The Resentment Nobody Talks About In Recovery

You know what makes most people assume that if drinking and drugs were the big problem in a relationship, then once the person gets sober, the relationship should start getting better. And sometimes it does get better. In fact, most of the time it does. But sometimes something really confusing happens. The person gets sober, everybody's still mad. The person in recovery is thinking, I'm changed. I did what everybody wanted me to do. Why am I still getting watched, questioned, criticized? Meanwhile, their partner's thinking, are you kidding me? After everything I've been through and now you're mad at me? Here's the uncomfortable part. There's truth on both sides, of course. Getting sober, yeah, that removes the substance from the relationship, but it doesn't automatically remove everything the relationship built around the substance. The resentment, the mistrust, fear, power struggles. The old roles like scorekeeping. These are something that's happened that's never really gotten acknowledged. Once the chaos starts settling in, sometimes you can start to see, or once the chaos starts getting out, I mean the drug and alcohol chaos, you start to see things more clearly. Now, don't worry, stay tuned. I am going to tell you how to fix this, what's going to make it better. But before I do, I want you to understand what's actually happening here. And heads up, my advice on how to fix it is going to be pretty much like the exact opposite of what everyone else tells you to do. So the smallest things can trigger like a 4-hour argument over every bad thing that you've ever done since 2017. Like, for example, imagine someone's in recovery And they can go to dinner with friends, right? Other people who order drinks doesn't really bother them at all, but they're at home and then their wife pours a drink, a glass of wine or something like that. Instantly irritated. Now they're annoyed. They're watching how much she's drinking. They're counting it. Maybe they're making little comments or jabs. They're getting angry. And it would be really easy to jump to a conclusion in this kind of situation and say, well, it's the alcohol that's bothering him. It's probably making him want to drink. But wait a minute, if alcohol itself were the trigger, why doesn't everybody else's drinking bother the person? That tells us something important. It tells us that the alcohol, the wine itself, isn't the whole trigger. It's what the spouse's drinking means to him. It could mean you judged me for my drinking and yours was a problem too. It could mean somehow I became the designated problem in this marriage and I had to change and you never had to look at yourself. Now, I'm not saying that those things are objectively true. That's not the point. The point is, is that we don't just react to what happens. We react to what our brain says it means. And it works in both ways. A husband is 10 minutes late getting home and his wife immediately gets anxious and angry. 10 minutes isn't the problem here, right? 10 minutes means, here we go again. I remember all those times I had no idea where you were or what I was going to walk into. The thing happening right now may look tiny, But it's dragging a whole bunch of history behind it. That's why sometimes the reaction looks way bigger than the situation. I usually say if the problem is this big and the reaction is this big, it means it's connected to something from the past. And that's the kind of thing that happens in these early recovery family situations. This is where relationships can develop. People in relationships develop what I call like the emotional ledger, right? Everybody starts keeping this invisible scorecard. The loved one's scorecard might say something like, I can't trust you. I had to handle everything. I covered for you. You embarrassed me. You scared me. You lied to me. But the other person has a ledger too. And it sounds something like, You humiliated me. You treated me like a child. You told everybody my business. You monitored everything I did. You ignored your own behavior while focusing only on me, pretending like all the problems in this whole family is because of my addiction. Every problem somehow became my fault. When that happens, you're both right. And it doesn't mean that you're both right in the way that everybody did equal damage. It doesn't mean that everybody was equally responsible. It means that 2 people can hurt each other inside the same relationship. And the perceived unfairness is huge. It's a huge resentment trigger. It feels like when you're the person that gets labeled with the problem, while you somehow, the other person somehow got to be the judge, that resentment can hang around for a very, very long time. And again, it doesn't mean that the behaviors were equivalent. Okay? One person's drinking may have been much more destructive, but there's a difference between saying our drinking was exactly the same and saying, I can understand why having me criticize your drinking while I was also drinking felt hypocritical or unfair. Those are completely different statements, right? Recovery also changes behavior a whole lot faster than it changes the relationship roles, right? Just because someone gets sober doesn't mean all these usually dysfunctional roles that are developed inside the family system, they don't necessarily just go away because during addiction, everybody gets a part. The problem one, right? The responsible one, the rescuer, the screw-up, the parent, judge. Then somebody gets sober, but nobody hands out the new cast list. You can stop drinking on Tuesday, but your marriage doesn't automatically update its operating system on Wednesday. The person in recovery is thinking, stop treating me Like, I'm that person. And the spouse is thinking, you've been different for all of 3 months. I've been living this for 8 years. Both of those experiences make complete sense. When people get