Daisy, my Border Collie and heroine of My Life as a Border Collie: Freedom from Codependency, turned 17 years-old this past April 15th. We don’t really know her birth date as she was a stray dog, but working with the best estimates of her age when we found her, she is at least 17 years old now. All of our dogs have been strays, so for years we have made April 15th the dogs’ birth day.

Being 17 years in human years, Daisy is anywhere from 84 to 90 years old in dog years. Her veterinarian describes her as a “ninety year-old dog.” Daisy continues to do well for her ninety years. 

I have wondered what I wanted to say to you about her birthday in addition to announcing this wonderful achievement of age to those of you have been readers of My Life as a Border Collie.And it has come to me to say that she and I both have reached this landmark by living one day at a time.

Over this past year as I finished writing My Life as a Border Collie and as we released the book and went on tour with it, I constantly found my self worrying about whether Daisy would live long enough for me to accomplish each of these goals: “Will Daisy die before I finish this book?” “Will Daisy die before I get back from the book tour?”  And then as I returned home, “Will Daisy die before Christmas?” “Will Daisy die before she turns 17?”

This is not a healthy way for me to think or to live, and I know it. To be preoccupied with things so out of my control is a waste and a bother. It is unnecessary worry. It is not living in the present. I do my part to keep Daisy alive and then I have to let go to the natural flow of life.

So each time that worry about Daisy making it to the next milestone came up for me, I did my best to quiet my thoughts, let go of what I could not control, and as Daisy’s veterinarian has said to me a number of times recently, “Enjoy her, Nancy.”

Yes, I am enjoying Daisy one day at a time when I am living in my recovery.

There I was, lying on the floor of the veterinarian’s treatment room. Not Daisy. She was doing quite well with the procedure Dr. Keating was performing on her. Iwas the one overcome by it all and dysfunctional at that moment: a codependent in relapse.

As you know from reading My Life as a Border Collie: Freedom from Codependency, Daisy is a very important creature in my life, a long-time, loyal companion and a teacher of mine. She will be seventeen years-old on April 15th and she is doing well for her age.

Sometimes I am doing well for my age in recovery and sometimes I am doing not as well.

Daisy has warts of some sort which grow in various places on her body. The procedure Dr. Keating was performing was shaving some of Daisy’s fur from around one of these growths on the side of her face close to her ear. There was no emergency about any of this, and both Dr. Keating and Daisy were doing well with this slow, tedious process.

It was I who slowly and surely became overwhelmed by it.

One could say that of course a novice to medical procedures involving blood and bad smells and possible pain might be overcome by such close involvement as I had there. Dr. Keating had asked me to be the one to hold Daisy on the examining table, and I did have my face and eyes right on what she was doing.

But I also had my heart and soul right on what she was doing as well. I don’t like to take Daisy to the veterinarian in the first place, not because of the care she receives – which is excellent – but because I am so afraid that something is going to be wrong with her that I didn’t know about or because I don’t want to stress her.

I said to my husband about it all, I just didn’t know if Daisy, at her old age, could handle a procedure that would contain her in ways she doesn’t like to be contained and that might frighten her. Monty and I laughed as he said back to me, “And you were the one who couldn’t handle it.”

Yes, that is correct. Halfway through the procedure I was overcome by heat and felt like I was going to faint. Dr. Keating called in her assistant immediately to take over my job and had me sit in the chair. I held my head down low. She wondered if I was having a heart attack, and I reassured her I was not. She wondered if I should get down on the floor to be completely safe, and I did as the floor had much appeal at that time.

And so there I was lying on the floor of the treatment room looking back up at Daisy on the examining table doing well as Dr. Keating and Trisha completed their work.

My level of over-concern for Daisy had taken me over. I had moved from being helpful to being a distraction and a problem in this process. As I had allowed my heart and soul to worry about how Daisy was going to do with all of this, I failed to simultaneously pay attention to my self. I had not taken off my coat as we started, adding to my getting hot. I watched what Dr. Keating was doing way more than I know is good for me to do. I kept feeling impatient and restless for Daisy who I imagined felt that way but did not show it. I wanted this to be over with – I thought for Daisy’s sake but really for mine.

