Like many things in recovery and life, frustrations can lead to growth and better relationships. That is what came out of the prison experience of having a 15 minute limit on phone calls, especially the ones with Grace.
Let me first say what a privilege it was to be able to afford to pay the 21 cents a minute for
making phone calls. Many of my fellow inmates could not do so; at least they were not able to take advantage of the full minutes allowed for each month. By being able to talk daily (except when loss of privileges had been invoked for all or the system was down or the lines were too long to the phones) even for just 15 minutes, and especially in the year before I was able to also use email, we were able to keep on struggling to maintain a relationship.
The lessons learned from the process of those calls:
1. A Daily Reminder We Live Finite Lives. Particularly addicts, again like stereotypical
adolescents, believe we can do and have it all. A part of us tells ourselves we won’t, can’t
die. We cram too much into a day. We see sleep as a form of death to avoid. We pay no
attention to time deadlines. Show up late. Inside the bubble, time does not exist. No one
will hang up on us, leave us. There is a way around everything, to manage everything.
Then an automated phone system hangs up right on the 15-minute mark, with a beep a
few seconds ahead of time as a warning. We have no control over the phone system. This
in itself was a recovery tool. Boundaries did exist and were enforced. And yet for a
long while early on I kept going, talking, and got cut off mid-sentence. A daily reminder
of how I wasn’t being a true partner. Over time as I got better, and when I talked with
someone with even worse obsessive-compulsive disorder than I had, I could see my old
self in their mirror, as I listened as they were cut off in mid-sentence. Learning time
management is key in recovery. Respecting boundaries on oneself.
2. I Am Not The Only One With Problems To Share. It was easy for me and my
problems in prison to become the default problems. I knew Grace wanted to hear, to help
by listening if that is all she could do or to help where she could from the outside. For
someone who centered themselves as part of their root problems, being incarcerated just
exacerbated that tendency, one I saw reflected in those inside around me. It is a reason to
create different systems where basic safety is not an issue and where we are immersed in
the wake of problems and feelings we have caused in others, and not where we continue
to be at the front of our own concern. But true restorative community justice was not the
reality and through the phone calls I was able to work on this therapeutic area that
otherwise would have been addressed more directly and continually.
Thanks to my budding recovery at the time, and Grace’s mirror she had the patience and skill to hold up to me, I saw how the phone calls were a symptom of my mind and learned behavior. Since these few minutes were all of the relationship connection we had, we figured out that we needed to use that time not only to pass information and feelings back and forth and work to solve tasks and problems where possible, but to work on our core relationship as well. Anything Can Become a Tool For Growth. I knew I had a tendency from my personality style and family environment growing up, to overdo “small talk” as a way to avoid conflict by not creating the perfect container in which to have any conflict. Grace’s way is the opposite. I was using that to eat up precious moments on calls. Or I would begin with my own “emotional dumping” without first finding out if she was ready for it, or had an even more important sharing to make. That leads into the next lesson.
3. The Care-In, Concern-Out System. I had learned this over the years from Grace who
had learned it in her role as a health care provider. It helps to create balance in relationships while focusing on the person with the most acute needs in the moment. The question is “who needs to receive the most care and attention?” at this particular time.
An example from a hospital room: there is a patient in a coma, a spouse by the bedside, and an extended family member and their friend arrive. The extended family member begins to immediately ask questions of the spouse for updates, centering their own needs and emotional uncertainty, and raises questions about the care given and offering possible
alternate treatments, all before acknowledging the patient or inquiring how the spouse is
doing. In doing so, they are seeking care for themselves, managing their own need to feel
helpful and in control of uncertain events, in the guise of being caring for others. Their
caring action in the moment is not going in to the one closest to the greatest pain. They
are instead projecting their own concerns in upon the one who needs to receive care, not
give it out to them.
A better care-in, concern-out way would be for the extended family member to come in with their friend, acknowledge with a look or touch the patient who is unable to respond, and then focus on the spouse by asking how they are doing (in an open-ended way, not asking if they are okay which is too easy a prompt for someone to just answer yes because they do not want to be a bother or feel guilty for their own needs), listen, ask what they need. Open space for them at their own comfort pace to share info or their own desires for more info, their own confusions and feelings. Then, later with the friend or someone else, it is their turn to express their own concerns and emotions outward to the one further removed from the core suffering so that they in turn can receive care in from the other. This is the multiplying care model used in trauma settings. First responders give care in and then turn outwards to a counselor for care, who in turn turns to their own counselor for comfort who may then turn also to their own counselor. The deeper and widespread the trauma, the more levels of care-in, concern-out will be needed.
