Sometimes You Have to Have a Life Sucks Day

“Life sucks and then you die.”

Anonymous

It’s easy to get discouraged in recovery. Bad days are still bad. We take steps forward and then we regress back into old destructive patterns of behavior. We understand there is no such thing as positive instant gratification, and yet we are still desperate for instant intimacy. So we continually find ourselves looking for that person who can make us happy, despite all we’ve learned in recovery. We still look to every face-- on every street corner, in every restaurant, in every social gathering, in the supermarket and even in our doctor’s waiting room.  We understand no one can rescue us, and yet we are still codependently seeking our savior.

On those days when life truly sucks, I think it’s especially hard for those of us who lost their youth to codependency. It’s easy to look back and regret that we lost our twenties and thirties-- and all of the attainable happiness that comes with being young-- to a disease we didn’t even know we had.  The temptation on every “Life Sucks Day” is to say “Why bother now? It’s too late to be happy. It’s too late to meet someone healthy and have a satisfying relationship. No one will want me now. I’m too old. Life has passed me by. I might as well give up.”

There are certainly those Life Sucks days when it’s hard to hold on to hope. Hope and our Higher Power have often let us down.  I can look back during my recovery journey and see how I’ve made great strides. But I can also see that the times I had the most hope in building new relationships were also the times when I was left hanging from a cliff. Things didn’t work out, no matter how honest and vulnerable I was, and no matter how much positive energy I put into the relationship. I was left dangling and wondering why I should still have an ounce of hope. All I could do is scream like a wounded animal and wonder “Where is my Higher Power in all of this? Where is the payoff to my hard recovery work? Is life ever going to work out for the better?”

Of course, I’ve read all about practicing gratitude during sucky times like these, and I understand the importance of gratitude. But when you’re having a real Life Sucks Day, I think it’s important to face the pain and ask what you can learn from it. To simply jump into gratitude mantras is to sugarcoat your pain and to act as if it isn’t justifiable, when in fact it is. It’s real and it needs to be felt. Take the time to feel all of your hurt, frustration, anger and sadness before you think in terms of rescuing yourself, either by acting out or prematurely offering gratitude mantras. Acting out will only make matters worse. And gratitude mantras only have value after the clouds have lifted. Until that time, it’s probably best to journal about your pain and frustration, or call a friend or get to a meeting where you can talk about it.

If we can face the Life Sucks Days without playing the victim, then we probably have a better chance of having fewer Life Sucks Days and more Life Is Good Days—before we die.