Helping Is the Sunny Side of Control

There's a particular kind of laughter you only hear in meetings, the laughter of identification, where a room full of strangers recognizes itself in one sentence. One of my most honest belly laughs came during a share where a woman said her sponsor told her "helping is the sunny side of control." I remember thinking it was a little ridiculous. I also remember not being able to stop thinking about it for a week.

I'll finish someone's sentence for them and call it helping. I'll remind them, again, to call their sponsor, and call that helping too. I'll tell people in the grocery store which product to buy. None of it feels like control from the inside. It feels like being useful. That's the costume it wears.

I've made a private list, over the years, of the things I do that I've learned to call by their real name. Explain, and I'm controlling how they understand something. Make a point, and I'm controlling what stands out to them. None of these started as character defects. They started as care. I turned them into something else by wearing them as a mask, and by not being entirely honest with myself about why I was doing it.

I still catch myself wanting people to appreciate my help. 

That's the whole engine underneath it, most days. Which means I'm operating on an assumption nobody actually confirmed: that they need what I'm offering, want it, or would even accept it in the form I'm handing them. It's all happening in my head. I'm doing it so I'll feel better, not because anyone asked.

You need your own meetings. They need theirs. Don't go to their program to learn how to work their steps for them. I had to be told this more than once before it landed. It's one thing to know powerlessness applies to the drinking or the using. It's a harder thing to know it applies to all of it, every twisted, well-meaning effort to manage someone else's recovery from the passenger seat.

If you're not sure whether something is help or a costume of control, there's a rough test I've come back to more than once: what am I actually trying to accomplish right now. If the honest answer is connection, a call is just a call. If the honest answer is that I need to check, confirm, calm my own fear, that's the sunny side of control again, dressed for the weather.

Short of an actual emergency, where the only sane move is to act and think about the rest later, the practice here is smaller than it sounds and harder than it looks. Notice the next time you reach for explaining, or reminding, or getting the last word. Ask honestly whose comfort you're actually managing. I still get this wrong more weeks than I get it right. I'm working on it, imperfectly, same as everyone else in the room.