Chapter One
TAKING
RESPONSIBILITY
Restart Principle 1:
Miracles happen, but you must
take responsibility for your own
recovery.
Evie's husband had died four years earlier, but she was still deep
in depression. She was referred to Tom for counseling, but he saw
no improvement even after several months. He began to suspect
there might be a "secondary gain" involved, meaning some benefit
she might get from remaining troubled. Some people really don't
want to start over.
So Tom asked her, "Is there anything good about your
husband's death or your current situation as a widow?"
"What do you mean?" the woman replied.
"Do you gain anything by remaining depressed and complaining
about how bad life is?"
This was an interesting angle for Evie-one she hadn't
thought of before. "Well, people feel sorry for me. They try to help
me. Some people cut my grass, and others help me financially."
Tom suspected that she was getting attention and support
that she was afraid she'd lose if she became healthy again. "Evie,"
he asked, "do you really want to get better?"
She never answered the question verbally, but Tom was sure
it struck home. In the following weeks and months Evie began to
climb out of her self-pity. She got out more, joining a few church
groups, buying some clothes, making new friends.
What was the secret of Evie's starting over? The simple answer
is that she just had to want to. She had to take responsibility for
her own recovery, instead of letting everyone else fret and stew over
her. She had to decide This is where I want to go and I'm going to
get there.
Who's Responsible?
When he's not writing books, Randy spends some time directing
plays at a local high school. The kids are great, but it's amazing
to see how little responsibility they take for their own lives.
"I couldn't learn my lines because, like, I was going to last
night, but then my dad decided to take us out to Dairy Queen
and my little sister threw up."
"I missed rehearsal yesterday because I called Jeri for a ride and
she never called back."
"I don't have my costume because my mom and me were
going to go shopping last weekend but she had a meeting instead."
Part of the educational process is teaching these teenagers to
stop looking for excuses and start looking for solutions: Study your
lines on the school bus. Call someone else for a ride. Find a costume
in your closet. Don't be satisfied to shrug and say, "Sorry, but
there were circumstances beyond my control." Take control of the
circumstances and do what has to get done!
This sort of behavior is understandable in teenagers, who are
still dependent on their families. They're in that in-between stage
where they're still learning how to fend for themselves. But the attitude
carries over to many adults who somehow expect life to come
to them. Look around at the twentysomethings you know and
sort them out. Some are taking responsibility for their lives, some
aren't. And over the next few years, with some of the currently
non-responsible ones, you'll see the light come on, like that comicstrip
bulb over the head. Plink! I need to make something happen.
And they will.
After a painful romantic breakup, you're likely to feel victimized.
Something bad has been done to you. You feel terrible and
it's not your fault! Someone pushed you into this pit-why doesn't
someone pull you out?
Let's be blunt-that's not going to happen. You're going to
have to climb out.
Sure, there might be people around you to give you a boost.
People might cut your grass or help you financially. But they can't
do your starting over for you. That's your own responsibility. You
have to take it.
Jay has to park his car on the street across from the apartment
where he lives. Weeds have poked through the pavement
in the crack between the street and the curb, right next to where
Jay parks. At first Jay saw the weeds and said, "Hmmm, that's
a bit unsightly. I'm sure the town will send someone to pull
those up."
Over time the weeds grew. Now they were over the curb line.
Jay figured that the owner of the service station on that side of the
street would take care of it. After all, an untidy property would
be bad for business.
The weeds kept growing. Now they were a foot high, and they
scratched Jay's car as he drove up. He worried about the effect on
his car's finish. Surely someone will notice this weedy patch and
do something, he thought. But no one did.
Once, when the weeds were about two feet high, Jay had to
load something into the passenger's side of his car-curbside. He
had to brush aside the weeds in order to open the door, and when
he closed it, some of the weeds were swept into the car. Now,
besides the scratches on the outside, the weeds littered the inside
of his vehicle. He became angry about the weeds, angry at the
town, angry at the service station, angry at the weeds themselves.
