I'm not Codependent! Oh, wait...

I had two days of recovery activities today. The first was Friday night where I met with a bunch of people from my COSA meeting to learn how to do our first step. It's interesting, I have a huge aversion to labeling myself as codependent, but I realized that I have some pretty real codie behaviors. For instance, everyone at my COSA meetings talk about how they have all these urges to track what their partners are doing online, check their emails, have them followed, look at their bank statements, go through pockets, ask them where they're going, try to tell them to go to meetings, make program calls, etc. So, I was thinking, "well, I don't do anything like that, I don't try to control my husband's sexual behavior..." Nope, not me. I'm a pillar of non-codependency and everyone else has issues. Okay. So, here's what I realized, I have all the bank accounts, I'm in charge of all the money, the credit cards, I have all the passwords in fact. When husband wants to spend money he always asks me if it's okay. I do the laundry, cook his food, take care of him when he's sick, buy his clothes, tell him when to get a haircut, make sure he wakes up in the morning. Now, granted, most of this has changed since I found out about his addiction, it's mostly because I care about him so much less than I used to that I don't want to do things for him, but also because he realizes that he was not only taking me for granted, but not engaged in his life. But then I think, "did I manipulate the relationship this way?" The answer is no. I didn't, but I found someone who was otherwise helpless, and made him totally dependent on me. I found someone who couldn't leave me if he wanted to because he would have nothing if he did. When I met husband, he was unemployed, he had this kind of disheveled look, he dressed in an unattractive way, had out of control hair, and eyebrows. I metrosexualized him with hair, clothes (that I bought him) and occasional eyebrow waxings. Then, I wrote his resume and sat with him and wouldn't let him go to sleep until he had sent it out to ten firms. I did this every night. And he would complain and want to go to sleep, but I wouldn't let him until his ten resumes and cover letters were out. Of course I wrote the cover letters. At this point we'd been dating for 4 months. But he was going to move in with me and I told him that he couldn't move in until he got a job. Oh see, look at me, I had boundaries. I'm not codependent. But, of course I probably knew on some level that even given that caveat he wouldn't do it on his own. Because he didn't know how to. So it had to be me who did it. Husband moved in with me and let me do everything. He has just handed over his paycheck to me for the past 5 years and I put it in our joint checking and deal with the money. He let me take all his credit cards, destroy them, and put the debt in my name, because of course I have excellent credit and his was bunk. I totally fixed his credit. Put his student loans in my name, all his credit card debt, all of it. Pattern here? Yup. I'm a typical codependent. It's just under a different guise.

Yesterday, I went to a daylong Vipassana meditation retreat. Man, Vipassana meditation is torturous while angry. FUCKING TORTURE!!!!!! It felt impossible to sit with my anger. I was jumping out of my fucking skin. One thing I did notice there that's important is that I started praying again. I prayed to God to take away my anger. And then I heard this,
"do you want to take away your anger?" the answer was,
"well, no. not really."
"What does it do for you? What purpose does it serve?"
"Well it keeps me safe."
"How?"
"As long as I stay angry at husband, he stays afraid that I'm going to leave him, that's terrifying to him, so he stays with his program."

So, I'm not saying that my anger is not valid or real, but there's a secondary gain to it. It's a way that I can control the addict's behavior. Ah, see! It's interesting because it hurts me to hold it just as much (or more because it's in my body) as him, yet I have no desire to let go of it.