These are from Stephen Frasier's blog Let it Happen . As a person who spent many years completely enmeshed in my codependency, I got a great deal of joy in recognizing myself in every. single. one. of these 12 steps of Non-Recovery:
- We admitted we were powerless over nothing, that we would manage our lives perfectly and those of anyone else who would allow us to.
- Came to believe there was no power greater than ourselves and the rest of the world was insane.
- Made a decision to have our loved ones and friends turn their will and their lives over to our care, even though they couldn’t understand us.
- Made a searching moral and immoral inventory of everyone we knew.
- Admitted to the whole world the exact nature of everyone else’s wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to make others straighten up and do right.
- Demanded others to either shape up or ship out.
- Made a list of all persons who had harmed us and became willing to go to any length to get even with them all.
- Got direct revenge on such people whenever possible, except when to do so would cost us our lives, or at the very least a jail sentence.
- Continued to take inventory of others, and when they were wrong promptly and repeatedly told them about it.
- Sought through complaining and nagging to improve our relations with others as we couldn’t understand them, asking only that they knuckle under and do it our way.
- Having had a complete physical, emotional and spiritual breakdown as a result of these steps, we tried to blame it on others and to get sympathy and pity in all of our affairs
J and I have recently been able to have some good conversations around the failure of our marriage and the things that we did that got us to that point. It was good to be able to talk to him about the things I know I owned and to have a chance to laugh a little bit at ourselves and our hubris. We each thought we knew everything that the other one ought to be doing. We never looked at ourselves, all of our attention was externally held.
I am so grateful for my recovery. I am thankful that I can laugh at myself and learn from my mistakes.
***Edited 2/24 for spelling and grammatical errors. Apologies to anyone whose eyes and/or brains were assaulted by my lousy grasp of the English Language.