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I have enjoyed getting real and honest in the first three steps.  Self-awareness is a natural high in and of itself.  Step one taught me the action of surrender from my powerlessness and unmanageable life; I do this every day and all day.  This propelled me to explore my beliefs and determine that a Higher Power has spared me from all the trauma because there is a plan for and purpose to my life.  He restored me to sanity.  I have not picked up for almost 6 months now.  This led to my making a decision of commitment; a leap of faith; to turn over the care of my will and my life to God as I understand Him.

That word care is very important, as I have seen (and learned) that there are dry addicts who have been clean for years that make their HP the NA program.  The only problem with this is misinterpretation and misapplication.  We ask God to “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the WISDOM to KNOW the DIFFERENCE.”  We know that we have free will, and thus self-will.  This has gotten us into more problems in active addiction than we could manage.  Unfortunately, there are those who believe that giving God control over our lives somehow takes away our accountability and responsibility.  Careful, people.  This is far from the truth,  We make the decisions and choices in our lives, but we ask God for the guidance to make the RIGHT ones.

It’s discernment…right?  In the past we have lied so much to so many, that it will take a long time to rebuild the trust in those relationships.  All that’s left is for us to lie to ourselves.  We KNOW the difference between right and wrong and how not to make the wrong decision or choice.  The acting out voice in my head taunts me…it says “if you give it all over to your higher power and your HP is the program, it would be too easy to blame the program if you made the wrong choice.  I have also built trust in my Higher Power and that trust cannot be broken.  I will pray for His gentle guidance, talk to my sponsor, share in meetings and wait and see what comes back to me before I “do the next right thing.”

If the basis of the program is one addict helping another addict, perhaps a newcomer, then why am I hearing about past mistakes as if someone is bragging about their wrong choices???  I don’t care about your past sins, as a newcomer I want to hear about recovery and HOW TO GET THERE.  The literature even says, we don’t care how much you used or how little you have.  I am learning who I WANT to be through also learning who I DON’T WANT TO BE.

As I commence my moral inventory in the 4th step, I want to be transformed by identifying wrong choice patterns in my life and learning to avoid them from here on out.  I want to learn just who I AM and also who I WANT TO BECOME.

I will always maintain accountability for my own personal actions, but I will pray like hell for guidance and protection every day.  Each step I take is a baby step in the right direction.  I too could blog about how my disease of addiction caused me to do this bad thing or that, but the bottom line is that because I was IN active addiction, I made a lot of really sh*tty choices and have paid for them over and over; and will continue to do so as I heal over time.  I am learning to let go of them, but will never diminish the weight of their consequences.

I don’t mean to sound “preachy” and I hope I do not offend anyone, I just have noticed how some people have interpreted the steps differently to suit their own needs….I’m just sayin’….

Peace, love and blessings…speak out!

I once blogged about the differences between addicts and the justifications we come up with for denial.  I have heard a lot of shares now as I approach six months clean.  I no longer feel like a newcomer in some ways which is good because it is now easier to hear the harsh stories without reservations, resentments, or judgments.  I think I always knew that I was an addict deep down, but of course would not let myself admit it to the true me; meaning that I just blamed my addictive behaviors on another alter.  I sure as hell was not about to admit it  to anyone else, least of all, my immortal beloved.  HE KNEW.  He also knew that I wasn’t ready to deal with it and was probably waiting for the time to come when I WOULD; little did either of us know that his death would be the turning point.  I ramped up my using so hard and so high and so fast that I can only recall images from his funeral and my mother’s.  The thirteen months that ensued his death were drug-filled days and nights; one just blurring into another, and saturated in tears.  I think that using all of those narcotics (onycontin, hydrocodone, morphine, fentanyl, demerol, and codeine), along with the Valium, not only made a zombie of me, but a depressed one.  I think I didn’t become suicidal until after they were both gone, the kids were gone (one away in college, the other off at GITMO in the military), plus everyone else in my family all moved away too.

