Sometimes too much is too much. As you practice using your new awareness, coping, and tolerating skills and take better care of yourself, in combination with a more optimistic understanding of how people change, you may be surprised at the extent of your resilience. You’re not expected to skip around the room singing “Que Sera, Sera,” but hopefully, your feelings seem more manageable, a sense of calm more accessible, and your life more in your control. You can begin to have more moments when at least some of the facts of the matter don’t bother you as much as they did before, and the limits of what you can stand turn out to be more flexible than you had thought.
In theory, you can handle anything. In the real world, everyone has limits—to what they can tolerate and what they can do. Coping does not mean lying to yourself or anyone else about what’s okay and how much you can take. Sometimes you can’t and shouldn’t put up with one more disappointment. Sometimes you need to take time out and collect yourself, for your own sake and no one else’s. This chapter is about knowing what your limits are and what you can do about them, independent of your loved one’s behavior—how you react to the stressors in your life, when you’re pushed too far, and how to avoid going over the edge.
You can think of your limits as boundaries, personal thresholds, life rules, or expectations (whichever rings true for you) that demarcate your physical and emotional well-being in your interactions with other people. They are the lines between what is acceptable and unacceptable, between what you can and cannot handle. How do you know what you can handle? Limits can be shifty. You might surprise yourself by rising to an occasion you thought would be too much. On the other hand, sometimes your limits will turn out to be closer than they appeared. What you can handle without losing your temper, dissolving into tears, or panicking may fluctuate from day to day. Nonetheless, with awareness, careful self-assessment, and practice, you can learn to see your limits from a safe distance and even use them as guides. Consider the following questions:
• Do you find yourself doing or saying things in the moment that you later regret?
• Are you acting in ways that do not match your internal image of yourself and the person you would like to be?
• Do you notice tension, resentment, or frustration building up within when dealing with your loved one?
• Do you feel mentally and/or physically not okay?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be living beyond your limits, telling yourself you can handle more than you reasonably can. Dealing with another person’s substance problems can stretch you until you’ve completely lost sight of what a reasonable limit really is. Not only is this a desperate, miserable place to be, it is not solid ground for the helping work ahead. Taking a step back and looking at things with your newfound perspective, equanimity, and resilience will let you examine your boundaries from a safe distance.
Knowing your limits is part of being aware and having reasonable expectations; you can work with them instead of being surprised and shattered by them. If you expect to have limitless patience for your loved one, you’ll be more vulnerable to becoming overwhelmed when you run out of it. You may wish you had more tolerance, patience, or goodwill, but it also takes strength to recognize when you’ve had enough.
The conscious act of recognizing how much you can stand makes your situation more predictable—no small comfort to people who have been trying to live with chaos. Awareness won’t change your circumstances, but it does allow you to anticipate what’s coming and plan for it as best you can. Foresight gives you time to avoid situations that you know will push you over the edge, where you lose your temper and say things you regret, or cry so much you feel out of control, or otherwise don’t recognize yourself.
Catherine’s husband often drank too much. Before she started with her CMC therapist, she wasn’t sure why her reactions swung so much. Sometimes she raged and argued with him and took it as a sign they should divorce, sometimes she felt they would get through it. As she paid more attention to the limits of her temper and optimism, she discovered two major variables: 1) when she was already more stressed out than usual, typically from a combination of not exercising or sleeping well, and 2) when his drinking (and the related hurtful things he sometimes said to her) happened in front of their friends. Seeing these, she prioritized her efforts to protect herself from avoidable stress by focusing on her self-care. She also minimized her time with him when she anticipated that he would be drinking around their friends, by coming and leaving early from the gathering or planning ahead with one of the friends to spend time together in another part of the house.