At the end of My Life as a Border Collie I tell a final tale about Daisy and I that highlights there being a fine and important line between us, that fine line that us codependents can be challenged by in our relationships: the line between where I end and you begin; the line between where you end and I begin.

There in the veterinarian’s treatment room I blurred that line so thoroughly that my body acted out my enmeshment and took me to the floor.

A lot of help I was!

Yesterday I was at the Carolinas Conference on Addiction & Recovery here in Morganton, NC. A town located at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, the setting is as inspiring as the collection of presenters and professionals drawn together by the dedicated organizer of this event, Jim Van Hecke.

Our lunch keynote speaker was William Cope Moyers whose position at Hazelden has him working in public policy on addictions. He also has a recently released book, Now What: An Insider’s Guide to Addiction and Recovery.  Throughout his message, Moyers told us of the importance of being proactive in our recovery work and taking it out to people who don’t even yet know they need it. Moyers reports that once he reached that place of needing to stop using, he was only able to ask himself “Now what?” At that crucial time, he did not know what to do.

Addiction lives in isolation, he reminded us, and is cloaked in shame and fear. He invited us to be accessible and easy to reach, to find ways to take our stories out to others and to place our experience, strength, and hope on their hearts.

As I listened to him, I found myself grateful yet again for all of the opportunities Central Recovery Press has given me to stand up and speak out. This fall book tour has had me at tables at the front doors of Barnes & Nobles and independent bookstores talking with strangers about codependency. Some have known what I was talking about and for others this was brand new information. I know I am planting seeds, and I know I will not likely know what those seeds produce. Working in the counseling field for 36 years, I have often thought about my work in this way.

But today, hearing Moyer’s message about getting out the word in the company of hundreds of my colleagues in work and recovery was extra encouraging, and I felt glad for all I am offering and for all that Central Recovery Press is doing to help us Stand Up and Speak Out.

Touring around with My Life as a Border Collie: Freedom from Codependency certainly provides me with many opportunities to talk with others about the book and to imagine various ways the book could be used: individually, in book clubs, for group study, for radio interviews, for conference keynote speaking – are some of the ideas that have been generated through conversations. Just the other night at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, VA this type of inspiring conversation happened for me as I spoke with Kelly Justice, the owner.

I am grateful for all of these ideas and the interest and encouragement which is being expressed to me through them. I enjoy a good conversation, and I can easily both see and get excited about possibilities. In My Life as a Border Collie I write about this type of excitement and energy I am blessed with in chapters on Tenacious and Delighted. And in those same chapters which honor these qualities of excitement and energy, I also write about not letting those features go too far so that they don’t cause me problems in my relationships with others or with my self.

Being disappointed could be one of those hurtful consequences if I don’t pay attention to my excitement and not let it run away with me. In fact what I also want to be able to do as I experience the possibility of things is to let them go.

I continue to deepen my work in this area and am using Let Go by Fenelon as a daily meditation book. Someone gave me this book many years ago, and I recently uncovered it as I was cleaning out a stack of stuff at home. I knew as it came into my hands that this is a great time for me to read and be with this material.

Here is a reading from just the other day that I find very useful in my letting-go practice:

“Learn to cultivate peace. And you can do this by learning to turn a deaf ear to your own ambitious thoughts. Or haven’t you yet learned that the strivings of the human mind not only impair the health of your body, but also bring dryness to the soul. You can actually consume yourself by too much inner striving. And to no purpose at all! Your peace and inner sweetness can be destroyed by a restless mind. Do you think that God can speak in those soft tender accents that melt the soul, in the midst of such inner confusion as you permit by that endless, hurrying parade of thoughts going through your mind? Be quiet, and He will soon be heard . . . ” (p. 9).

Be Quiet and Let Go.

In November, I presented a session at the Carolinas Conference on Addiction and Recovery in Morganton, NC. My session was entitled “Working with Codependent Behaviors: Guiding Lights to Recovery.”

I had excellent participants in my session, most were professionals in the field of addiction, many likely in recovery. As we began, I asked why they selected this session on codependency and what they hoped to get out of it. Most responses were client related with desires to learn how to help family members resistant to changing their ways of enabling.

