Not only do you have to begin this healing while you’re here, but you now have to accomplish it without the old crutch of the alcohol. “It’s the other parts,” I continued, “the mental, emotional, and spiritual parts, that are harder because these are the parts that you have to do. The next phase will be bitter and prolonged even unpalatable to the point of insufferable when you’re back at home. Compared to what invariably follows, this will be the sweet phase of the process. In that way, he was an angel of the shift.” He was kind enough to prompt me to review that section again, to edit out that portion for good. Spanos of the world in order to feel OK about myself. A clause that I overlooked, that stipulates my need to be validated by the Mr. Unless I uncover a clause, in minuscule print on page five. His contract has nothing to do with mine, unless I allow it to. So, if he says things that are disrespectful, this is his contract. A human being can never treat another person better than he treats himself. Spano’s contract demanded that he act in ways that were dismissive of my attempts to help him. Spano, my ex-husband, my father, my mother, Collin, the hospital administrators, or anyone else. I thought about how I needed to love myself enough to allow others to fulfill their contract with themselves. I wondered why the behavior of this self-hating man would rock me for even a second. I wondered too about my contract with myself.

It is all part of that contract, that even if we didn’t write it for ourselves, we certainly cosigned. When we pick the job that pays us less than we deserve.

We do this when we select a partner who confirms our feelings of unworthiness. Like everyone, he had this right of self determination. Spano had honored every word of his inner contract. I do not deserve wellness, so I return to what I deserve.” I do not love myself enough to allow you to take care of me. I do not love myself enough to take care of myself. Because I am afraid, I cannot be here, sober. I cannot endure the pain of facing my life. I am not healthy and cannot commit to healing. What was so terrible to face that death would be preferable? How might his inner contract read that he would be consumed with such a compulsion? I wondered what it must have felt like for him, without the haze of intoxication to blur the relationship between himself and the truth. Spano who, once he’d learned that he wasn’t going to die that afternoon, found the prospect of remaining in the hospital so unsettling that he preferred to hobble out on a bloated, red leg and risk dying a few days later, although he wasn’t yet 30.

The beauty in breaking michelle harper