Reflection on Chapter 2, March 21, 2023

The wonder of how CoDA readings often resonate with the insights of the past week still surprises me and I am grateful to have this growing understanding that my higher power works in subtle and pervasive ways. This reading reminded me of what an old-timer shared in one of my first meetings.

“Codependency is the disease beneath the disease of all addiction.”

In my childhood home we lived in constant flux. My father’s career was always the focus and from the age of five I moved every 2-3 years from city to city and remember looking out the back window of my parents’ car to see another school, set of friends, and home disappear into the distance. This was one of the more obvious contributors to my codependence, but this isn’t what I’m reflecting on tonight.

What I was taught through the constant moving and the anxiety my parents exhibited about the future and the pursuit of more money, a nicer house, a better neighborhood, a bigger job was that the future is the higher power I should put on the pedestal. If I control the circumstances of today and accept that hard work and suffering is necessary, I can guarantee a happy future… a little or a lot of pain today is acceptable for how incredible the future will be.

What does this do to relationships when this unhealthy and unrealistic attachment to the future is always sitting there eroding the happiness of the present? What happens when this priority is something that is embedded from childhood subconsciously and I lash out in anger when this wrong belief or value system isn’t respected by my partners? When the present is meant to be endured and not enjoyed how does this affect a partner who doesn’t have a shared experience of how to live for tomorrow instead of enjoying the moment? I know how this story ends again and again.

Becoming aware of this need to control circumstances of my life today in pursuit of a future is one of the great insights I’ve had recently. To see that the future will never become the present because I have this codependent need to create a stressful present has allowed me to pause, reflect and take time to enjoy the present and find a more balanced approach to my days. What a gift it is to again find more enlightenment and self-awareness in what is always a small and incremental way. I’m grateful to be here and have this experience and know that progress happens in subtle and pervasive ways the more I let go of my need to control the present in pursuit of a future that doesn’t actually exist.

Rob M 2022-12-12