For reasons not relevant to this blog, I joined an online Alanon group.  Alanon is for friends and family of those dealing with alcohol issues.  I learned that Alanon is not about the individual with the alcohol problem, but it’s about *you.*  How you deal with your life, your reactions, your healing.  Learning how you’ve changed (often for the negative) from your attempts to “deal with” or “change” the other person.

I’ve learned many things I can apply to my life – things that have *nothing* to do with alcohol.  I had no idea it was such a widely-applicable program.

Joy wrote a comment on the Baby Talkers post that got me thinking about something I learned in Alanon.  She wrote:

I have been struggling with this for awhile now, especially regarding you tube. They sound sincere, but who is going to actively flaunt this, especially their littles on public video forums? Maybe I’m wrong, but then again, half the time I doubt my own diagnosis.

What’s right and wrong?

Many of us struggle with this idea of what is “right” or “wrong” for this DX, and if we aren’t like someone else, that we doubt ourselves; doubt the DX.  Like somehow everyone who has cancer has the same type, copes in the same way, and responds to the same therapy.

Sounds ridiculous, right?

Man, we have to stop beating on ourselves.

Someone in Alanon used an analogy about houses across the street from one another.  You have your house, you paint it, garden it, take care of it how you will (or won’t).   The other person (in Alanon-speak, the one with the alcohol problem) lives across the street.  You may not like how they take care of their house, leaving garbage outside and not pruning the bushes.  You can comment and bitch and moan, hoping they’ll change.  But they don’t, you get resentful, they get nasty, spiral down, etc.

So I learned from Alanon – get out of their yard and get back across the street into your own yard.  You can only care for your own yard, so stop letting your behavior be dictated by what they do, and what you can’t control.  Work on what you *can* control.

What does this have to do with Baby Talkers?

I’m not perfect and I don’t really understand myself and all the ramifications of my DX.  I don’t like the YouTube videos so I’m walking away from them.  They may be true or not – at this point in my life, I don’t care.  When I wrote that post, I was much more concerned that people would see these videos and assume that’s what we’re all like.

Now, 18 months later, I care much less about that.  I went back on my side of the street and shut the blinds on that side of my house.

I used to agonize about my DX – what it was, what it means for my future, how I’ll “turn out.”  I obsessed in the beginning, as an engineer.  Now, since the last year or so have been 7 times of hell, I’m less concerned with the specifics and mechanics, and I just try to work ways to cope with my daily challenges.  To be fair, I’ve been unable to do any trauma work.  I don’t think I could right now. But since my ability to deal with stressful situations and triggers has been significantly challenged lately, my therapy has been very useful in other very important ways.

In a way, I’ve been forced back across the street to work on my own house and garden.  And I’m worrying less about how I compare, and more about me just getting along in life with my own challenges.