We’ve mentioned a variety of factors, including moods and past experiences, that can influence what any one person can handle without harm to his or her well-being. Some of these—moods, for example—fluctuate only partially under our control. Others, like childhood experiences, may have happened quite outside our control. By developing awareness of your own limits, you will begin to see what you can handle in certain situations, with certain people, in a variety of emotional states. Catherine could shrug off her husband’s arrogance more easily when she was alone, but when he was disrespectful around friends, she couldn’t stand to be with him. A mother we worked with found her teenage son’s messy room annoying but tolerable, while his neglected schoolwork typically provoked her to nag him until they ended up in a screaming fight. Another client told us that she obsessed over her partner’s hangovers on weekends because it affected the kids, but she didn’t think much about them on weekdays when he went to work.
Your own experience is the best teacher. Since most people spend the majority of their lives in fairly familiar territory, limits tend to follow certain patterns. If you can pause and examine how you respond to events and interactions with your loved one, you can begin to understand your limits. Ask yourself the questions below to help you recognize the signs:
• Are there types or topics of discussion you’ve had with your loved one that always go badly?
• In what situations have you felt pushed over the edge?
• Has your loved one spoken or acted in ways that you find intolerable?
• Has your loved one gotten into emotional states that you felt you couldn’t handle?
• Do you extend yourself in ways that you later regret, such as lending money, giving time, or doing chores?
• Do you find yourself ruminating or fixating on particular interactions with your loved one?
Such reflections on the past can inform your approach to the future. Generally, you can look to the following four aspects of experience to increase your awareness of your limits: emotions, physical sensations, thoughts, and actions. These four types of signs will help you navigate safely away from emotional flooding and existential cliffs. The territory may change, but you can always read the signs.
Emotions
Most people can identify certain emotional states that contribute to their feeling on or over the edge. Fear, rage, hurt, or despair can lead to larger emotional and physical problems when they are sustained too long. However, with awareness, they can also serve as helpful alerts that you are approaching the edge, if you catch them before they have gone too far. Feelings don’t usually strike like a bolt of lightning; instead, they tend to build gradually and to progress in an arc. Noticing the signs when you start to feel afraid (perhaps you fidget or feel a tightness in your chest) or when you first feel the heat of anger (maybe your neck gets flushed), you can choose a coping strategy and change course before it is too late. If you decide to call a friend before anxiety overwhelms you, you might distract yourself enough to go to sleep that night instead of lying in bed listening to the ticking clock. Most people have a hard time leaving an argument when their temper is fully inflamed. Seeing your anger in an early stage, before the conversation goes too far, you can choose to end the conversation or change the tone before you reach your edge.
Our bodies can reveal our emotions, but most adults are experts at ignoring their bodies. Despite backaches, twitchy eyes, or knots in their stomachs, people tell themselves they are “fine.” When you pay attention, your body’s signals can warn you as you approach a limit. Do you feel a headache coming on when you don’t know where she is? Feel sick to your stomach when he shouts at you? Are you too tired to go to the gym after you have stayed up all night worrying about what she’s doing? A physical symptom that threatens to keep you from your routine—or any physical symptom of distress that you notice when you stop to think about it—might be a sign of an approaching limit. As with emotions, learning to read the signs can save you from repeating the pattern.
Thoughts
The content of your thoughts, when you notice it, can also be a red flag. “He takes me for granted,” “Why does this always happen to me?” “She’ll never change,” “I can’t take this anymore” are just a few examples of the dramatic, exaggerated things people say to themselves before they hit the wall. Psychologists call this “catastrophizing.” In another common way of thinking, people disregard their own limits because their loved one needs them too much. But you need to remind yourself that it is not sustainable to be on call around the clock, 365 days a year.
Actions
You can take your own behavior as a hint. Maybe you know that right before you completely lose control of your anxiety, you tend to make impulsive spending decisions. Perhaps you choose to have a drink too many yourself. Maybe you stop talking and avoid your loved one because you don’t think you can stand how he’ll react. Perhaps you become physically reckless because you think you have nothing to lose.
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Harvey had been trying to manage his wife’s drinking for several years, mainly by coming home early on weeknights to monitor her, as well as to help the kids with their homework. As a result, he felt he was shortchanging his job and vexing his boss, to whom he couldn’t explain such a personal matter. Late afternoons when he arrived home, he was already fuming and resentful, his stomach upset.
