Addiction- A perfectly normal response to unhealed, unacknowledged, unsupported, long-term, ongoing trauma.
Trauma is an experience that overwhelms our capacity to process and integrate what is happening.
I have lived many sad years, decades actually. Life, even on the most special of days, has been that, for me. So, when asked what is my saddest day, I had to take time to think. My saddest day was maybe the day I knowingly married someone who "loved" me as my family had hated me. I wished I could say it was the passing of either of my parents. That would be a lovely way to feel--to have known…
I was an inconvenient child. There was no tolerance or support for this, only resentment. I learned resentment at an early age. Unlearning is taking time. As mother to a highly sensitive child, I am grateful that I can love him through the overwhelming thing of life instead of resenting him for not making my life easier. He makes me, life, and the world better just by being in it, exactly as he is. But he sure does not feel that way and my…
Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Each of the 12-Step Programs follows these two steps to recovery, verbatim. Only in my program of recovery(Al-Anon), was I taught when and how to appropriately amend. Also, apologizing with words is not the same as amending our behaviors and working to restore…
Buh-Bye Toxic Shame! Recovery for me has included unburdening of generations of the toxic shame imposed on me. I now have the tools to identify what is mine to amend and for what exactly what I am responsible. I can not and will no longer be sorry for: existing, feeling and thinking differently and deeply, speaking my truth, attempting to meet my own most basic needs or taking up space. As a girl and young adult, I was truly sorry,…