Recovery Writers in November (whether you attend Nov 8 or 15) will use the following prompt:
We are Attracted to Dysfunctional People
Many of us in recovery are baffled as to how we ended up romantically tangled with an alcoholic, workaholic, narcissist, Adult Child, or other dysfunctional person. Didn’t we know better? This was a personality we grew up with, a cycle of drama that released adrenalin and made us feel alive. Normal people were “boring.” We were programmed from childhood to seek out such people. I can recall my mother criticizing my High School boyfriend as lacking in pizzazz and personality. Today, I see that she was addicted to my alcoholic father’s personality.
Most of my boyfriends in later years fit the pattern of out-sized personalities and dramatic narcissists. The one I write about below wasn’t outwardly dramatic, but he was both an alcoholic and an Adult Child.
Watching Walter Cronkite
His dad died when he was three.
Mine hung on longer,
half-dead from Gallo and despair.
We found each other with the radar
of children unused to being lucky.
Nightly, we’d sit on his college couch,
drink gin, and listen to the man we called “Walt”:
“Today, 30 servicemen dead in Vietnam.
Tornados flattened a Midwest mobile park.
Gas prices rose again.”
Beneath his newsman’s voice, a lyric of authority,
and though we knew he couldn’t see us,
bathed in cool blue cathode rays,
we straightened up and listened close.
He sat behind a desk.
We imagined a dining table.
He wore a suit and tie.
We saw a cardigan, worn at elbows.
His desk was clear of papers, pens.
We saw a jello salad jiggling its bits of pineapple
holding out its promise of a tart explosion on the tongue.
As our ice cubes melted, shrank in our mouths,
we were mesmerized as if our horoscope had said
tomorrow would be sunny, our fortunes would improve.
Twenty-two minutes. He signed off: “And that’s the way it was.”
CONNECTION TO RECOVERY
The man I loved was odd, even by Berkeley standards. He always wore a black suit and white starched shirt. In that respect, he was clearly dramatic. But he loved me and cared for me in the way I imagine both of us would have liked to have been cared for as children. He died before I could make amends for taking him for granted.
PROMPT:
1. Write about a relationship, past or current,
with a dysfunctional person. What did you expect? What did you get ?
2. Try to add an image of a TV show that made you feel safe.
Explore why that might have been true.
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