Resentment

I’d love to tell you that I’ve been using my winter break from grad school to work on the capstone presentation that’s required of all master’s candidates or search for jobs I might want to apply for after graduation…but I’ve mostly been sprawled out on my couch, punching remote buttons in an escapist search for good distractions.

I’ve caught myself barking at the TV more than usual.

For example, just yesterday, I hit on a few old “Intervention” episodes where these families were desperate to get their loved ones to stop drinking. And yet, based on what the “before” scenes showed us, the parents and/or siblings had no qualms about sitting around boozing it up with the “problem drinkers” at gatherings or out at bars. I’m watching this, like, “How the hell do you expect this person to beat their addiction when you’re shoving their drug of choice — and your freedom to imbibe — in their face all the time?”

Pro tip: “Do as I say, not as I do,” is NOT an effective approach to coaxing someone into recovery.

Then, later on Saturday evening, my husband roped me into watching this new Netflix movie with Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke. Did you make it through “Leave the World Behind”? I couldn’t! I mean, I’ll give the thing points for the soundtrack (“Misled” by Kool & the Gang…👍🏻👍🏻), but beyond that, it was just too excruciatingly slow, with too many characters I didn’t care about saying far, far too many words that didn’t ring realistic to me.

What kept me from falling asleep was my irritation over all the alcohol.

“Oh, yeah, you’re trapped in the Twilight Zone, potentially facing the apocalypse, and all you can do is sit around mixing cocktails and chugging wine! Of course that’s your solution!”

Spoken like a true alcoholic, right? Only a person with alcohol issues would notice what/how much others — be they real people or fictional characters — are drinking, let alone get upset about it. It’s a fact of life for people in recovery: You’re going to battle difficult, complicated feelings of resentment as you look around at a world that unabashedly treats your kryptonite as a super-powerful magic elixir. When the thing you had to give up to survive remains an essential staple of “the good life” for seemingly everyone else in your society, it’s only natural to get a little rankled from time to time.

As you might imagine, the holidays are an especially rankle-y time of year.

Last Christmas, for a multitude of reasons that included some unresolved family resentments, I came as close to a relapse as I’ve been in nearly 4 1/2 years of sobriety. Even though I didn’t drink, that experience was a lot more miserable than it needed to be. So I think the negative emotions that’ve been bubbling in in me lately are valuable “grist for the mill” of my recovery. It’s important to look at them, process them, and work through them so I can deal with any nasty resentments as they pop up and hopefully avoid unnecessary suffering.

Resentments often spring from unrealistic expectations we set for other people, or from trying to control the uncontrollable. Resentments are described in recovery circles as “drinking poison and expecting the other person to die,” and realizing that you can’t control what other people say or do, but you can control your reactions, well, that’s described in recovery circles as “serenity.”

I am not writing this to elicit sympathy. Hell, now that I’m sober, I can see very clearly that I was one of those oblivious people who bought wholeheartedly into the belief that alcohol was a mandatory accessory for life — and shoved my drinking in other people’s faces with no regard for how they felt about it. So I’m not asking all you “normies” to feel sorry for me and my fellow recovering addicts because we took the tomfoolery too far and lost our partying privileges.

Obviously, addiction is more complicated than that, but my point is that overcoming a psychological dependence on a substance can feel like trying to get over a long-time, deeply passionate love affair and watching someone else get cozy with your former flame. It can feel like getting shunned by social cliques at school.

These are old wounds that can re-open at random times, no matter how much time you’ve spent trying to heal them. I mean, we all know that you don’t have to be a kid to suffer that left-out, “you can’t hang with us” devastation, and adults can even be worse with the high school BS behavior. But, just like part of growing up is learning how to deal with/brush off the mean girls, and learning how to move on from relationships that don’t work out, recovering from addiction is a maturation process. You have to develop self-regulation strategies and coping skills, and seek the proper support, so you can give TLC to your inner child when she gets triggered.

So, for example, when you walk into your grad school classroom, mentally and emotionally exhausted after taking the National Counseling Exam, which had you all tied up in anxious, nervous knots for several months, and the first thing you hear is a classmate talking about how she’s going to celebrate her own passing score with tequila shots, and you instantly want to throw a tantrum and run out of the room…that’s normal! It’s also a sign that you need some time to rest and process your experience with your therapist or a sober pal or maybe just the trees in the park.

Or, when you’re driving along listening to the all-Christmas music station, and the little promo between songs is a joke that goes, “What is Santa’s favorite thing to drink on Christmas?” and in the second before the female voiceover gives the answer, your brain is like, “Please don’t make it something alcoholic,” and then the voice goes, “White Claws, of course!” and you scream out, “OH, FUCK OFF!” at the top of your lungs…

That’s a totally natural response! I mean, the idea that anyone would honestly choose White Claws as their favorite drink is ridiculous — much less Santa, who gets served delicious creamy egg nog or classic 2-percent milk with which to pair his cookies and is responsible for driving around to every house on Earth delivering joy to children over the course of 12 hours. Yeah, the jolly old elf is really gonna pick your bland-ass malt beverage to fuel his Christmas Eve mission! 🙄

See, reactions can be informative. And the 53 months I’ve logged in recovery have informed me that I still have chinks in my armor when it comes to letting stuff go/behaving like a mature adult. I may always have these chinks in my armor, to some extent, and that’s ok! The lesson here is that when I start “acting out,” I need to slow it down and pay closer attention to my triggers. I need to take care of my emotional, spiritual and psychological health the way I (try) to tend to my physical fitness. I need to reconnect with all the recovery resources at my disposal as we head into this holiday season.

Luckily, today, I have a meeting with my “Helping Hands” support group for aspiring therapists, and a stack of holiday cards to write to all the people who have made a positive impact on my life this year. It’s honestly amazing how many more people there are on that list in 2023 than there were in 2022! Could that be a case of “you get what you give”? I’d like to think so!

One line I heard in that awful Netflix movie before I gave up, and that I actually liked, was when Julia Roberts’ character says she decided to take her family off the grid on vacation because she realized she “f*cking hates people.” I feel like that is a harsh yet natural human reaction to living in this world, and it can feel more potent when it seems like you’re “the only one” who can’t just escape from the cesspool of humanity by hitting a bottle.

Resentments are borne out of self-centeredness and living too much in your own head. The greatest gift I can give myself at holiday time is a reminder: I’m certainly not “the only one” who is struggling with issues and challenges this time of year, and there’s a big difference between worldly human behavior and the higher power of humanity. We can cope with/rise above the former by tapping into the latter. And isn’t that the spirit of Christmas? It’s finding a “thrill of hope” in “a weary world,” and rejoicing in the knowledge that there are pockets of love all around us, and no matter how much we screw up our lives, we can recover.

Unfortunately, the glacial hour and change I spent trying to get on board with the “most popular” movie on Netflix is time I can never get back. 😑 Not that I’m resentful about it…