Hi Helen,
I attended a 12 step program for codependents for a little over a year, 8 or so years ago. Letting go and letting God became real to me about 4 years ago when in frustration I cried out, God, why do I have the terrible feeling I'm having now on the heels of putting myself out for another sacrificially and at the time I thought unselfishly? I was driving a long distance back from a trip where I'd poured out my sacrificial/unselfish acts. I felt disappointment and frustrated with the results. What had transpired, well within the bounds civility, had come to an end, yet I felt emptiness on every human level. The results I'd wanted just hadn't happened. So the disappointment and frustration were what made me cry out for answers. I got one answer. Put as simply as I'm able, the answer was, tt, you have a knack for seeing train wrecks about to happen in the lives of others. All your life, you've jumpen on the tracks ahead of their trainwrecks and tried to stop the train. You're trying to put yourself in the business that only I (God) can handle. I (God) never designed you to do what you're trying to do. Their life is their life, however they choose to run it is their business, not yours, furthermore, you're killing yourself trying to perform this super-human feat. Let Me (God) do this work you've been trying to do. Continuing to drive, I wept sad tears for all the times I'd put myself at risk, doing things I wasn't designed to do. I turned over the reigns of that part of my 'bent' to God. This was one lesson that turned into a milestone. Some lessons come easy and some come very hard. In my experience, it's the hard ones that allow us to turn memorable corners in life. This was one of mine.
I was my mother's caregiver for years, in the same house. You could say we were two adults living in the concentrated eye of dysfunction, narcissism, codependence, and God only knows how many other manifest, un-named symptoms. I spent part of those seven years jumping on the tracks of her life, hell bent and determined not to let her fall. She was in her 80's and I knew that a fall spelt the end. I simply didn't want her to die. I didn't want her to suffer the misery of trying to recover from a fall (or any other trauma). I wanted to spare her suffering no matter what it cost me. Where my own health is concerned, it cost a lot in the end. Anyway, toward the end of her life I was able to let go (by now you could pretty much say that I was living on the tracks) more and more, but not entirely. Then when she passed, I sat in the house hardly moving, making no plans past the immediate half hour. I spent a year like that, making no plans and not wanting to. I had a wonderful kind neighbor who checked on me. In the aftermath of her death, living in the grief, and basically living in a dormant state, I emerged having turned yet another corner.
During that year, without purposing it I let go of the reigns to my life. I'd already developed trigger finger from holding on so tightly. As is the case with a number of life lessons, this one seemed to seep into my being quietly and for the most part unobserved. It happened while I was just being and I suppose unconsciously absorbing what I needed to learn. Things I couldn't have learned in earlier times when I was busy jumping in front of the train. In that year of dormancy, as far as I know, nothing catastrophic happened in my life on account of it and as far as I know nothing was left undone because of MY inertia. This was another memorable milestone in the way I think and perceive life. I learned that if I allow it, life has a way of stabilizing or adjusting itself whatever our circumstances and as far as I can tell, living in the knowledge I think I've gained, the outcome is far superior to what it was for me personally before I learned these things. Almost a year to the day after her passing, I went to live in another state where I know many people and have a nice circle of old and now new friends. By now, I've spent the best part of two years with my new level of understanding, at least the part about staying off the tracks.
Zoom forward to this minute. Am I truly able to live IN the lessons I think I learned and which are outlined above? Well, I'm laid up in bed with complicated Labyrinthitis. I have poor balance and have to have assistance walking. I may be stuck away from home for a week or several weeks. Before coming here, I had the year 2010 completely scoped out with various plans. I had to cancel all of my short term plans. I have to start over again as far as planning is concerned. So, am I truly able to live in the lessons I think I learned? We'll see... In the meantime, in this, I'm looking to learn new lessons.
Hugs,
tt