I had to make a difficult decision recently to sever a friendship with someone and it definitely was far from easy. I’ve honestly never been the kind of guy to part ways with any type of friend, but I’ve realized that sometimes this becomes necessary to do so when it’s putting my recovery in serious jeopardy.
My recovery from addiction is by far the most important thing in my life today, next to my relationship with God of course. Years ago this wasn’t the case though and when it wasn’t, I was usually known to maintain friendships with those who regularly triggered me back into a relapse with any one of my former addictions. In almost every case, how this happened always began with me befriending someone I was attracted to who was overly codependent, mentally imbalanced, or still engaging in some form of an unhealthy addiction.
The reason why I always befriended people such as this was simply for my desire to constantly play the rescuer (thinking I could save someone), as well as to avoid looking at my own day-to-day character defects (not looking in the mirror). Thankfully, I’ve done enough recovery work in recent years to work through this character defect quite a bit, but unfortunately I haven’t been perfect in it either.
About a year ago when I came to Toledo, I met someone in a recovery meeting that followed the path of this character defect pretty well. I initially believed I was truly strong enough to handle this friendship with healthy boundaries, but over time I started to see I couldn’t. Arguments and great moments of stress often consumed me in this friendship along with an increased sense of resentment, none of which was healthy on any level for my spirituality or my recovery. Yet, I continued to maintain this connection for close to an entire year until I saw the only thing it was doing was leading me right back into a hard relapse with my sex and love addiction and codependency.
I always say that when the pain of doing something again and again becomes greater than not doing it ever again, that’s when the healthiest changes are usually made in life. In my case, this principle proved to be true when I clearly saw how unhealthy I was becoming by remaining in this unbalanced friendship.
Saying goodbye to this friend and increasing the distance between them and me was not an easy thing for me to do at all. I really felt this person’s pain and sense of being rejected in doing so, which caused my heart to hurt in the process. But, I know that if I was to remain friends with this person and fully relapse into any of my former addictions, my heart and a whole heck of a lot more of my life will end up suffering far greater.
Like my Massachusetts recovery friends once said with great frequency, while I may have another relapse waiting to happen within me, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever have another recovery. With that being said, sometimes it truly does become necessary in a life of recovery from addiction to sever ties with a friend, especially when it’s putting all of that in serious jeopardy. I just thank God I was able to recognize this before it got too late…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson