When I'm in an ego state, separated from God, I'm like a universe of energy with nowhere to go and nothing to do, penned in, like whatever-it-was before the big bang.
I need a stage for the theatre troupe to act out.
How do I get one of those?
Find an alcoholic, an addict, a candidate for romantic or sexual obsession, and voilà, there’s my stage.
What I have with the person is not a relationship, though.
We’re playing out our roles in private halls of mirrors using the other person as a prop. I’m just as on my own but now with a cast projected out of my own mind to keep me company.
I don’t see the other person at all. I just see myself reflected back. In entanglements like this, ‘I love you’ means ‘I love my image of myself when I say I love you and you say you love me.’
The most entangled relationships are the loneliest because neither person is really experiencing anything but themselves.
Stop those relationships, and all of the energy is now contained inside, with nowhere to go.
And, until recovery is found, the situation will be recreated, again and again, in the hope that the ending will change.
The ending will never change.
For me, recovery has meant giving up on relationships entirely. No more ‘romance’. No more ‘love’. No more ‘relationships’.
Really? That can’t be true.
Actually it is. Although there’s a catch. By ‘no more romance, love, and relationships’ I mean no more of the type I used to have before. Those sour breeds, which had nothing to do with real romance, love, or relationships, with their sickly intensity, had to be erased from my experience. If I’m excited in the familiar way by someone, it’s a no-no.
Real romance, love, and relationships are available, but they are entirely different phenomena under the same names.
For the relationship-addicted, it’s just like giving up alcohol. Alcoholics never get to drink safely again. I never get to have one of those sickly entanglements again, and get away with it. I really have had to make the decision to give up those forever.
So when your eyes lock across a crowded room, don’t even say hello.