JUDY EMERSON Author and Personal Coach

Recently I’ve had to admit my humbling recognition that I am bad at following directions.  I’m certain others in my life have observed this about me, for decades. (“She thinks she’s better than anybody else! She agrees to a plan and then she does it her own way”, etc.) Sigh. At the age of 73 I’m finally catching onto the magnitude and persistence of my willful tendencies.

Here’s an example, because confession is good for the soul: Starting in March or April of this year, I noticed I was losing my voice through the course of the day. There was a sudden onset with no apparent reason, and it kept happening. And I realized I was sneezing, all through the morning every morning, but my symptoms never escalated to congestion in my chest the way a cold or flu would have. This seemed more ominous as the months passed. Now it’s July. Was this laryngitis going to be a new normal? I can’t sing in church any more. I can’t make myself heard in a conversation. And a friend told me she’d just had nodes on her vocal cords surgically removed! Eeek! What is going on?

So, medical tests are run. No answers from various doctors. Did I have allergies? Never before like this! What was going on? Finally, last week it dawned on me—what even prompted me to think of it? Oh! I have not been following the recommended protocol to clean my CPAP machine. (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. Google it, if you don’t use one.) Yes, I regularly clean the mask. But the tube and tank and such? Well—once in a while.

I mentioned this realization to my 12-step sponsor, who also uses such a breathing device when sleeping. She said, “Do you change the filter?”

Uh oh—I had forgotten there even was a filter! Had I ever changed it? Where was it? Hidden behind a tiny trap door. So that afternoon, I thoroughly cleaned the device. Opening and removing the filter was a scary experience, like your neglected dryer lint trap in miniature. OMG. How did I not have pneumonia? I’ve inhaled that concentrated dust and microbial gunk every single breath while I’ve slept.

Suddenly I saw this laryngitis as a consequence of my willful refusal to follow the instructions clearly expressed by the doctors who developed CPAP technology for the benefit of patients who stop breathing during sleep. Because stopping breathing can kill you—even intermittently, it can kill a whole lot of brain cells. Alzheimer’s runs in my family, and my sister now has a diagnosis of dementia whose progression I observe with great sadness and zero ways to help. I’m acutely conscious of my need to retain the brain cells I’ve got.

It’s in my own best interest to follow the CPAP cleaning routine to the letter.

My sponsor, at my invitation, does a wonderful job of kindly prompting me to notice my selfish tendencies. But it turns out I tend to “forget” her wise suggestions aimed at removing the roots of my addiction. Over time, I’ve begun to see a disturbing pattern—that I tend to do my own thing, even when it’s a bad idea—because my brain already decided it’s a good idea, without examination.

So, she and I talked about the dirty CPAP filter. Because in 12-step recovery we talk a lot about following God’s will, rather than our own will—our own best thinking has gotten us into some bad places. And as we talked, I noticed I felt like crying.

My sponsor gently asked me, “Why do you think it’s so hard to follow directions?”

And I flashed on a feeling, of me, very small inside a dark place: suddenly I’m alone in a deep echo chamber. Impenetrable steel walls rise up into the darkness. I’m abandoned here, unwanted, unimportant to anyone. I feel desperate for someone to see me and acknowledge me.

That is a very old, very scary feeling. I block it before I even let myself notice it. I can numb it by eating. How much of my food addiction comes from this place?

I took a breath, realized tears were spilling down my cheeks, and came back into the conversation. Another deep breath. I described the feeling: “This feels like how it was when I was very little. Nobody came when I cried.” Yeah, that’s still in effect.

My parents were overwhelmed long before I was born. They ‘had to get married’ and quit school when they were both sixteen, despite Mom’s dream of going to college. Mom was seventeen when she had my brother, nineteen at my sister’s birth, and twenty-one when I was born. I’m pretty certain Mom was a trauma survivor from childhood, because of her lifelong patterns of depression, and a long list of symptoms that match trauma survivors. That’s another story, not her fault. Mom and my father divorced when I was two, but before that, I know he had an affair that had broken them up after my sister was born. Mom told me that in the twenty-three months after her birth, they got back together and immediately made another baby (me), on purpose. When she said that I thought, “that was stupid”, because I know babies can’t fix broken marriages. But I didn’t say it out loud. It must have made sense to them at the time.

The people that I needed to welcome the little me, to nurture and teach me how to manage feelings, were just scared kids doing one of the hardest things anybody ever does—make a family. They never meant to hurt anybody. They were so focused on the chaotic drama of their painful marriage, what energy did they have for yet another new bundle of squalling needs? All my life I thought of my sister, only two years older than me, as the “true” mother in our family. Because Mom was tapped out from the beginning. Mom was a good person, with good intentions, kind and generous to her friends. But within the family—she was just stuck in hopelessness. The life she had wanted was derailed years before.

I said to my sponsor, “I forgave my parents a long time ago. They did the best they could. But I think I decided, when I was very little, that nobody was ever coming to help, and if somebody offered help, it wasn’t real—I couldn’t trust it. I had to take care of myself. I think I vowed to always be in control of myself.”

That’s way too big a job for a little kid. And it’s still too big a job for me as an adult.

So ever since that vow I made, my unconscious “default setting” was to figure things out for myself. I went by my own ideas to solve problems, and resisted anyone who told me what to do and how to do it. Funny, because I also was such a people-pleaser, still desperately seeking attention and approval, always. Those traits don’t go together. I’ve read that trying to accommodate simultaneous conflicting needs and beliefs is a big part of crazy behavior. That’s asking ourselves to do the impossible, and being upset with ourselves when we can’t. And then trying harder, using the same tools. Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

So, my sponsor heard me admit I was powerless to know all the right answers, and I believed God would help me with that. I surrendered that old vow to God, and I asked God to remove my willfulness. I had been praying for willingness, on repeat, for the last year or two, to follow God’s will. But this old vow was my roadblock. Now I’m surrendering the roadblock.

Willfulness was a coping strategy I invented when I was little and scared, and didn’t know any better. It must have calmed me a little bit to think I could be in control. But these days, to not be teachable, to never surrender to a higher wisdom, is only a character defect that keeps me in a pattern that doesn’t work. I can’t fix myself, but I can trust that God loves me, and I’m safe to let God change me, for the better. God is doing exactly that. And I forgive myself, seventy times seven times for not knowing a better choice to make. And my laryngitis is going away.