Victim or Co-Conspirator?

Once we’ve gotten recovery’s wake-up call, it’s easy to see ourselves as the victims of many abusive people. Suddenly, everyone we chose to be in a relationship with looks like an evil never-do-well. We look to the past and see our “innocent” selves as having been willfully abused by these people. We pretend that in every instance they knew what they were doing in hurting and victimizing us for their personal pleasure and gain. This way of seeing the past is called denial.

And it’s denial because of one word: choice. No one forced us to be in relationship with anyone from our past. We chose to be in relationship with them. Nine times out of 10, we became obsessed with a particular person—not understanding that he/she was toxic for us—and we chose to pursue a relationship with him/her. We thought about this person obsessively, called him/her constantly and bent over backwards to please him/her until we succeeded in taking this person hostage.

Once we had our great obsession as a hostage, we smothered the life out of him/her while he/she bled the life out of us. In the end, we felt abused and so we demonized him/her. In reality, we were just as guilty of being abusive in our own little way. After all, our hostage didn’t realize that we were toxic for them, either. We were both blind to the toxicity of the attraction between us. Addiction is a toxic attraction between two unsuspecting persons who think they are practicing normal human behavior. How scary is that?

It’s pretty scary! And neither one of us had a clue. In a sense we were partners-in-crime. Both of us were perpetrators of harm against ourselves and each other. At the very least we were co-conspirators. If we are really honest with ourselves, we will find few cases where we were purely a victim. A case in point would be if we were abused as children by an older sibling or an adult. But in any adult to adult consensual relationship, we most likely played a significant role in our own abuse, demise and personal pain.

A major key to recovery is our ability to honestly take responsibility for the role that we played in a relationship that went sour. If we can take responsibility for the choices we made-- like being controlling and manipulating and staying loyal for way too long to someone who was toxic for us-- then we can begin to let go of our resentments. And we can replace them with empathy and acceptance. Once we can do this, we are on our way toward forgiving the past—including ourselves as well as those who hurt us.

Forgiveness sets us free by returning our personal power to us. In particular, the personal power that we need to have ownership of in order to be healthy, happy recovering people.