What I fell into : leaving behind the dark years

When I think of my later adolescent and early adulthood years it all seems so dark, and soul lonely, especially the Sydney years of active addiction. Sydney is where I moved at the beginning of 1987 after coming home from overseas and finding my mother was going to re-marry a man she had only recently met following my father’s death.. I did not feel wanted there and so I was lucky that my Godparents offered to take me in while I tried to make a new life in Sydney.. When I look back I honestly feel so grateful to them, my therapist knowing my whole story often says I am lucky to be alive, if not for Aunty Jo and Uncle Piet I would be so damaged.. For a time with them I had a loving Mum and Dad, while I worked at my temp job during the week on weekends we would share good times and go to movies. And over time Uncle Piet who left Holland at the same time as my Dad (1938) shared with me so much that I never got to talk to my Dad about. He also gave me affirmation and love, he saw me as I was outside of all of my family trauma.

I moved into a group share home after about 8 months with them and that was a descent into a dark time, my level of self awareness was pretty non existent and in many ways I was lost, working in a job and career not fully aligned to my heart. We were all addicts of one kind but so called ‘high functioning’ ones.. the weekends involved discos, clubs, dinners out and lots of drinking and later drug taking.. At that time I got involved with a guy who convinced me to take ecstasy in time we broke up and I got involved with another boy who still lived with his mother.. This was the boy I fell pregnant to in 1990.. I cannot call him a man as he lied to his mother about the pregnancy and when I fell into such distress following the pain of waking up next to him in the early hours in intense abdominal pain and it was impossible to wake him I drove myself to intensive care where I waited five hours to be seen by a doctor who diagnosed a ruptured pregnancy.. In time I left the group house and it was decided Mum would come down to support me through a necessary operation to have the pregnancy cleared but I later found out she did not really want to come but my sister convinced her that she needed to. Following this time my god father began to hate my mother when he saw how she was towards me. In time Mum helped me to buy a place but it had to be the one she chose not the one I wanted.. Do not get me wrong I was glad for the support but it was never about what I really needed or wanted.

A year or so after all of this went down my frustration over doing secretarial work reached a crescendo. I wanted to change my career having been forced into secretarial so in 1991 began to undertake some studies in naturopathy but since I still struggled with connecting authentically to others in time that derailed.. I was lucky following this to land a job at a small shop in the Sydney suburb of Glebe that specialized in alternatives like crystals, books, natural remedies and essential oils.. My boss was a bit of a narcissist to be honest.. But for some reason he championed me as I was a hard worker. I was quickly promoted but in time he decided to sell up as he was offered a position as general manager for the essential oil company he was helping to get off the ground.. This was when my emotional life really began to deteriorate due to my addiction.. It was around the time I also met my husband Jonathan.

I am watching the drama series Nashville at the moment and really identify with one of the lead characters, the guitarist Deacon. In the first season of the series he has 12 years of sobriety but he still struggles in a lot of ways. In a scene I watched last night he confesses he did not get sober for himself but for the lead character Rayna who ends up abandoning him after his 5th attempt at detox and marries someone else. It made me think when I chose to stop drinking so much of that revolved around not wanting to lose my ex husband’s love. At that stage after only 2 months of marriage I got a blinding hit of clarity in seeing where my addiction was continuing to take me.. And so on 5th December 1993 I went to my first AA meeting and got sober from then on.

Getting sober is only a beginning.. that is the truth.. Sobriety is a long haul. In Nashville Deacon has not done a lot of the inner work on his relationships so he gets pulled around from pillar to post by the strong women in his life and also by relatively newly sober ‘mates’ who are still very toxic.. Getting deeper insight into our attachment wounds (which I firmly believe lie at the heart of all addictions) takes years in my experience. As I look back now I see that on my path it took until 6 years of sobriety for any kind of authentic feeling at all to begin to break open inside of me. In 1999 I had my first flood of grief flow through around the 15th anniversary of my father’s death.. but the surge of this uprising in some way also made me feel the urge to be back with family.. It is a long path for us sober addicts to make past pain conscious. And not until the years 2005-6 did I begin to explore and understand the familial multi-generational threads.. This also took getting into another relationship with an adult child of an alcoholic father to burst open.

I now believe that it is inaccurate to see that I ‘failed’ by coming back here to Australia in 2001 at the time of the Saturn Pluto opposition. I see that there was so much to explore and the only way I could do that was to come back into the swamp or soup of our complex family history. In truth with my level of emotional neglect and multiple traumas I am strong to have survived.. It has also been a strength to pull back from family lately. I still feel guilt for relying on the inheritance.. in a way I wish I had my own income but then I see the inner work coming out of all of this was the goal for me.. and as someone, who for many years could rely on no one, in these later years I should be allowed to rely on what my mother wanted to give me but my brother will not release.

When I wrote the poem about my heart becoming a stranger last night someone said they hoped I was no longer as trapped in that dark cold icy place.. I can now TRULY SAY I AM NOT but those icy years of the cold and dark of my active addiction and later emotional isolation and retreat WERE SO REAL AS WAS THE ABUSE AT THE HANDS OF MOST OF MY PARTNERS, but then I was not in touch with myself so all of that was just a symptom, not an excuse. These days I choose not be a victim any longer.. I can take back my power..I can make decisions to be around more emotionally available energy, I can change nothing of the path I went down, it was meant to be.. I had to go to hell to find out what a touch or glimpse of heaven is to be honest, it comes in those times I feel fully in alignment and peace with myself and nature, as well as accepting of the realities of my life..

There is a well known saying in the rooms of recovery “religion is for those people who do not want to go to hell, spirituality is for those people who have lived in hell and do not want to go back there again.”.. And so it is. Only by being brave enough to be honest and vulneralbe about the nature of our own personal and familial hell or blind side can we begin to make of our demons, friends, those exiled emotions need a place to be heard and made sense of. We cannot deny someone’s pain by demonizing them for having demons.. What the hell are demons anyway but parts of ourselves we so long ago had to reject, bury, project or deny due to fear and fucked up social conditioning?

I am familiar with hell and its demons but I also know they spoke of something essential.. so the path for me through the dark and the ice was necessary.. My soul had to freeze so that I could find the way back to the buried fire of my spirit…

I well remember that dream I had of the dark African woman a few months before my ex husband and I decided to return to Australia after 2 and a half years in the UK. In the dream I looked into her dark eyes which were brimming with years as he told me her baby had died after one year, when I shared my sadness with her in the dream, she said to me : “Do not be sad for me, this had to happen for my growth, this is a sorrow I know I must bear.”. And so it was for me too. The sorrow I must bear could not be medicated away and when I saw the medication of things in my family it nearly tore me in two.. But for me I had to chose another way a way that led me towards the warmth the open air and the light. Towards the erradication of unnecessary voice of shame and blame that did not speak the truth.

The light is now where I chose to live, knowing that now I have me I will never ever ever feel as alone as I used to when the way to my true self was barred throughout all of those dark inwardly disconnected years of my addiction or the following times of depression. In many ways the dark was not my enemy at all in fact it was a place of massive wisdom making and inner self re-generation. Thank God I also found others who knew this too and spoke for the dark path.. What we lost the way too, I fully believe we can find the way to again. We can find ways to be accepting and happy about it all.. learning in the words of the AA Big Book not to turn our back on the past but look it in the face honestly. .. The way out is through that is the truth as I see it..