The Power of Choice
Shift your mindset, see more paths
My introduction to Al-Anon came by way of my couples’ therapist who, after listening to me recount my parents’ problems with substance abuse and various other related issues in an individual intro session, drily inquired whether I’d ever considered attending a meeting.
Hmm, I thought. Maybe I will.
I’d heard of the 12-step group before, but had no sense of what they were about. Why might the friends and families of alcoholics need a 12-step group of their own? They aren’t the ones with an addiction.
At one of my first meetings, someone referenced How Al-Anon Works (a book that is part of the small body of officially approved literature). Curious to know more, I bought the book and started reading.
My first impression was amusement at how much the group itself functioned like a religion. I felt skepticism as I read the Al-Anon understanding of codependence, in which the partner of an alcoholic is framed as attempting to control the alcoholic’s behaviour. In my opinion, the dynamic is rather the other way around and it is the codependent who is controlled by everything that happens around them. But what really caught my eye, what kept me engaged with the literature, was the Al-Anon view of choices.
Specifically, it insists that we have choices. We may not see our choices now but if we keep focusing on our own wellbeing instead of that of the alcoholic, we will begin to see we indeed have choices. In effect, we can choose how we respond to stress. This starts with choosing to respond rather than simply react.
It took some time for me to absorb this claim – eight months, to be precise. During those eight months, I mulled it over during my individual and couples’ therapy sessions. I started consciously making choices about how I would respond to stress in other areas of my life. And last week, I discovered that I do have a choice in how I respond to the stress caused by someone else’s alcoholism.
Last week, I was able to break a pattern I’ve been trapped in for years. I finally recognized that I do have choices . . . and let me tell you, that is an empowering realization.
My couples’ therapist asked me, when I first started, what I hoped to get out of therapy. “I want to break a dynamic between us that I feel stuck in,” I explained. We had a pattern of breaking up with every instance of alcohol abuse, then getting back together afterward. Each time would be devastating for me; I’d be forced to make a plan for how I’d start my life over as I was determined that I would never knowingly share my life with an addict. So my relationship had lurched forward, up and down, in and out, off and on for months and my nervous system was wracked with the stress of uncertainty in what felt like every area of my life.
And isn’t that such a familiar dance? I see the same patterns in my childhood, which involved some external stressor – the loss of our family home, a father more deeply mentally ill than anyone realized, substance abuse, being “shunned” from our religious community – wreaking havoc on my family’s daily life. I see my mother, my siblings, and I reacting with our own survival strategies. I see us being yanked around by other people’s behaviour, trying to keep our heads above the wreckage. I see how I never felt like I had many choices, and how I used marriage to escape that dynamic for good.
This, I think, is the dance of a dysregulated nervous system. It’s indecision and uncertainty. It’s a feeling of disempowerment, of having no good choices and being forced into making the “least bad” ones. It’s wanting to escape but being compelled to remain in this dynamic because all of the other options you can identify don’t appear to be any better.
When this is your view of your life, your nervous system exists in a state of chronic stress. Even small stressors become overwhelming. You also get triggered by old sources of stress, which in my case included finances and even the slightest hint that somebody might not be entirely lucid. Above all, you feel like your relationships are locked in a dance that you can’t quit, swaying to a tune you hate. They simply don’t change. And even though you have periods where things are easier, even though you have good times, you find yourself returning to this feeling of life just being hard.
Last week, I had an opportunity to change how I responded to the stress of someone else’s alcoholism. Over text, it became clear to me that a relapse was occurring. I felt that familiar sense of dismay rising in my throat, of “this has gone too far,” of “I don’t want this in my life. I can’t have this in my life.” Of “this has to stop.”
I started to text back that okay, I’d be ending the relationship even though doing so would involve dismantling my life and all the plans I’d made over the past year. Because who could accept this sort of behaviour? And why was it happening again? I sent the text messages and then paused, re-reading them and becoming aware of the anxiety now flooding my body as I thought about how many tasks I would need to do to completely reorganize my life.
As I read, a thought quietly appeared in my mind: You don’t have to make this relapse mean that the relationship is over. It doesn’t have to mean this. You can make it mean something else.
What if I made it mean . . . nothing at all, for the moment?
What if I didn’t make any decisions for a few days?
What if I decided that the relationship was okay?
I reflected on how much we’d both grown over the past few months. Couples’ therapy doesn’t seem to have a great reputation, but I’ve found it very helpful. Having someone mediate our discussions forced both of us to regulate our emotions better, to actually listen, and to trust that the other person genuinely wants us to be happier and healthier.
I also thought about my work with my individual therapist, who has encouraged me to become more confident in my instincts and to trust my ability to handle stress.
And I felt an instinct that said, “Trust what you’ve built so far. Trust the work that you’ve both been doing, the direction your relationship has been headed.”
So I made a different choice. I deleted the texts I’d sent, and sent new ones. I felt my shoulders relax, the urge to resolve this right now dissipate. Then I blocked the text conversation altogether, giving the situation time and space to resolve itself. And when it did, repair was so much easier. The relapse did not consume the relationship, and we were able to pick up where we’d left off.
This is the power of recognizing what are often hidden choices. It turns out that Al-Anon was right: we do have the power to choose how we respond to stress. When we learn to pay attention to the state of our nervous system, we begin to understand how to make decisions that feel right for it. When we learn to pay attention to the emotions in our bodies, they can guide us into choices that help us manage our stress.
This shift in mindset is one that takes us out of a passive or victim mode wherein life is a series of events or situations that simply happen to us, and into an active or creator mode wherein we exercise a great deal of say in what occurs in our lives. No, we’ll never be able to control what happens. No one can exert that degree of power over something exogenous, something outside of ourselves. But we can shape what occurs through what we make it mean to us. We can alter its impact on ourselves and our lives through a shift in our perception. We can break the ties of co-dependence and take responsibility for how we respond to stress. We can choose differently.
In this sense, we can influence the direction of our lives simply by how we respond to stress. For me, such a shift in mindset is transformative and throws all of my past decisions into a new light. What if I’d seen these kinds of choices earlier? What if I’d responded in a way that prioritized what I wanted instead of simply reacting? I think I would’ve made different decisions.
But, says Al-Anon, there’s no point in mourning the past. Focus on today and the choices you’re making today – the ways you’re caring for yourself today. Celebrate the change in yourself and move forward, one day at a time.
For more essays on Al-Anon ideas, see:
Some powerful realisations here, Liya. Thank you for sharing.