Tracing his path to this unhappy place, he noticed that he spent much of his time on the drive home berating his wife in his head for being so insensitive to him and the kids. He saw how he went over in his mind the “evidence” of her selfishness. Recognizing rumination as a sign of an impending limit, he made plans that protected his physical, emotional, and financial well-being. He asked his mother to sit with the kids two nights a week so he could stay at work without worrying about his family. These two nights significantly reduced his stress about work, even if they didn’t match his ideal of how he thought his life was supposed to be. To keep from ruminating all the way home, he had two alternatives ready: he would think about the kids’ school projects or sing along to music whenever he noticed resentful thoughts creeping in.
Harvey did not assent to his wife’s drinking with these changes. He did make his life better for himself and less dependent on her behavior, in turn putting himself in a better position to influence her behavior.
Ignore the signs to your limits and you may be on your way to a breaking point. Hitting that point can set you or your loved one back by adding to hurt feelings, confusion, and a variety of other unhelpful emotional states. In the moment that you break, your reaction feels justified—that’s the nature of being overwhelmed and not thinking straight. If you can see your breaking point a half mile down the road, however, you can slow down, pull over, adjust your expectations, and set a limit. You can tell yourself don’t go there, and find a safer way around. You can brake before you break.
Here are some examples to help you get a feel for the difference between braking and breaking.
Breaking point: This is the third night in a row he’s going to come home late and disappoint the kids, and I’m going to hand him his head!
Braking point: I’ve been stewing all day and I need some time off. I’m going to take the kids to a movie so we can have fun.
Breaking point: I’m tired and cranky, but I can’t stand letting him get away with going to bed early again. I’m going to insist he clean the kitchen even though he has been drinking.
Braking point: I’m so tired and cranky that I am going to order takeout so I don’t have a mess to clean up. I will talk to him about cleaning up tomorrow when he is sober and I am rested.
Breaking point: He spends so much money on cocaine, I can’t stop worrying about our finances, and I have a stomachache all the time.
Braking point: If I got a separate bank account, I could at least protect my income from going toward his habit.
Notice how breaking tends to happen to you, in reaction to something you can’t control. In order to brake, you will need to be at the controls: your hands on the steering wheel, your feet on the pedals. Knowing the difference depends on awareness. To build awareness and acceptance of your limits, you can ask yourself these questions:
What exactly is it that I dread?
How can I prepare myself for the best and worst outcome?
What can I do with this anger (or other emotion) before it gets out of control?
How can I settle my anxiety/other emotions enough to think straight and make good decisions?
What parts of this situation can I control?
Any of the awareness exercises from chapter 4 can help bring the signs of your limits into view. The “Self-Care Checklist” in chapter 5 is meant to encourage you to take care of yourself, but it can also help you respect your limits and breaking points, since they partly depend on tolerance and resilience.
Determining a limit and living with it are not the same thing. You may be hugely relieved by your decision not to pick him up at the train when he has been drinking; he can walk or find a ride home. You may celebrate the prospect of no more good-night phone calls when she’s drunk. But actually following through can bring on a new, challenging mix of anxiety and guilt. Living with the limits you set requires conviction in their validity, plus tolerating your loved one’s reaction when you stand by them.
This chapter introduces limits as guidelines for self-care. In the next part of the book, we’ll present the goal-setting, communication, and reinforcement strategies you can use to solve more complicated problems with limits, when it isn’t as simple as turning on the stereo in your car. This chapter is meant simply to give you permission to have limits, to help you see the value in knowing where they are, and to encourage you to pay attention to the relationship between your limits and how you take care of yourself. If you’re not sure how to talk to your loved one or anyone else affected by your limits, you can keep them to yourself for now.
Be patient while you get the hang of your limits. If you are used to losing your temper when he chooses that glass of wine over you, it might be enough for now to just notice that and take care of yourself. Practice setting and communicating lower-stakes limits in situations that are less charged—ordering in instead of cooking, having your mom babysit so you can stay later at work—where your boundaries will more likely be honored. Start smaller, set out a plan, and practice getting comfortable with your limits. Pick the lower-hanging fruit.
