higher power.

Step 2: We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.



Oh, step 2. I've been waiting for you...with all my pride and ability to impress with my knowledge of the love of God and willingness to be holy.  And here we are... standing face to face and you're not nearly as sweet to me as I had envisioned. 

:To me, the sanity to which codependents must be restored is the knowledge that we are perfectly imperfect, that we can only do certain things about that, and that imperfection is the normal human condition. ~Pia Mellody:

oh. shit.

There is a saying my dad used on a regular basis, that I too have used regularly in my life...it's one of those things you say jokingly but then kinda believe too. 

:It's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way: 

And, coupled with the fact that I have some pretty deep abandonment issues, that thought process has been a real hinderance for me. 

Typically, issues with a higher power come from your earthly relationships with men. Namely your dad as a child, and both your dad and husband as an adult. I won't revisit all the things about growing up with my dad that I have in the other blogs. Just go read them.  I will say that my dad was very passive. To the point of being negligent. I don't think it was his heart to constantly leave me feeling abandoned at all. He came from very harsh and unloving parents, because that's how it was. The kids are seen and not heard days. I also believe he loved his family very much. He talked fondly of them as well. So my gracious nature has always said, He did the best he could, Kins. And there is a lot of truth in that. 

It doesn't negate the hurt I felt from him never showing up though. Not paying bills...not going to work. We would make jokes about having "air sandwiches" for dinner when there wasn't any food. I was a smart kid and very involved in organizations during high school. I was often the kid standing alone getting recognition for something. The other parents were there. My parents were not. 

What this did to me was build a belief system that said, I'm my own savior. No one will help me but me. And I've got this. My mother also had a lot of these same traits, so she constantly fed into my beliefs that no one could help me but myself. 

So when I started struggling...first with eating disorders, then codependence.. I thought I had the power within myself to accomplish my own recovery. 

Honestly, I was too proud to ever ask for help. It's still something I struggle with. After the summer of the broken leg, I can say I struggle less with it than ever before...but it was a grueling lesson for me. 

Rewind back a couple of decades to the depth of my eating disorder days though...I had been married five or six years, had three kids, and my husband had no idea I had an eating disorder. I would binge and purge while the kids were napping during the day...then I would drown in guilt for the rest of the day. Maybe the guilt would last for a few days...but eventually it would subside and the whole cycle would start over again. 

I still remember the day it broke. So clearly. My mom called me in a panic and said, "I just bought 4 king size snicker bars and I've already eaten 3 of them. Help me. Tell me not to do this." 

I sat on the phone in stunned silence. 

Until that very moment I wouldn't have dreamed in a million years that was something my mother had ever done or struggled with. I'm pretty sure I laughed uncomfortably and said something snarky about her being crazy...and then told her to throw the damn candy bar out the window. But I hung up from that phone call, called a close friend, and spilled my guts. Then when my husband came home I told him too. I think both their reactions were similar to that of me with my mom. Disbelief that I was so good at hiding such horror. 

I have struggled with urges to binge and purge since then...I've even given into them a few time over the last decade, but it was never the same for me again. 

Did God, my higher power, have something to do with that? Odds are he did.  That was the most vulnerable and real conversation my mom and I had up to that point in my life. Did I give God credit for that rescue though?...No. I didn't. I did the religious thing and said "I recognized it as a generational sin passed down from my mother and I acknowledged it and I overcame it." 

I...I...I

Because I was my own savior. 



[sidenote:....I've been staring at this dancing cursor for the last 10 minutes. Letting the truth of what I just wrote sink in. Sometimes I feel the breath of God in these keystrokes and I'm just a body moving some fingers. I learn so much about myself here. God has started growing all these ideas inside my head and once they get out I'm so in awe. Want to learn some stuff about yourself? Get creative. Write, draw, paint. God will pull the truth out of you...your biggest secrets and greatest strengths will come flooding out for the world to see. It's so uncomfortable. But so worth it. I'm learning so much about myself in these moments....]



I don't know when it changed...slowly and painfully if I know myself at all. But at some point along the way I began to trust God. Not just say I did because it's the Christian thing to do...but I actually started doing it. He has proven himself to me time and time again. In all these tiny but amazing ways, and in some big ones too. More than anything these days, I think I understand what life actually is. It is not my job to save anyone. Not even myself most days. I'm learning to be perfectly imperfect. 

Life and love are a set of choices that are constantly set before us. With God at our side as our constant confident...to show us the direction to take that will give us the life we say we want. And if the life we actually want is different than that...He's still there. To raise us gently out of the depths of those choices to help us start over again. And again. And again. 

For as many agains as it takes. 

I see God as this constant force on my life. Always beside me. Never neglectful, yet never pushy. He's just there. The pull of his presence makes me want to be better. Do better. Stay on the right track. I want his direction. I want his presence. Not to take away my responsibility, or have someone to blame for my choices...but to have someone. 

Someone that is always there. Always constant.

Someone greater than myself.