URL: Unhook, Release, Learn

RIGOROUS 
HONESTY


The words were blazoned on the whiteboard by our back door for over four years.


These words were the first things we saw when we came home from work, church, or shopping, and the last thing we saw when we went out anywhere. They were a constant reminder of the lifestyle we had adopted.  

There was something comforting to me about those words.  I put them there when my hubby was still relapsing into his addiction all over the place... and I was deeply into trying to control his behavior.  But as we both grew, at least for me, those words were a constant reminder to me to be honest with myself, to be true to my recovery, and to maintain a lifestyle that demands rigorous honesty.  

And oh yes.  They reminded him too.  ;-) 


So when my youngest daughter decided one day last week to erase the words - I must admit that I was annoyed.  


Okay, I freaked out.


The words on the whiteboard represented the lifestyle we had come to rely on, the things restored to us from the years that the locusts of addiction and codependency had eaten, the years they had stolen from us.  I guess in a way I thought that if the words went away, our lifestyle might too.  I'd worked too hard to get to a place of freedom for that prospect to be attractive to me.  

So I put the words back on the whiteboard - and then my daughter saw what I'd done. 

SHE freaked out!!  To her, the words were a reminder of a very sad time in her life when Dad was relapsing and Mom was hunting all over the house, looking behind the freezer, snooping in the trunk of the car (how pathetic was that...) and she just wanted to move on.

I wasn't ready to unhook.  I needed some time to think.  Rather than let us continue to fight over it, hubby removed the whiteboard and put it in our room.  He bought me the time I needed.

So I started thinking very hard.  Why was this important to me? Was it really representative of what I wanted to remind myself of NOW?  Was there a better way?  

Slowly, I began to unhook from the habits of the past, to let go of the reins.  I decided to let someone else - God - direct me. (Just like the girl on the horse in the picture is learning the exact way to sit on the horse to achieve balance even on the bumpiest ride!) Awkward as it felt at first, it was the only way I could learn to live the right way - in freedom. 

And then it dawned on me.  I was trying to control again. All over whether two words should or should not be on a whiteboard!!

So what did I decide to do?  Well, after much thought and reflection, and after talking about it with hubby, I learned something.  He had always taken my reminder of the saying "rigorous honesty" as my trying to be his conscience, to be a watchdog over him.  He thought (as had my daughter) it meant that I didn't trust him.


Well, to be truthful, I didn't - at least not back then.  Slowly, over a period of well over a year, the trust started to be built back up again.  He was working at it; I was also working at it, and learning more and more how to let go, just let go.  Now THAT was a concept...

I felt as though this was a new stage in my recovery, a new phase in my relationship with God, with myself, with my husband, and with my children.  A stage where I was learning to release from the patterns of the past, and then learn a new way of being - completely relying on God and not my own idea of the way things should be.

So I knew what I had to do.  

I put the whiteboard back on its hooks by the door.  Erasing the words "rigorous honesty," I wrote two well-known slogans:

LET GO ...

LET GOD !  
(and then, in smaller letters)

First things 

    first!!