Someone should do something!
It was a constant source of irritation for him. Every day, as he
went to his car, he grew angrier. No suburb-dweller should have
to fight his way through a jungle to open a car door. Why doesn't
somebody take responsibility for this?
And then his focus changed. It was that light-bulb-over-the-head
moment. Why don't I do something about this? He borrowed
some gardener's gloves and pulled up the weeds.
You might be doing the same thing as you recover from your
breakup. Sure, you've been victimized by circumstances beyond
your control. But stop waiting for someone else to do something.
Put some gloves on and take control. Take responsibility for your
own recovery.
Miracles
But don't miracles happen? Don't people find that, when they
run out of their own strength, they rely on a higher power to get
them through? In fact, some people would say that you have to
realize you can't recover by yourself, and the harder you try the
harder it gets.
We admit that miracles certainly occur. We've experienced
many moments in our own lives when we feel God stepped in to
help us. Tom can point to several times in the recovery from his
own divorce when he had to rely on God. Higher power?
Absolutely.
But the problem is that some people treat their faith like a
magic wand: Their prayers will undo all the damage. Certainly,
God will make everything all right if they just have enough faith.
We knew one woman who spent twelve years praying and trusting
that her husband would come back to her. Janice kept setting
a place for him at the dinner table and assuring her children that
God would answer. This continued even after their father remarried
and had other children.
We feel her faith would have been better spent in the grueling
march toward accepting what had happened to her. If she had
prayed for help in dealing with this crisis, she would have received
some powerful answers.
Twelve years! That's an extreme case, but we find that many
people take a similar approach, even if it's for a shorter term. And
there are numerous advisers who will urge you: Just have faith.
Still Waiting
We do believe in miracles, and we know that sometimes people
get the miracles they pray for. But we also caution against certain
dangers of this approach.
It keeps you in denial. As we'll see in the next chapter, denial
is the first stage of dealing with a tragedy. For a short time afterward,
we don't quite grasp what happened, or we intentionally
block it out. Maybe that's fine for a short time-a few months
maybe. But extended denial is a problem. It keeps you from moving
onward along the path toward acceptance and healing. In her
conviction that God would definitely bring her husband back,
Janice delayed her recovery for twelve years.
It ignores the natural ways God works. This is what we've
observed. Sometimes God dazzles everyone with some supernatural
miracle no one expects, but more often he seems to work
within the natural order to answer prayers and help people.
Humans have been created with a natural response to crisis, and
we go through natural stages. That's a miracle in itself. It's irresponsible
to insist that God overturn the natural process of
healing in order to make you feel better instantly. That's imposing
your own agenda on him.
It can focus on your own ability to believe, or your inability.
At a certain point it stops being about God at all. Some people
say that if you believe hard enough, or well enough, you can make
those miracles happen. So when your prayers don't get answered,
whose fault is it? Certainly not God's. You must not have enough
faith, you loser! And so you end up feeling even worse about yourself
because you lack the ability to summon God.
It can teach negative things about God. We worry about an
approach that dictates to God what he must do. If he's truly aHigher Power, then maybe he should tell us how he's going to act.
We also wonder about the backlash, say, with Janice's children.
Instead of learning to trust in God's help for hard times, they're
learning that God never gives you what you want.
If God isn't in your grid, then forgive our little side-trip into
theology. We know that those issues are important for many
people after divorce, bereavement, or a serious breakup. At the
very time when they need their faith to help, they find it tripping
them up.
We also recognize that many people find their faith during a
crisis. As long as everything is going swimmingly, they don't need
to think much about God. But when the world comes crashing
in, suddenly they're asking God for all kinds of help. That's why
Alcoholics Anonymous urges people to get in touch with their
Higher Power. They're intentionally vague about naming it. They
don't want to exclude anyone unnecessarily over religious sectarianism.