Evie’s husband was trying to stop drinking by checking in with his addiction psychiatrist a couple times a month while he powered through long days at his all-consuming job. Evie took care of their three kids and cooked everything from scratch while she tried to run a small business. When her husband wasn’t relapsing, Evie was pretty happy with the fullness of their life. When he decided to drink for a weekend, she was devastated. She knew her husband and their household were doing better on the whole, but she was always ready to snap, and snap she did when she found out he had been drinking.
As she educated herself on how people make behavioral changes, she came to understand that lapses were a likely part of the process for her husband. So, she decided to focus on minimizing the effects of his lapses on her, so that she wouldn’t break. She served leftovers more often. Her husband helped by getting up with the kids one morning each weekend. She made a point of taking five quiet, uninterrupted minutes each day to just breathe. She trained her nine-year-old daughter to ask her how she was doing as they drove home from school—not that Evie would unload everything on her daughter, but because it helped to remind her to ask the question to herself. Paying more attention to her own limits and reactions, she noticed that not only did she keep her temper in check on more occasions, but when she did lose it, she was able to get her equilibrium back more quickly than she used to.
• • •
Living life always at the edge of your breaking point is like a game of Jenga. The players take turns pulling out blocks one by one from the tower of blocks, hoping at each turn that this will not be the block that makes the whole thing collapse. We try to help families dealing with substance problems stack the blocks of their lives differently, so that a single block does not make the difference between a standing tower and a pile of rubble. The elements of self-care in this part—awareness, acceptance, distress tolerance, rest, nourishment, exercise, getting help when you are physically or psychologically ill, and setting limits—are the materials for a stable foundation and earthquake-proof building. Stability doesn’t depend on nothing going wrong. Rather, it depends on your ability to weather problems and mistakes, making sure the regular demands of life do not wear on the whole system too much, and repairing damages when they occur.
Take our suggestions with your own limits in mind. The research is clear about the power of family involvement, but there is no master checklist of things every family should do. The quality of your involvement matters, as you will see, and a big factor in quality is whether you are involved in ways that make sense to you. Let your limits guide you in deciding what you will do and when you will do it.
Use the questions below to reflect on your limits. Remember, they may be different from day to day depending on your internal and external resources. Consider interactions with your loved one that leave you feeling you’ve “lost it,” when your emotions have spiraled into states of abnormal distress, you have said or done things you regret, or a conversation stayed in your head and left you ruminating over every word. These are clues you are “over the limit.”
1. Investigate how you feel before, during, and after these interactions: hurt, disappointed, exhausted, scared, hopeless, betrayed, angry, terrified . . . ? It might be painful to clarify your feelings if you have become accustomed to ignoring or actively suppressing those feelings. In fact, it would be understandable if you disengaged from your feelings when you felt there was nothing you could do to change your situation. But this book is about what you can change! Clarifying the degree and type of your feelings can give you important information to decide where and when your limits are being broken and the action you may want to take to reset them.
2. Assess whether you need some distance from the problem. When you think about getting some distance, do you think I’d just prefer to get away, I’d really like to, I think I should, I think I need to, it feels imperative, it’s the only option . . . ? These are different spots on a continuum of emotional experience. Consider, in a calm moment, what action seems to fit best: I need to talk to a friend and get a different perspective, I need to do something to get my mind off all this, I should take a long shower to feel better, I need to spend the night elsewhere, I have to get away for the weekend, I should speak with a lawyer to see what my separation/divorce options are, I’m moving out for a week/month, I’m taking all my stuff and leaving now. Looking at that continuum of actions can help clarify what you actually want to do, given all the important variables of your individual situation.
3. If you’ve read all this and are thinking, This whole situation is beyond my limits!, we understand. Exploring your feelings, noting when things feel out of control or beyond what you can handle—all of it is designed to establish how and when you should be intervening to protect yourself more and in what way. Start with something small, something you can change, a positive impact that you will feel. And keep reading.