upset over seemingly small things, it's about the perceived meaning that they're attaching to it. When people get really upset, Over the small things because of perceived meaning. I'm saying that though, because I really want it to hit home. You have to pay attention to the meaning that the other person is attaching to the event or that you're attaching to the event. When you find yourself getting really upset over a seemingly small thing, take something as simple as like your partner asking, where are you going? Or where are you going? Not even with the attitude I said it, just Where are you going? That can hit completely different depending on what's underneath it. It could come across like, you still don't trust me. That when that happens, that's a trust wound that it's hitting, right? It could feel like, here we go again, I'm being monitored again. That's about feeling controlled. It could feel like no matter how long I'm sober, you're always going to see me as the person who can't be trusted. That hits your identity button, right? It's like a wound and it's triggering that wound, right? It's not the question, it's everything else that the meaning the person is attaching to the question. Or the person— on the other hand, the person asking the question may be thinking, why are you getting so defensive over a completely normal question? Maybe the person's just asking because they're thinking, hey, if you're going by the grocery store, I wanted to ask you to stop and get some milk, right? Like maybe that was the intention. So they're just asking a simple question. In their mind, it doesn't mean anything. But in the other person's mind, it means a lot, right? It just triggers us back to those same old roles and feelings. It feels exactly like it used to feel when you were hiding something. Now we've got this threat and mistrust being activated on both sides. The same question, but completely different emotional meanings. That's why figuring out what happened is only half the job. You've got to figure out what your brain, your brain, if it's you getting upset, or the other person's brain decided that it meant, right? It's not about what's happening. It's about the meaning we attach to it. If any of you have ever done any cognitive behavioral work, there's a lot of that in this kind of situation. You learn how to stop attaching irrational meaning to things, and that helps you to stabilize your emotions. Now, this is where people get themselves completely stuck, right? People get stuck on trying to prove whose version of reality is correct. I mean, it can be back and forth for years about what actually happening. It can be, um, The person with the in recovery thinks, well, your drinking was just as bad, or you smoked just as much as I smoked. And then the other person's like, no, it wasn't. Yes, it was. I never did what you did. Well, everybody covered for you, and suddenly your kitchen has turned into CSI Chardonnay. Okay, like it's this argument, and we're collecting facts and evidence. Nobody wins this kind of argument because you're trying to. Resolve an emotional injury through historical fact-checking. And you may never agree on every detail of what happened. And honestly, and thankfully, you don't have to. Underneath a lot of resentment is something much simpler. It's, I need you to understand what it was like for me. That's almost always what's going on here. Which brings me to the part I told you earlier that I was going to tell you how to fix this, right? And I promised you now that I was going to tell you how to fix this. Now, everybody else, maybe not everybody else, a lot of other people, right? They tell their friends, couples counselor tell couples, blah, blah, blah. You need to communicate your feelings. When there's like a bunch of relationship all built up, you need to communicate what you're feeling to the other person. And they may even say, you know, use your I feeling statements. But I personally feel like that can be really bad advice because what does communicate your feelings turn into, right? Let's look at this logically. It turns into, I feel like you never... right? I feel like you don't care. I feel like you always... And when you're doing that, you know, what you end up doing is you end up disguising criticism as a feeling and the The other person does exactly what you would expect them to do in that situation. They defend themselves. So instead of that, instead of communicate your feelings, I want— my advice for you is to do the opposite. Communicate the other person's feelings. Before you explain how hurt you are, show them that you understand how hurt they are. Here's what this sounds like. It sounds like, I can see how my drinking made you feel that life was just totally unpredictable. I can see how my drinking made you feel like you were walking on eggshells, or you didn't know what kind of mood I was going to be in when I got home. You never knew what kind of night you were going to have to deal with. Or from the other side, it sounds like, I can see how me constantly looking the next mistake that you were going to make made you feel like none of the progress you were making even counted. It's about articulating, communicating the other person's feeling. It's completely different than communicating your feelings. Your feelings, to be honest, usually make people defensive, right? Even if you say it in the nicest way and you use Academy Award-winning I feel statements, It still comes across as, you know, the other person still knows you're telling them something that they did that you don't think is right or that upsets you. It's a completely different conversation when you do it the other way, when you communicate their feelings, because when I communicate my feelings to you, you hear something that you have to defend yourself against. When I accurately communicate your feelings back to you, You, you get it, right? And, and when people feel understood, they