But they've embraced the fact that we all need help along
the path of recovery-superhuman help.
"You Gotta Help Me!"
So consider the generally non-religious man whose wife walks out,
causing great pain and deep soul-searching. This can't be happening.
How could she? What did I do to deserve this? God, you gotta
help me! Suddenly, he is more aware of God than ever before.
Maybe he stops into a church or synagogue in town. Maybe
he talks with a religious friend. Maybe his fervent sister-in-law
starts giving him theology lessons. He doesn't know anything
about God or the Bible, but he knows he needs help from some
higher power. We just hope he gets steered in the right direction.
Well-meant advice like "Just believe" and "Pray for a miracle"
and "Let go and let God" could cause a problem. They're
not exactly wrong, just subject to abuse. It's that magic wand that
he has to learn to wave. Personally, we have no doubts about the
power of God, but we fear that this poor guy could get the
wrong message about recovery, about God, about faith, and
about himself.
Yet if that man, in his suffering and searching, wound up asking
us for help, we'd tell him something like this: "God cares for
you in your pain. We don't know why he let this tragedy happen;
his ways are mysterious. But we know he'll help you deal with this.
Yes, he has the power to send some lightning bolt to make everything
better instantly, but he seldom chooses to work that way. Yet
he will work minor miracles in your life every day over the next
few years as you come to grips with this crisis and rebuild your
life. You'll go through some difficult times, but he'll never be far
from you. You can trust in him for the strength to go through it."
Mad at God?
While crisis can often bring a person closer to God, it also drives
some further away. It's common for people to cry out against God
in anger. Why did you let this happen? I don't deserve this suffering!
At such times some people seem to lose their faith. Though
they might have been very religious in the past, they stop their religious
observance. It's as if they're trying to punish God for treating
them badly. In some cases they also lose all interest in starting over.
They could choose to go through the recovery process, but they'd
rather sit and sulk. God got me into this. Let him get me out.
They're something like the little girl who's mad at her mother
for not letting her go out to play before dinner. "Well then," the
girl sniffs, "I'll just go to my room, and I'm not coming out." She
stomps up the stairs in a huff.
Mom calls her for dinner, but she doesn't answer. Mom even
knocks at her door, but the daughter is taking out her vengeance,
punishing her mother by boycotting dinner. "All right, dear,"
Mom says, "we'll go on without you."
"Fine!" the child harrumphs through the closed door.
Then she hears the plink of tableware from the kitchen,
along with the voices of her family. I bet they'll be sorry that I'm
not there. But there's laughter from downstairs. They don't seem
to be missing her at all. Then the girl begins to feel some pangs
in her stomach. It sure would be nice to be eating with her family.
She begins to realize that her hunger strike isn't hurting
anyone but herself.
So the girl steps willfully down to the kitchen and announces,
"I'm still upset. But can I have dinner?"
"Sure, honey," says Mom, pulling out a chair for her. "Maybe
we can talk about it later."
Other books have explored all the philosophical and theological
angles of being angry with God, so we don't need to get
into that. Our concern is that you don't let your anger hinder your
recovery. If you're trying to punish God by staying wounded, you
won't hurt anyone but yourself. The victim thing gets old after a
while. Sulking isn't going to get you where you need to be. The
table is set for your healing. Come and join the family. You can
talk about those anger issues later.
Working
Medieval monks had a saying: "God works and we work." We
can apply that to the process of starting over after any sort of personal
crisis. We all work through the stages of recovery, managing
our anger, eventually reaching a point of acceptance and even forgiveness.
But it's emotionally challenging to keep moving along
that route.
By urging you to walk and work along that path, this book
isn't denying that there's a Higher Power who will work with you.
God works and we work. Any miracles that happen will occur
along that path of recovery.
And the path of recovery is itself a kind of miracle. At several
points in this book, we'll say, "Relax! Stop working so hard! Let
the process happen!" Is that a contradiction? We don't think so.
Continues.
