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Healthy Recovery IRL — A Case Study in Nurturing, Affirming, and Setting Boundaries
One afternoon at the beach nearby, I happened to sit next to a couple of women who were just bitching up a storm. Before recovery, I would have stayed there and been pissed off that these assholes were sitting next to me. It would never have occurred to me to get up and leave.
BTW, that’s called victim mentality — when we feel like we have no choice other than to put up with stuff.
Instead of listening to those women bitch and complain, I moved. Here’s where my Higher Power rewarded me for having the “courage to change the things I can,” as the serenity prayer says: I sat near a young mom with her two little kids and a friend. I witnessed some of the most incredible parenting I had ever seen in my life.
Through my recovery journey, especially the reparenting aspect of it, I learned that healthy parents nurture, affirm, and set boundaries with their children. That was precisely what this young mom was doing!
She was nurturing her two and four-year-old by speaking very lovingly to them and continually referring to them with loving names like sweetie, honey, baby, and darling.
She set boundaries by saying to her four-year-old, who was playing by the water, “In about 15 minutes, we’re going to go home and…
