This morning, I had an unexpectedly amazing conversation with a woman I worked with a few years back. I’ve been keeping in touch with her on social media and have been seeing her journey from afar after the loss of her child to drug addiction. Her journey is one of the many events that have inspired me to move forward with this project. Being a witness and having known someone whose child was taken much too soon as a result of mental health and ultimately addiction challenges reinforces my belief in this project.
There are so many people out there struggling with their own mind, running from themselves, fearing their emotions and living less than their fullest potential. I faced my own version of addiction and overcame so I understand that when you are in the throws of addiction, you don’t necessarily see that you have an addiction. You believe that your thoughts and your behaviors are just “who you are.” You fail to realize that your addiction is a cover-up for that which you will not face within yourself. With addiction, we are usually throwing a blanket (in the form of drug, alcohol, sex, binge watching tv, binge eating, obsessive working, obsessive exercise, smoking, etc) over the wounds that we are not willing to feel, but we are so determined to deny that we have any wounds, which is why the disease is often a difficult one to treat and why so many people who need help never get it.
In many social settings I feared the feeling of anxiety, so I would often overindulge in alcohol to evade the discomfort around social situations. It wasn’t until I stopped drinking and went to a social gathering that I fully felt the anxiety that I had been so used to numbing with alcohol. I sat with the anxiety at that gathering, though everything in my being wanted to up and leave the situation (a.k.a. fight or flight kicked in and I wanted to flea the premises) and I live to tell about it. It was a gut-wrenching realization, but that realization helped me to dig deeper into that fear to see that the fear I was holding in this moment, wasn’t even related to the moment at hand. It was a delusion because somewhere in my past I developed a faulty belief that “Girls hate me. I was weird and ultimately not worthy of belonging.” I was able to start working on unraveling this belief and learned to become more comfortable in the uncomfortable so that I didn’t need a numbing agent any longer.
We spend a lot of time hurting ourselves and pouring salt in our own wounds when we run from what we are afraid to admit to ourselves. We think we can outrun the lion, but the lion has already caught us and is devouring us though we are just too numb and in shock to feel it. When in addiction, you live in the blindness of your blissful delusion pretending that you are aren’t hurting yet some on the outside can see through the guise. The only person you are fooling is yourself and there is a part of you that is begging for you to admit the truth… that you are in pain, that you are desperate for healing, that you don’t know the way out.
You owe it to yourself to heal. I’ve watched my friend grieve the life of her son’s life cut short because he could not find his way out of his own pain, which brings me to the next thing that spoke to me within this morning’s discussion. So often we feel that we deserve to live with the pain we are carrying. My friend said something really enlightening and truly profound today related to her own healing process,
I responded by stating plainly,
Regardless of whether we are dealing with grief or pain from our past, we need to realize that we are not meant to feel guilty or ashamed and we are heaping it upon our own heads in large doses. When we realize we are the ones doing this to ourselves it becomes slightly hysterical (because we can clearly see the insanity of what we are doing) and allows us to make the choice to stop. I’ve spent a lot of time in my own life being my own worst enemy. I spent a lot of time pouring self-loathing, shame, and guilt over my own head and have turned it around so that I am now my own best friend. My work now is to help others learn to heal, release their hurts, and ultimately love themselves so that they can heal & love others (if that is what they feel called to). At a minimum, my goal is to help others work for progress in their own lives so that they can lead a life that they are proud to call their own.