ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 144: Co-dependents Anonymous

I attend my first Co-dependents Anonymous (CoDA) meeting. It’s a speaker meeting, and tonight’s speaker chooses to talk of his hurt inner child.

“Actually, I have four hurt inner children,” he says. “The first one is two years old, and he feels unloved, deprived of his mother’s love because she’s just had another baby. The second one is four years old, and he’s angry at the loss of his mother’s love and attention. My six-year-old child, who’s physically and sexually abused, isolates himself. My ten-year-old “adult” child tries to fix everyone and everything because his alcoholic father and depressed mother are helpless.”

It’s easy to picture the speaker — brown-eyed, curly-haired, round-bodied — as a little boy. For the past twenty-three years he’s been in Recovery from alcohol addiction and co-dependency. “I’ll always be an alcoholic,” he says. “I’ll always be a co-dependent. I meditate every morning. I journal every morning. I breathe in the good stuff, breathe out the toxins. I practice so I don’t slip into my default mode of I’ll fix you, you bitch!”

He smiles. He knows who he is, accepts who he is, and works on healing his four inner children. “But one at a time,” he says. “I can’t take them all on at the same time.”

What’s my default mode?

Save me! Please save me!

What’s Ernie’s?

Come on, you son of a bitch! I’ll fight you, too!

Once Ernie said to me: “I can’t fight you and everyone else, too.”

I didn’t even know we were fighting.