Thank God I am alive

I don’t know what is happening this evening but I had a huge surge of happiness and deep feeling of being so alive after leaving therapy today. I followed a new way home that wended its way via the lake as dusk was settling in and stopped by the small beach at the bottom of the road that leads to my suburb. I got out of the car and felt the wind on my cheeks and everything was glowing as the sun lit a pathway of gold across the water directly to where I was standing on the shore line.

I had a lovely meeting with my friend who has been away for a year and its so funny as I wrote a post this morning and by a chance of synchronicity it linked to the post I wrote last May on the day she was leaving for South Africa, I remember how sad I was and how it triggered so many feelings about my older sister who is now dead since she and Christine were born in the same year, 1946. I remember how I had to get out into the wind that day so the tears could flow and ran around with Jasper and just let the feelings out and now I think of how suppressed my feelings were for all of my addiction and how many years of sobriety it has taken for me to start to feel unbridled and no longer so much in fear of them.

I was discussing with Kat today how my last partner would go ballistic when I was sad, I would be read the riot act, he called my family a ‘vortex’ and after one visit to my bed ridden sister he said to me ‘you better watch out you don’t turn out like that’ we went to have a coffee after the visit and I felt like I had been slapped but that happened so many times. When he ended it he told me how in the wrong I was. His break up email told me he deserved a medal for dating me and that I was screwy, flighty and insecure. Gosh how those words have reverberated in the years since we parted. I now feel for him living with me at times but as Kat said today he could not accept the whole of me wanted only the happy side and no one is that one dimensional.

We were discussing in therapy today again how wrong I always make myself. It makes me cry at times. Kat said I am one of the hardest on myself clients she has met. I know this is true now. I said to her I don’t think that all alone I could have had the power to defeat my inner critic. Its voice is just so pervasive at times so was it any coincidence I attracted that partner back in 2007 and could not fight back but just collapsed under the criticism. God knows I am far from perfect I carry scars and have flaws and fault like anyone but I know how good and pure my heart really is.

Anyway I do love Thursday nights. I love the feeling of being free that comes after a particularly good therapy session. And I had the thought today as I drove home from the little lake beach how grateful I am to be alive and medication free. I could easily have been labelled with a number of psychiatric conditions in my time, just feel grateful that I had the sense to steer clear of that medical model and pursue addiction recovery and long term psychotherapy. It really has paid off. I used to feel suicidal most of the time, especially after that last abusive relationship ended. I now very rarely feel that way, usually only when I am being shadow dumped in some way or shown a lack of empathy or misunderstanding, but its getting easier to see where these things get me in my vulnerable achilles heel at times awakening that relentlessly critical killer energy within self. Feeling freer to live outside of it makes me feel so full of life and happiness and that is such a wonderful feeling.