 |
| Image credit: Photo by misterbisson on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
I went to a great 12 Step meeting this week. A lovely group of women, some of whom I'd never met, sat together and shared the kind of things we usually share as partners of sex addicts. We share about things like incest, physically and verbally abusive relationships, using sexual relationships to escape from or buffer ourselves against painful realities, using food and alcohol to help dull emotional pain, and contracting sexually transmitted diseases from our partners.
We share about how it feels to have your life fall apart and to realize you never had that life in the first place. We share about our sex lives. We share about how we've wanted to feel beautiful and to feel loved and how we've looked to other people to make us feel that way because we didn't feel quite beautiful or lovable as we were. We share the secrets that we'd hidden from others for years, the secrets we'd hidden from ourselves. We share the kinds of incredibly intimate details most people never share with anyone, and we share them with total strangers or with people whose last names we didn't even know.
When my meeting ended, we stood around chatting. We talked about some of the same thing, but we also shared little details like how far from the meeting we lived and how we'd found it. We talked about the kinds of work we did during the day and whether or not we had kids and how old they are.
It struck me that we did things in a way that was nearly the complete opposite of the way I'm used to getting to know people, the way I get to know other moms at the park or new neighbors or new coworkers on the job. Sure, we start off with "hi, my name is..." in meetings as well as out, but inside that church meeting room, we followed that right up, not with "I'm a teacher" or "I live up the street" or "I just started in accounting" or "I have three kids," but with our deepest vulnerabilities and fears and shame, the kinds of things we're supposed to keep locked safely away from the world. We cut past the details that define us, but don't say who we really are, and we filled those parts of the picture in later.
And I realized that that's one of the things I find most refreshing about situations like 12 Step meetings; I can take down the defenses I carry around to protect most of my vulnerabilities, because they are out there and understood already. When I walk into a meeting. I'm not Austen and Janie's mother or a writer or a stay-at-home mom. I'm me. Imperfect, improving me. And that feels good.
This post was originally published at The Second Road.
1 comments: