You kept me safe through all of those years, finding my way to freedom

With only 13 days until my sobriety birthday I am emotional, thinking how, even in those desperate times when in the lonely Sydney years I took myself to such dark places in my addiction and buried longing for love (coming out of a black outs to realise with a shock and the profound disorientation of addiction that I was in a terribly compromised place I find too hard to share here) I thank God in some way I was protected.. In fact at one of the lowest times after my father died and I was overseas and my then boyfriend sent me back to the UK from Finland after meeting someone else.. this was on the second anniversary of my Dad’s death, I got so drunk on my return and luckily two guys took me home and kept me safe.. Those around me at that time, were, I know now mystified by my behavior and when I hear partners of those in active addiction share their sorrow, helplessness and dismay I think of how impossible it is for them to know or understand or even be able to help the alcoholic.

There is an expression we use in AA that we “get sick and tired of feeling sick and tired” that happened for me in Decembe 1993 I had only been married six weeks by my husband was suffering due to my drinking.. I can still see him sitting with his head in his hands in a chair saying he could not cope and I thank God I found a book that spoke of the way we progress in addiction and I could finally realize my drinking was out of control. And I got to my first meeting.

I well remember too the powerful dreams shortly after that when Dad’s spirit came to me.. and I am emotional now, I actually then could feel the love he had for me that was blocked in me due to his death and it took me a lot of years to see how he played a part in shutting me down, but thinking about it in the bath this morning and after watching a wonderful movie Made In Belfast about a man coming to terms with forgiving his own abusive father I realized none of it came out of malice, Dad just struggled as a man born in the 1920s who did not understand his younger daughter or how to reach her and then there was the exceedingly troubled relationship I had with my Mum and my enmeshment with my oldest sister who was encouraging me to drink in an unhealthy way at the age of 13. Really I was left so so unprotected and Mum and Dad had not a clue of what I was struggling with leading up to and after the accident and my older sister’s cerebral bleed. Then their attention had to be else where due to all the trauma of my sister laying in a coma and then being taken away dumped in an asylum and returned back with a one way ticket and so it was I fell through the cracks. Then Dad became ill and died.. What a terrible amount of trauma for a young woman to have endured over a 6 year period!

The truth is that I am not that girl any more, I am emerging but god its been tough work, to try and see I am not the ‘failure’ I am often seen as or can see myself to be, that in fact I have been so strong to have fought and to have survived so much and, most of all, as Kat pointed out in therapy yesterday, to have trusted my gut..

I think we do children a huge disservice when we try to dissuade them from their intuitive and instinctual knowing and when we do not react with and to them in a natural and instinctive way.. For me anger was never overtly expressed at home in a ‘clean’ clear way, it was scary and I now know that for most of my young life I was terrified, terrified most of all that my ‘truth’ would burst out and offend someone which it obviously seemed to do as my sobriety led me to take the lid off of some pretty deep and primal feelings.

Slowly I am trying to make friends with my anger and to keep trusting my gut.. It was good to get the rage out at everything yesterday and most especially my last partner who caused me so much pain, that said today my heart did fill with compassion for him too, it was not his fault what he endured in childhood, but it was his responsibility not to act that out on me. I do see the ways in which he may have struggled in the relationship with how I was at that time coming 2 years out of the head injury and 4 years after the abandonment by my husband due to the fact he did not want me to ‘go there’ in my grief.. It was NOT MY FAULT HE LEFT ME.. HE DID NOT WANT TO FACE HIS OWN FEELINGS AND HE ADMITTED AS MUCH TO ME A YEAR AGO

When I was with my ex often on falling asleep my body would spasm and jerk and he got angry at me, so angry I had to sleep in another room and sometimes even ended up driving myself the 12 kms home to my place if I had chosen to stay the night with him before I moved in. I could never relax around him because I was terrified of the next angry outburst, but then thinking about it maybe we attracted each other due to both our buried emotional neglect and anger issues.

Anyway all of those painful year are now in the past.. Getting the anger out means it no longer needs to possess me from the inside any more.. There is so much that happened to hurt me and so many ways I did go back ‘lapping up’ shit treatment and abuse when others tried to down play it and fob it back on me.. I wont take that now.. I did not get it wrong when I instinctively felt that knife in my gut at what you said or did.. coming out of abuse though involves taking back our power from being the victim ANYMORE. I was thinking a lot about this in the bath earlier as the Zs in Lee Harris’s intuitive energy transmissions Intuition that I signed up to receive for the month of November spoke a great deal in the second one about victim energy.. As along as we remain unconscious of how we were wounded and how we were disempowered, cut off at the legs or shut down we WILL CONTINUE TO REMAIN THE VICTIM THROUGH NO FAULT OF OUR OWN .. AT LEAST UNTIL WE DO THE HARD WORK TO BECOME CONSCIOUS.. For this to happen we need a lot of support, to hear the stories of what others go through, to have our pain validated and to understand how we react out of it and most of all we have to give the toxic shame dumped onto and into us back to those who still try to shame us in subtle ways.. We can then walk free into our own sunlight holding the hand of that innocent little child who so long ago gave away his or her goodness to shame inducing parents, peers or society or had to sacrifice his or her feelings to ‘belong’ while losing the deep and necessary connection with his or her emotional self and soul.