Frustration Multiplies

“I understand your frustration.”

I heard this phrase quite a bit in my twenties and thirties. Also during my forties, fifties and into my sixties. People said they understood my frustration but I don’t think they ever really did. I think they could tell that I was frustrated. That was the easy part because I was frustrated almost all the time.

I was frustrated at work. I was frustrated at home. I was frustrated by the music business, the government, the rich, the poor, television networks and helicopter parents. The world was run by idiots and those idiots were making morons out of everyone else. I was alone in a sea of dissatisfaction and powerlessness, raging against a mega-machine of narrow-mindedness and blind obeisance.

When I met people who weren’t bothered by the wrongness that surrounded us, I was shocked. Incredulous, even. “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention” was the catchphrase of my people. Gradually, I met more and more people who were letting things “roll off their backs” and I was… frustrated by that. How can they not let it bother them? This was long before I ever found Al-Anon.

Once I found Al-Anon and realized that I had an addiction to frustration, I was finally able to do something about it. I listened as one after another, members would share stories from their daily lives that included car wrecks, foreclosures, bankruptcies, affairs, violence, broken bones, floods, lawsuits, lost children, lost dogs and sunken trucks. I heard laughter as they talked about acceptance, detachment, boundaries and living in the moment. These people had deliberately chosen not to get ensnared in these events. Each one, in their own way, seemed to arrive at the conclusion that there was life before and there would be life after.

As crazy as they seemed, I wanted what they had.

 I wanted to find calm in the middle of the storm. Some of these people were living with loved ones in active addiction. Some were living with newly sober alcoholics. Several had lost family members to overdose or suicide. Yet, each one had found serenity by trusting a Higher Power and not becoming attached to the insanity. The message was clear. The answer was in the steps, and it took a great deal of effort to choose to work the program instead of signing up to fight all the injustice and idiocy in the world.

The first step allows me to admit my powerlessness. I have no real power over other people’s choices or actions, whether they are drinking or not. The second step clears away the need to fix by reminding me that all my insanity never changed anything but me; for the worse. The third step gives me an opportunity to allow a Higher Power to lead me out of the fog to a place where I can be a spectator instead of a gladiator. Steps four through twelve teach me to recognize and surrender my illusion of responsibility and control over everyone and everything but myself.

I have a sponsor and I have a support group. I can share my frustration and vent if I like. They smile and remind me that responsibility and authority should travel together. If I don’t have authority over a person or their thoughts, feelings and actions, then I have no responsibility and no business scoping or judging them. If someone I care for is “not okay” I would do well to check and make sure I’m okay, and if I’m not, put the focus where it truly belongs.

Frustration is a virus of dissatisfaction and dis-ease. It multiplies given the right conditions, and for me, it is focusing outside myself. Today I have a different attitude. If I’m not outraged, I AM paying attention, to my Higher Power and my own serenity.