The road to recovery

“YOU are what you eat” is one of those phrases that conjure up ideas about the relationship between our diet and the kind of people we become. Those who used the phrase in its original setting and the makers of the Channel 4 diet programme with the same name were playing with the notion that the food we eat has a bearing on our state of mind and health and, of course, has a further bearing on the quality and longevity of our life.

What we eat, how much we eat and how well we look after our bodies is a crucial part of any holistic approach to personal well-being. Addiction, craving, compulsive disorder and dependence are all complex conditions which require detailed, determined and persistent remedies.

However, for the purposes of this short reflection I want to examine a different proposition; one that has disturbed me during the course of many years of dealing with people whose lives become bogged down in conflict and dispute. This condition could be summed up in the phrase, “you are what eats away at you”. This condition drills deep into a person’s being, it surfaces in obsessive behaviour and it takes over the personality until the conflict becomes the reason for being.

You will have seen a dog with an old bone; there is no marrow left in it to extract, but still the dog persists in gnawing away.

People who become fixated on conflicts long past or who persist with disagreements that cannot be settled can miss the very best bits of life while they chew over their old bones. Their anger, disappointment, loss, or grievance eats away at them until they can think of little else. This is a road to desolation and loneliness and it becomes a complex condition which like any disorder of the mind requires detailed, determined and persistent treatment.

The great philosopher of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, reflecting on the conflicts he had endured, said: “I was never ruined but twice; once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I won one”. How often I have wished that people could set aside their deep disputes because at the end of them, invariably, there are no winners and everyone is diminished.

Jesus knew the high cost that people paid for the grudges they held, he knew precisely that if we did not deal with our differences they would not only diminish us as individuals but they would hamper our relationship with God. So, he said: “If you are offering your gift at the altar and there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5: 23-24). This is one of the hardest of Jesus’ teachings and it is harder still when our brother or sister throws our olive branch in our face, but that is the risk we are called to take and even if it is not the road to reconciliation it can be the road to recovery of our true self.

”How often I have wished that people could set aside their deep disputes because at the end of them, invariably, there are no winners and everyone is diminished.

When he became President of the USA, Abraham Lincoln chose one of his bitterest opponents, Edwin M Stanton, to be his closest Cabinet colleague. Working together Stanton and Lincoln became allies and friends. Lincoln did not subscribe to the idea that you should seek the ruin of your enemies; instead, at the height of bloody Civil War, when asked why he did not seek the utter destruction of the Confederate Forces, Lincoln said: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” This is great wisdom indeed.

If something is eating away at you, find a way of setting it aside. Life is too short to harbour grudges and the road to recovery from the bitterness of conflicts that eat away at our inner being is as hard a road as anyone might ever have to travel.