feel safer. And they— and when they feel safer, this is the important part— it means they don't have to argue their case quite so hard, right? They can fire the lawyer, right? They don't have to argue back and forth about what happened or why they feel the way they feel and all that kind of stuff. You don't have to keep proving the point over. And once somebody feels understood, They become much, much, much more capable of understanding you. It almost happens usually like automatically. Like when you say, I know this probably made you feel that way. A lot of times automatically the person was like, yeah, but I didn't always respond to it right. Or yeah, but I shouldn't have said that or something like that. Like they'll, they'll lower their walls and, and communicate how they know they didn't handle it perfect either, how they know what they did. Affected you in a certain way, right? But this needs to go in both directions. If you're the family member, you don't get a free pass on hurtful behavior just because you had a good reason for being scared. Yes, fear explains a lot of your behavior. It explains exactly why you did a lot of what you did, but it doesn't give you like diplomatic immunity. Okay. If you became controlling, acknowledge it. If you humiliated them, even if you didn't mean to, acknowledge it. If you brought their past mistakes into every new disagreement, just acknowledge it. If you said things out of anger that cut really deep, acknowledge that too. You can do all of that without saying the addiction was okay. You can say, I clearly see how me bringing up everything you ever did wrong every time we had an argument made you feel like there was no way for you to ever outgrow that old version of yourself or get past your mistake. And if you're the person in recovery, this is not the opportunity. Again, I'll say not the opportunity. you to say, see, I told you so. This is not your victory lap. Settle down, sit back down in your seat. Don't be rubbing it in their face because now you're going to blow the whole thing up. You have work to do here too, right? You may need to say something like, I understood, or I understood or understand why you stopped believing in me. Or you could say, I could see how having to cover for me and pick up all the pieces all the time made you feel really alone in this relationship. Or you can say, I made promises that things would be different and didn't follow through. I can see how eventually my words stopped meaning anything to you. Notice what we're doing here. We're not just admitting the behavior. We're not just saying, yes, I drank, or yes, I lied. The important thing that's happening right here is that we're acknowledging the emotional impact of the behavior. There's a big difference between just saying, yes, I did this, and talking about the impact. You could say, yeah, I shouldn't have disappeared like that. And I can see how me disappearing and not answering my phone left you sitting They're scared and angry and wondering if something terrible had happened. There's a big difference between, I know I said some awful things, and I can see how hearing those things from somebody that you really loved stuck with you long after I sobered up and apologized. Right? That's the part people are usually waiting for. And acknowledgement doesn't mean agreement. This is where people get stuck. They, it's like they're withholding the acknowledgement because they think that if they acknowledge it, sometimes they think if they acknowledge it, the other person's going to throw it back in their face, right? Sometimes they think if they acknowledge it means they totally agree with the other person's perspective, but it doesn't really mean that. You can say, I understand why that felt unfair to you without saying you were right about absolutely everything. You can say, I understand why you felt embarrassed about what happened without saying, therefore, every way you reacted afterward was okay. You're communicating, I understand what it felt like from where you were standing. And I'm going to slow down right here. Major emphasis. Okay? Please do not ruin the statement with a but. Okay? The statement and then stop. We talk a lot about this in our Denial Breakthrough Intensive, which we had a few weeks ago. We'll have again in a few weeks. So hop on our website if you want to claim your spot. One of the things we teach in there is really important is you say the statement, you stop. No, but I felt that way because none of that. You had it. You were doing good. Then look right back. Let the acknowledgement stand there for a minute. No correction, no counterclaim, no, what about you? Your turn will come because a lot of what people are demanding through anger is acknowledgement, and they just don't know how to ask for it directly. That resentment about the glass of wine may actually be About feeling like I need you to understand why watching you drink brings up this whole sense of unfairness in me. And her defensive— her defensiveness may be saying something like, I need you to understand how much you were drinking changed the way I felt inside this relationship. At that point, nobody's really arguing about the alcohol anymore, right? It's not about the wine. They're arguing over whether their past pain That's why the first step in dealing with this isn't figuring out who's worse. It's about helping the other person feel accurately understood. And the good words, the good thing about this is if you, if you say, I can understand how it made you feel, whatever, fill in the blank, and you get it wrong, that's okay. Because they'll just correct you, not in an upset way and be like, well, no, I really wasn't that mad. I was really more sad or whatever. They'll just explain it to you. And then you can repeat it back using their words, and now you've got it accurately right. So if— just take a starting point. If you have to guess how it made the other person