For about a year I was occasionally attending 12-step meetings with my boyfriend. One of the meetings (which he started several years ago) had a focus on abuse survivors. When we broke up, I stopped going to the meetings. I didn’t want to run into him. I went to a few meetings when I knew he wouldn’t be there, but found that I really didn’t feel a need to go, to talk, or to listen. I’ve heard the script over and over, heard all the same stories and one thing really struck me – how many people get stuck on staying wrapped up in the system, how they can’t learn from it and then move on with their lives. They define themselves by their fellowship with others at the meetings, and their focus stays on what was wrong, instead of getting over it and looking at what is right in their lives, and building on the good things.
My ex wrote in his blog about how he was going to start blogging about his recovery again. That proves my point. He remains stuck being a “survivor” – even though he pretends he’s not being a victim, he is still living as a victim. He can’t get past it. He can’t move on. He defines who he is by things that happened to him as a child – over 40 years later he’s still unable to just get over it! He pretends to be optimistic, but he defines how he feels not by what is going right in his life but by what is wrong, including faintly remembered wrongs committed many years ago. He remains stuck in recovery, instead of recovered and moving on.
I’m not trying to make light of the wrongs that he experienced. Obviously he was quite traumatized by these things. But he’s had many years of therapy, many years of meetings. He’s come to grips with what happened, knows he can’t recreate the past, and claims to be trying to move on. The issue is that as he remains focused on the things that were “wrong” he just creates more of it. This was one of the underlying reasons we broke up, he created in our relationship and household the very same “wrongness” that existed in his family when he was a child. Of course, he denies all of this. That’s another reason we broke up – he’s totally unable to admit that he’s perpetuating the wrongs in his life by remaining focused on them.
Recently I ran into a woman I knew from the meetings – she was the clerk at the checkout stand at the grocery store. She asked Hi, do you remember me? I said Yes. She asked how I was doing, I said that I was doing OK now but it was rough for a while after the breakup. I said she looked like she was doing good. She said she didn’t go to meetings anymore. I told her I thought that was good, that she was getting what she needed and then moving on. She agreed, she had also noticed how many people get stuck in going, and going, and going, and never getting better.
And there it is, someone getting what she needs, learning, and Moving On. I did it. She did it. It can be done.