It’s been a hot minute since I posted as life- and my priorities as a result- have shifted yet again. The more we seek and search, the more we learn and I have been in a constant state of self wonder. While that’s a good thing, it also leads to more realizations about how I came to be the person I am today as a result of the trauma and violence I suffered as a child. I denied it all just to survive that period in my life and now that my yogic path has brought me here, to a place of self-love and equanimity, I clearly see how my behaviors in the past constantly worked to reinforce all those survival methods- and not in a good way.
The past several months, I decided to go even more internal and took to writing in a journal as opposed to this blog as I wanted to speak my whole truth and nothing but. Here, on the blog, there’s an audience and while I aim to write as truthfully and as authentically as possible 99.99999% of the time, my deepest thoughts are not for publishing. Here, I craft each post with attention to paragraph length and supporting images and grammar and all that fun stuff but there, in my journal, I write to myself, for myself, and let all structure go- it’s incredibly therapeutic (albeit unreadable as my handwriting is atrocious but I knew what I was relaying in the moment and that’s what counts, right?! Right!).
I started this blog with the intention to chronicle my journey giving up alcohol but that period in my life was actually just a blip; the way I used alcohol worked to support the survival/ self loathing/ external validation seeking habits I had formed as a result of being abused as a child. Freaking epiphany: I am a people pleaser to a (HUGE) fault. I never learned how to find validation within, I only felt validated when I did things to make other people happy no matter how it negatively effected me. For 48 years. Wow. The moment that hit me was the moment I decided the people pleasing stops now- my needs and my desires alone are paramount. Finally.
While alcohol is part of my story, it’s definitely not the whole story. The people and paths I have chosen along the way and these ingrained habits revolve solely around the lasting effects as an adult survivor of child abuse. This, dear readers, is the truest part of me, the thing that has a clutch on my soul and psyche, the thing I have tried so hard to deny, the thing that has brought on more stress and anxiety and grief and depression than I have ever admitted to any single person I have ever met. This is the time to face it in order to change it, and this is the story I will continue to tell…
Continue reading “A New Recovery”