feel, just start there, because just the fact that you're trying to understand how they felt will go such a long way. You can start asking, okay, what do we want this relationship to look like now? Right? We know what it looked like in the past, but what do we want it to look like now? Do we need less interrogation and more voluntary transparency? Do we need a way to talk about fear without accusing someone? Do we need to stop commenting on each other's every move or what the person did in the past? Do we need some arguments around the alcohol in the house? Those are problem-solving conversations. But before But understanding needs to come before that we get to the problem solving, because sobriety doesn't mean pretending none of it happened. You don't erase the history. If you're going to build a genuinely different relationship, at some point you have to stop organizing every current interaction around who everybody else was during the addiction. And this happens on both sides. You're never happy. You never tell the truth. Back and forth. It's both sides. Yes, the history, it matters. It gets a voice. It just doesn't get the final vote, right? If you're going to move forward in recovery on both sides of the family, you have to decide to move forward. And sometimes that means You have to decide that you're going to put the past in the past, even if it feels a little bit unfair, right? Because continuing to bring up what the other person's done over and over on either side is just going to create more defensiveness. It's going to keep us back stuck in old roles. And even if the sobriety stays, it's— the relationship doesn't get better. And what's it all worth it? What's The point of being sober is to have a better life, right? That's the whole reason why you wanted to get sober or why your loved one wanted to get sober is so the relationship is better. So we have to focus on that relationship and realize it's not just about the sobriety because there's a lot of things that happen in the process that need to be undone. Now, if you're watching this live, Bree is back there behind the scenes being our moderator. And if you want to, you can join the conversation. Put in the comments or in the chat there if you have a question, if you have a comment. Bree's going to be looking for those. She's going to pop them up there on the screen. In the meantime, while you get those up there, I will remind you that we have links to lots of resources for you in the description of this video. There is a new 5 Essential Recovery Skills Guide that's down there. You can get, you can download that. There's a Understanding Manipulative Behaviors Guide. All that's there for you. It's all in the description, so check it out. All right, Bree, do we have any questions or comments? Anybody wants to be in the conversation? All right. Is it ever okay to tell my spouse's mom there is a drug issue? She gives five figures like money gifts throughout the year, plus sizable inheritance, and eventually meant to help people provide. Eventually meant to help provide for our disabled child. Do I disclose? I can understand why you want to disclose, but I have a couple of thoughts here. The first and most important thought is if you out someone's addiction to Especially to one of their people. And that means their family, their friends, their workmates or whatever. Your person is going to feel like that's extremely disloyal. It's one of the things, it's one of the hurts that I've seen people not get over even once they're in recovery. They feel betrayed, they feel humiliated. So you got to know your person really well, Ellie. Is your per— if you do that and then your person finds out, which they probably will, that you told their mom, are they going to get over it? Are they going to hang on to it? Is it going to be one of these arguments that just never end like we were talking about earlier? So ask yourself that. The other question you need to think about here is more times than not, when you try to tell the in-laws what's happening, they either don't believe you or they blame you. And I know that's really hard to hear. If the addiction was going on before they ever met you and the in-laws got a firsthand experience with it, then they probably will believe you, right? But if it's kind of happened or grown or gotten really big since you've been with your spouse and they really haven't seen all the firsthand of it, they may not believe you because it's like they don't want to believe something that big and difficult about their kid, right? Their son or their daughter or whatever. So thinking about your spouse and thinking about your in-laws, you can make the decision to do that. I just want you to think about how that's going to play out on both parts, right? And you're the one that knows them. So you know whether they're likely to hold onto something, whether they're likely to believe you and support you or go behind your back, right? Because a lot of times what ends up happening is The, um, the addicted person has been complaining to their parents about you for a while. You know, she's critical, she's never happy, she's controlling, blah, blah, blah. And so they already have this mindset about the situation because the addicted person's been telling them a bunch of stuff. And so when you come and you try to say, no, this is really happening, sometimes it even just reinforces this narrative that the other person's been saying. So. I totally get why you want to do that, but I want you to really think it through because I've seen these situations turn bad. And usually it's just like someone reaching out to their in-laws for help. It's like, oh my gosh, your kid's going crazy over here. I need some help. And I see it backfire more than I see it. Hopefully that piece of information helps. All right. Sa 6920 says. My loved one is going to be off work for 2 to 4 months on disability, and he's already drinking all day and not