'Al-Anon does not promise to save marriages, but it does offer sanity. If you do want the marriage, they told me, then accept the fact that you will not get healthy behaviour from a sick person or logical statements from an illogical person. This includes me too.'
'I was also reminded that we do not accept the unacceptable, and what is unacceptable varies from person to person. What I could not live with for five minutes, others could perhaps tolerate with good grace and vice versa.'
'They said to look at the possibility that I might be accepting sick behaviour. Do I seek out suffering and abuse?'
'Build an invisible shield between you and him, a shield of love. Use it when the abuse begins, and the words will hit it and roll off without touching you. Visualise it keenly; make it vividly real in your mind.'
'Remember that he is only one or two years old in AA, that he is much like a real baby of that age who slaps out at people who are holding him. We don't slap back. We just hold the baby off far enough that he can't hit us.'
'When he is holding forth with these torrents of vicious words, they told me picture him saying these things out the window of a mental hospital. Would they hurt then? No, I thought, because I would know he was sick and that they weren't aimed at me personally. Members suggested that I mentally draw a window around him whenever this started and detach myself as if he were really hospitalised. It worked amazingly!'
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