I'm always amazed when I hear tales of people who take actual pleasure in hurting others.  I have to constantly remind myself of how miserable they must be. 

I worked with children (abused, delinquent) since I graduated from college and finally had to stop.  Hopefully it's just a temporary hiatus.  I just can't handle the pain that people inflict on their children.

Kitty, I have no words of wisdom for you, but I'm sorry you are hurting and you are in my prayers.

much love 

In How Alanon Works, there is a chapter on Detachment, Love, and Forgiveness.  The very last paragraph of that chapter starts with "Forgiveness is no favor.  We do it for no but ourselves.  We simply pay too high a price when we refuse to forgive.  Lingering resentments are like acid eating away at us."  It also mentions self-righteousness in that paragraph.  This one paragraph out of the whole chapter really hit me. 

When I was young, I remember my father having a lot of anger at times.  We'd all go to church 3 times a week, plus be expected to go out door to door preaching.  I would see how my dad was with others and then come home and be different.  I began to resent him for not practicing what he preached in his own home, I looked upon him as a hypocrite.  Of course this affected our relationship.  I could not wait to get out of his house and married in haste to escape.  Of course I ended up in divorce, a single mom, after that.  Had some other relationships that didn't work, including a second marriage.  Ended up back in my parents home, a single mom of 4 with no resources (money, car, etc.)  I can remember a day when my parents were packing a U-Haul to go up to Oregon where dad had a job that was going to last a while.  Dad was angry (looking back he was probably tired and frustrated), and he threw some stuff in the U-Haul, hitting a lamp of mom's.  She was upset that it got damaged.  I yelled at my father there in the front yard.  He turned to me and said "this is NONE of your business, stay out of my marriage!"  He was right.  It was none of my business. 

As a mom myself, I began to see how I didn't always make the right choices, how I sometimes "hurt" my children by my own choices and actions.  It dawned on me one day that mom and dad had once been as young as I was then, and that they too had only tried to do the best they knew how to do.  Knew how to do.  If we don't know any different, how can we do/be different?  When I realized this, it was like a door opened for me.  I saw how I had all these expectations of how dad should be.  How I had never accepted him as he was.  Seeing this, I was able to let go of my expectations and find acceptance.  From that point on, my relationship with dad changed.  Not so much on his part, but on my part.  I was able to get along with him and avoid the hurt feelings from expecting things he wasn't capable of.  My old expectations were replaced with love and compassion.  I was able then to see the things he did do for me out of his love, like when he allowed myself and the 4 kids to move in when we had no where else to go.  He died of cancer a few years after that.  Two weeks from the time we found out he had cancer until he passed away.  I am thankful I had my eyes "opened" prior to that and could be there at his side those last few days without those old feelings of resentment and anger.

Fast forward to my current marriage.  I married an alcoholic.  I knew he drank, but had no idea what alcoholism really was.  This was a man who functioned quite well in the world, had an excellent job where he was flown out to worksites to fix problems, was a real high roller.  We had a lot of fun while we were dating.  Then we got married and the reality of the disease started to show itself.  I began to react more and more to it.  The verbal abuse was the worst.  Fights every week, several times a week.  Threats of divorce constantly.  Being told how I never did anything - didn't work enough, didn't parent well enough, didn't keep the house clean enough, etc. etc.  Always there was something wrong with me.  Always waiting for the other shoe to drop, walking on those eggshells, getting angry at the kids for not being "perfect" (cause gosh, if they did everything they should then he wouldn't have a reason to get mad and drink, huh?) - I became a real sick person. 

Then I found Al-Anon.  And I saw that in my self-righteousness, in my putting all the blame upon him and not looking at myself, my part in it, how that had contributed to my own "illness".  Once again I had been expecting someone to be something they did not know how to be or were incapable of being.  I expected him to think and act like a "normal" adult who had had a "normal" upbringing.  Well he wasn't and didn't.  I discovered that my expectations of him, my reactions to him, did nothing but increase his own feelings of guilt and shame and that he responded to that by verbally attacking me and drinking more to try and drown out those same feelings. 

With Al-Anon I have and am finding acceptance of him as he is today.  I am finding that it wasn't him who had changed during our marriage, it was me who changed (for the worse).  I am finding my way back to the person I was when we first met.  The person who fell in love with a wonderful man, who used to have fun and laugh with him.  The amazing thing is, as I find more and more of this person I was, and choose her to be the one acting (rather than reacting), the better our relationship gets.  Since I am no longer attacking him with my expectations, reactions, anger, nagging, etc - he rarely attacks me, and even on those occasions when he is drunk and begins in on the "you never..." stuff, I find that by my staying calm and realizing this is the drink talking and not taking it personally, he runs out of steam real quick and perhaps sometimes realizes he is talking foolishly.  Often a simple statement like "you might be right" (and sometimes he is) diffuses the whole thing right at the start. 

Yes, "forgiveness is no favor.  We do it for no one but ourselves. .... Although we may despise what others have done, if we keep in mind that everything we are now trying to do has the goal of healing us, we are bound to decide that the best thing we can do for ourselves is to forgive."  And that includes forgiveness of self.

Keep coming back, luv ya! Kis