having food. How do I get him to consume some food? He's drunk all day. It's really common with alcohol. People with alcohol, they stop eating food or they like only eat like once a day. And some of that is purposeful because they don't want the food to mess with the alcohol. And some of that's because their stomach is just like literally full all the time. And it's going to be really hard to get them to eat something. You might get them to eat a piece of candy. Maybe they would— you might get them to eat something little, but trying to get them to eat like a full meal might be pretty difficult. So I'm not sure I have an answer for you on how to get that to happen. When people start— I will say that when people start getting sober, especially from alcohol, eating food on a regular schedule is one of the things that helps them. Stay sober, right? Because it keeps your belly full, which actually helps, and it actually keeps your blood sugar up, which helps you have less alcohol. I feel bad for you. I don't know how to get them to eat food. I would try just get them to eat something little and kind of sneak little things in that don't feel like a whole big full meal would be my best advice to you. Elizabeth says. My son is in jail. He told me yesterday that he read a book about a young man with addiction. He wants me to read it because he thinks I will better understand his feelings and actions. I'm unsure. Are you unsure if you want to read it or you're just unsure if it will help you better understand his actions and feelings? Because it doesn't really matter to me what the book says or even, you know, the thing here is, is he's saying, I want to feel understood. And that's what this video is actually talking about. Right. And so he's relating to the character in the book, and that'll give you a starting point to start some conversations. So you can have these, like, that must've made you feel, or that must've felt like conversations like we're talking about here, which is going to create safety and connection, which can leave room for some, a lot more productive. So I would probably do it, even if you're not sure it's going to be all that helpful. The fact that you did it. Will help them feel cared about. Philip says, the hardest part is back off when you somehow think, believe, think or believe you're right, even if you actually weren't right. Because this isn't a— That's exactly right. Because it's not about who's right or who's wrong, right? This is about how do I repair the relationship and move forward? Getting stuck on right and wrong and proving the history, it's only going to go into circles forever and ever, right? So I hate it, that whole cheesy question, do you want to be right or do you want to have a relationship? And so it is hard, especially if you— if it's easy for you to get caught up in that, in the right or the wrong. Travel to Joy says, My son destroyed the house after being under the influence of weed and alcohol. I cannot stand weed smell anymore. How do I look? This is something else, but I think it's ask him to leave the house in a good way. What words can I use to ask him to leave? It's always really hard once they're there to get them out. What I would say, I would probably. Couch it something like, um, I know that you're an adult and you can make your own choices, but when I see them, it brings out my momness. And then I want to micromanage everything. And that's not fair to either of us. It's probably time for you to get your own place because I know you want the freedom and the privacy to make your own adult choices. And then I know I need to give that to you. It's just hard when it's in my house. That's probably the way that I would couch it. That might make it less feel less, I don't know, angry, accusatory, or whatever. But don't expect them to be particularly happy about it. They're probably not going to like it either way, but it does soften it. All right, Bree says that we're about to the end of our questions. So I'll take just a minute to say, some of you probably already know. If you don't, I'll tell you. Last week. Last Wednesday, in fact, our YouTube channel got hacked by some kind of like cryptocurrency scammers. Last Wednesday, after I finished my sessions, I was logging into YouTube, the backend of YouTube, which I don't usually do. I just had this notice that I needed to fix something and I saw that somebody was live on our channel. That's not us. It's not me. It's not in my team. So I panicked. I, um, I took a screenshot of it first. So I would have the evidence, and then I deleted it, and then another one popped up, and that. And then I thought, well, I'll submit some support ticket to YouTube tomorrow because I was super tired. It was late when I woke up. The whole channel had been terminated. That's the word it said— terminated. And it's super scary. So, um, YouTube, I think they probably have algorithms or whatever that look for things like this, because whatever the scammers were doing was illegal, right? And so it shut the channel down and had to go through a whole investigation to figure out what happened. Did it get hacked? How did it get hacked? And then secure it back. So for those of you who tried to find us last week or find a video, that's where we were. We didn't go anywhere. We're still here, but we were terminated for the moment. So luckily we did get through that. We got everything secure. We're back up and running. Thank you for those who hung in with that through us. I don't know if anybody even saw those live streamers. I don't think they were up there for very long, but I hate that that happened. It was pretty shocking, scary. So, but we're back. So, and we're glad we're back. All right, everybody, I think we're about to the end of our time today. I hope you guys have a great rest of your afternoon. Don't forget, there are additional resources Description if anybody needs any. I'll see you guys next week. Bye, everybody.