As our session progressed, however, our focus expanded from how to help our clients to how to help our self as we try to help them. I did not ask for anyone in the room to self-identify as codependent, but when you are with a group of professional caretakers there is likely to be a good number of people whose behaviors can be codependent.

And this became clearer as we talked further about our own efforts to fix and change our clients: stories of getting frustrated, of getting upset, of doing things to persuade and convince them to do what we think they should do.

We smiled and laughed at ourselves as we saw how our own codependence wants to fix someone else’s codependence without our even noticing and working on our own codependent behaviors. Such an unproductive and perhaps destructive tangle.

And such an opportunity for growth, at least then in that room, as we saw even more clearly the need to study these guiding lights to codependency recovery first for our Self.

Yes, for the most part, it is easier to talk about dogs than codependency. But I created this challenge when I decided to put these two topics together in My Life as a Border Collie.

Last night was more a night for talking about the dogs than for talking about codependency, though frankly I never really know what comes from the many conversations I have been blessed to have with people who stop at my book table and talk – often personally.

With my book table set up right inside the entrance of theBarnes & Noble at Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia, I was given an excellent place to greet the general public with my big Border Collie book cover poster and copies of the book available for sale. Many people stopped by to talk, drawn in by the book cover poster and by their curiosity about what the book is about.

In such book event situations, people immediately start talking with me about their dogs – stories both happy and sad; stories of love and loss. Some people don’t even want to go further than talking about their dogs. Others do ask about what codependency is and how have I put this all together.

As I explain about codependency and how I have found it similar to the border collie traits, the responses from the general public can range from no response to the topic of codependency to not understanding the concept to interest in this new topic to deep familiarity with it.

It is easy and exciting to talk with the people who are curious and/or familiar with codependency and who readily then tell me their personal stories and often buy the book.

For those who do not join me in the discussion about how this book pours into human lessons not dog lessons, I feel considerably more challenged. For the most part, I simply continue to join them in the dog stories and let go of any efforts to teach what I want them to know. As I said above, I really am not the one who knows what may actually come from our conversations and their opportunities to talk about their pets who they love dearly, as I love Daisy.

But it is also a reminder to me of how hard all of this self-awareness and self-growth can be. If I was just out for an evening to the bookstore for an easy time and the person at the front door was inviting me to learn more about my self, I, too, might just rather talk about dogs.

Though maybe later, in my own private moments, the words spoken at the book table about not letting my strengths become my weaknesses and about creating balance in my care of self and others may come to mind and heart.

There is little doubt about it: people do not like the word “codependence.” It did not take the book tour for me to know this. Our fields of mental health and addictions don’t even know what to do with the term or, more importantly, with the constellations of behaviors that are involved in codependency. It is not unusual for people to associate it with blame, shame, and illness. I am so sorry for these meanings and am offering what I can to help people move past the word and look at themselves and their behaviors.

These concerns were highlighted for me in a most engaging conversation I had with a woman at a book event Wednesday night at Chester County Book & Music Company in West Chester, PA. In this amazing store which is one of the largest independently owned bookstores in the United States, I had the honor of having a couple of very meaningful connections with individuals who are interested in this topic and want to help to get out the word about My Life as a Border Collie.

Bill Mason of WCHT in Westchester, PA  saw the poster about this book event and had me on his show on Wednesday morning. Clearly understanding codependency, he asked questions about first steps people can take if they believe they may be codependent: I told him willingness and education from knowing sources. Later in the day he came to the book signing to get to know me and this topic better and stated he plans to suggest that I be invited to an hour-long radio show through their station for deeper discussion of “this important topic.”

And then there was this woman and our engaging conversation. Clearly she, too, was interested in this topic of codependence and wanted to know about its relationship to addictions and if it is an addiction itself. She understood the importance of self and balance in care of self and others and yet was concerned about the word “codependence.” She laughingly suggested a title: Codependence is not a Four Letter Word.

After a rich and long conversation, she told me that she is interested in my book for her club. I was happy to hear this. Recently I thought about how well the book might work in a book club setting. It certainly is written in a way so as to promote discussion.

I was also happy to hear that she is going to use it for her book club, because that’s a way we can continue all of these great conversations. That’s a way to help us all move away from this word “codependence” and our negative reactions to it and move toward an honest look at our own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and the choices available to us to make our life better.