This is true daily in a relationship. It is intensified when that relationship care-in,
concern-out has a 15-minute time limit. It is frustrating and a hard environment to learn
the lessons, but it is great practice. It paid off well. As the quality and depth of the phone
call sharing improved, it was a sign of how well my mind was healing through recovery.
A main tool we used to carry out this model of communication was the stoplight method
we had learned from family therapy a few years before (therapy, again, that I undercut by not being rigorously honest.)
4. The Red-Light, Yellow-Light, Green-Light Check-In System. Green light is code that
I have had an uneventful, fairly good day. Life is progressing. Nothing today has derailed
me. Only, or mostly, good news to share. Good news is good to share especially during
such times of struggle in a relationship when bad surprises have become the norm. But if
someone else is not having a green light day, they won’t be able to receive fully the good
news you want to share; so, you first need to find out what kind of day they have had.
Yellow light means they have been slowed by feelings or events that marred their day
and occupy their mind. Red light then means they have had or are in the midst of a crisis
that if left unaddressed will keep them from being present in the moment; it might be a
short-term interruption they have to attend to right then, one that is uncertain how bad it
might be, or it might be a death in the family (like my own father’s) or from any of the
myriad of problems that beset us, but land especially hard on family members of
someone incarcerated (the victims of even so-called victimless crimes) who is left to
handle alone mounting problems, many caused by the incarceration and subsequent
financial and emotional support losses.
It makes a big difference to take time at the beginning of a phone call lasting only 15
minutes, or when communicating during the day or when returning home from work, to
give each other a moment to share what stoplight color their day has been. Then you
know who gets the care-in first. It also demonstrates the strong necessity for having one
or more persons beyond your partner who can receive your concern expressed outward
after you have been the one caring. In 12 step it is why we have sponsors but also
recovery “buddies” or “friends” we talk or text or meet with in addition to sponsor and/or
therapist. Here too we will share care-in, concern-out. The more such relationships we
grow, the less strain there will be on the more intimate partner relationship or any one
single relationship we might have.
Finally, undergirding these lessons learned, there was the dynamic to deal with of the
one-way communication: the jailed or imprisoned must be the one making the call, or
calls, during the day. I could have an immediate problem and as soon as I could get to a
phone I could make a call to Grace or someone who could get the news to her. She had
no such ability to reach me. She would have to hold her cares, at least to share with me,
until I called. It was good to come to understand how this was a kind of power imbalance.
It was more incentive for me to learn to wait, to ask, to get outside of my own head and
issues as much as possible.
This is probably not the same for couples on the outside, of course, but it is something to
be alert to if it comes in some form, perhaps in different kinds of work done where one is
more accessible than the other. What causes problems can lead to better lives. (And it
does lead me to wonder about the future of relationship problems between couples where
one is incarcerated in a culture where voice phone calls are being replaced by text
message communication, since text messages are not allowed while incarcerated and
when done with contraband, as happens, it leads to more trouble. More incentive to be
face-to-face now whenever possible.)
All this came from the frustrations of time-limited phone calls. You probably have your
own version of this, your own frustration context that can be used to grow your recovery
and/or relationship. Please share.
Grace- You might know by now I am an introvert. Small talk is not fun for me even if we have nothing else to talk about! But in a 15 minute phone call, from someone I can't contact whenever I want? With the kind of chaos an incarceration brings? Yes, some days were so stressful for him that nothing I needed to say couldn't wait. How much could he help me anyway? But the pattern that existed before his arrest of him starting a monologue that I tried to turn into a conversation, then gave up, then zoned out, was not a sustainable way to communicate. I needed to be seen, I needed to be heard, and I needed to insist on better communication despite his ADD and OCD. He needed to be sober for that to happen.
It is still difficult at times but I have learned to pause to see if he is tuned in or if he is hyper-focused elsewhere and needs to register that I am telling him something. He has learned to pay attention to my response which may be "I need to think about it". In the past he would take anything other than a very loud no as a yes! Communication is important and it is difficult and it will never be perfect, but when you say "I hate it when the phone call stops without us saying goodbye" that needs to be heard and respected and behavior needs to change. Communication with your partner should feel like growth. Good luck!