7. Healthy Relationships Enhance Recovery

By Tom O'Connell

When we're having problems coping with life, and resolve them through healthy interpersonal relating, we're on the right track. The other option is to dive into our addictions. But addiction doesn't resolve problems, it intensifies them and creates new ones. So a major ingredient in addiction recovery is healthy relating.

Couples therapist Harville Hendrix talked about the need to strive for "conscious love relationships" when he was advising therapists at last summer's Cape Cod Institute, sponsored by Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

What's a conscious love relationship? Well, it's not the primitive approach. "Ugh. Me Tarzan, you Jane. We go to bed!" Hendrix calls this approach "primal consciousness." It's the stuff of romantic love and power struggles.

In romantic love we experience erotic attractions and capture our love object. Then we become attached to our love object, and filled with hope for the future. We become captivated by our own illusions of how wonderful our love object will be for us. And we achieve a temporary condition described as ecstasy. But the situation changes.

Then comes the power struggle when the love object doesn't meet all the fantastic expectations. This brings disillusionment, frustration, fear, coercion, anger, and the impasse where the relationship is no longer satisfying.

In discussing "differentiated consciousness," however, Hendrix uses words like "commitment," "knowledge," "transformation," and "awakening." There's an encounter with "the other" above the primitive level, and we get beyond our separateness.

In commitment, we make a no-exit decision and deal with our fears, our resistance,  risks, and goals.

In knowledge, we gather information, consider options, make decisions, experience pain, expand curiosity, and grow.

In transformation, we work on issues like anger, see our relationships more realistically, use romance in healthy ways, and develop such skills as mirroring, validating, empathizing, and stretching beyond our self-centeredness.

In our awakening, we come to deep knowledge of self and other, experience heightened awareness that includes fear, and sometimes we get disoriented as we encounter what Hendrix and Carl Jung describe as "the shadow." We all cast a shadow.

Finally, by working hard at intimate relating, we find "real love." What does this involve? Unconditional giving, relating without expectations, dropping our defenses, communicating with empathy, valuing the other without possessiveness, practicing spiritual intimacy, feeling joy, and being fully alive. Wow!

Relating is the key to addiction recovery. Recovery may begin with not drinking, not drugging, not gambling, not overeating, not using sex as a fix. But that's only the beginning. Recovery is a relationship journey, and there's no graduation certificate. We're all students.  Each day brings us new challenges in relating to self, others, and God. But what an adventure! After all, what is life but relating?

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