Bouncing Between Extremes

In her book Facing Codependence, Pia Melody points out the fact that codependents tend to bounce between extremes. We can bounce from low self-esteem to arrogant, from too vulnerable to invulnerable, from good boy/girl to bad and rebellious, from overly dependent to anti-dependent, and from controlling to chaotic.

I know what it’s like to bounce between all of those extremes. Before recovery, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing when I allowed myself to swing like a pendulum between extremes. Now I do. I am aware when I go from feeling empowered to totally disempowered. And that’s a really painful bounce for me because the feelings of being disempowered are ingrained from childhood. Mentally, they make no sense to me. I know I’m not truly disempowered, but my feelings don’t agree. In fact, my feelings violently disagree.

At least now I know that these feelings of disempowerment are not really about the NOW. They aren’t about the reality of the present moment. They are about unresolved issues and feelings from the past that haunt me like the greatest of nightmares. And, unfortunately, I have to allow those feelings to be present and I have to be present to them until they pass through me and are released back into the universe.

Sometimes I think it would be a good idea to give them back to the persons who evoked them. If a feeling of disempowerment came from my father berating me with his harsh words and his backhand when I was five, then in my mind I need to say to him “Here. Here’s your anger and your rage and your belittlement. I’m giving it back to you. I know longer wish to feel disempowered. I reclaim my personal power from you.”

Part of my problem with feeling disempowered is also about the fact that I was raised to be the perfect good boy. Being the perfect good boy meant that I took on a lot of unreasonable expectations that belonged to my parents, teachers, etc. and I made them my own. Today, I want to disavow ownership of those expectations. I don’t want to pretend to be perfect anymore and I don’t want to be the good boy. I want to be REAL.

Sometimes in recovery we need to consciously bounce between extremes like good boy/girl and rebellious. We need to do this with awareness, however. We need to be able to experience both extremes and then find our true reality, our REALNESS, in the middle of those extremes.

Sometimes we need to consciously experience being overly polite and sometimes we need to experience saying “Bite me!” Eventually, we will realize that the truth is in between these extremes. We will learn we can be polite but still set proper boundaries; we can temper indignation/honesty with kindness.

Or we need to be able to know what it’s like to do a good job, say at work, but we also need to know that failure is an acceptable option. We don’t have to be perfect, but we need to learn from our mistakes and own up to them without feeling bad about ourselves. That’s reality. That’s being REAL.

So now, when I find myself still bouncing between extremes, I consciously work at finding my true place, my true fit, somewhere in the middle of those extremes. And I’m OK. I’m good enough right there in that space.