I would not have chosen the things which have harmed me but am grateful and proud of how I am allowing myself to be shaped by them. Recovery continues to teach me about mercy, redemption, and reconciliation. I am now awake and this quote expresses perfectly where I am in life: “I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence.” “Splittings” by Adrienne Rich
In my family of origin, from my earliest days, I felt unwanted, unwelcome, hated, invalid, banished, shunned, discarded. I learned self-loathing and worthlessness from the people whom I counted on to teach and show me love. To love a person, as I understand, means to be unconditionally FOR them and NEVER against them–acting as an enemy- willingly diminishing, harming or serving up pain.
While my pain and healing have been disruptive and agitating to those too uncomfortable to acknowledge the harm and pain that was, I know that there will be conversations and questions which come about from the younger generations in my family, if not also some of the older ones.
Since my healing is more important than proximity and access to blood relations, I was forced to choose- as it is not possible to heal from the environment which makes you unwell, while still in that environment. I did beg, literally begged for decades, repeatedly to do the work to heal together. I was notified that the issues and work were mine alone, fabricated, manufactured, imagined.
I have expressed countless times, my dedication to breaking or disrupting the cycles of pain, so as to not directly hand the dis-eased thinking and ways of being- to my sons. And until today, I had not considered that I am aslo THE beginning– of a new cycle. The cycle of healing, awakened parenting, living in ways which allow us each to see, feel, speak, acknowledge, and heal pain and difficult feelings which we both cause and experience.
“I love you so long as you are pleasing me – doing only as I desire …and when you do not, it will be withheld from you.” This is the cycle of chaos and dysfunction that I am breaking one day at a time. The manipulating, forcing, pretending, denying, lie-telling, defending and covering up. It stops here— I make no claims to being healED—only to doing the work to become healed. I am a work in progress.
Someone at today’s meeting shared the following. I never stop being amazed to hear someone say a thing that I have felt unable to articulate. Amazing….
“The truth is I’m in need of repair every day, One Day at a Time and for the
rest of my life. I’m not going back to a fractured perspective, unclear boundaries, stifling
anxiety, crippling resentments, out of control “control”.”