So yeah.  A year after he died and a couple months after my mom died, I ran out of drugs. I panicked.  I couldn’t get anything anywhere (don’t remember why).  I went to the Dr. and told her.  She just stopped prescribing cold turkey and left me in withdrawal hell.  It was that day that I remember truly wanting and deciding to die; to take my own life. You see, nobody in my family every dealt with drug addiction.  I still had a full bottle of Valium so I took the whole bottle (120 pills), plus the Dr. finally capitulated and called in a script for me which my sister picked up for me and dropped off to me, so I added the whole bottle of those (Vicodin I think) to it.  They found me the next day and called an ambulance.  I remember hearing someone say “we’re losing her” and blacked out and woke up vomiting charcoal.  My dad said they told him I might not make it.  Yeah, he was pretty pissed at me, and even more so were my kids.  I got shipped to the psych ward of a local area hospital for ten days, then was released.  Scrounged desperately to find a rehab with NO help from the Dr.  Ended up in rehab in Billings, Montana (pretty far from home).  Refused to grieve, was STILL suicidal and went through the worst withdrawal possible that lasted ten days or so.  They said that the benzodiazepines stick to your fat cells and that’s what saved my life.  Did not deal with underlying causes.  Went back to drugs with new Dr. about six months after rehab.

For the next decade, I did every despicable thing imaginable to score my next fix.  I used even harder than I had before.  The tolerance in my body is insanely high to narcotics now.

What’s my point.  I have heard similar shares in the rooms and in group sessions from all kinds of people with all different kinds of backgrounds; rich, poor, fat, thin, attractive, successful, homeless, whatever.  What matters is not what we did…we all did ugly things in order to feed our addictions.  What matters is how we can connect over that fact alone, as well as other similarities we find through sharing with one another.  There is no such thing as a “perfect program” in recovery.  Perfection is unattainable in this life.  We are flawed humans by nature. What matters is how we survive.  How DID we survive? I know I have at least TWO ANGELS in MY corner.  I KNOW there is a REASON that I DID survive –everything.  It’s partly to tell my story, however long, sordid, and sad that may be.  It’s to help OTHERS.  It’s to GIVE BACK and to share about my beliefs and my strategies in recovery.  KNOWING THIS, I can stay clean one more day.

What do YOU think?

Peace, love and blessings….

I have experienced a lot of things, good and bad, in my near 56 years on this planet.  I have learned that I am a survivor and that instinct has served me well, as I have survived a lot of traumatic events.  What I stink at is letting go of these events.  It’s time. Nobody in my family wants to discuss this stuff anymore.

I have a good therapist in my life. I have a great sponsor and new friends in the program. So what am I waiting for?  Third step is about turning my life over to a higher power that is greater than me, greater than my addiction, greater than any painful event I endured. Turning these things over is about me letting go…but I am afraid to.

What does that even mean?  I feel like if I do let go of it, I will lose some part of myself in the process.  I am told that the opposite would occur, in that instead, I would grow; maybe even grow up finally.  It’s like the suggestion of integrating my alters.  Would they die?  If I let go of deaths and abandonment, rapes, abortions, incest, and all of my sick secrets, then who do I become?  AM I READY?  I feel like I am.  I want to in my head, but not in my heart or the reverse of that –I’m not sure.

I’m convinced that this takes a leap of faith.  My faith is stronger.  My head still has compartments with locked cabinets of stored or repressed memories; some in an indestructible safe! My head has cobwebs in some places and the persona in the compartments are like glass that can be shattered into shards.

My heart has hope, fear, uncertainty, peace, ambition/determination and resolve, gratitude, open-mindedness, willingness, honesty and acceptance…oh and love, there is always lots of love.

I am fully self-aware.  There will be disappointments, confusion even terror and pain.  But if I take this step forward, there will be peace and serenity, with the continued hope for a better future as a better person.  It will make me healthier from a mental health perspective.  I feel like I could try it –with just one thing and see if I succeed.

New dilemma, what do I let go of first?

I believe that in order for it to help me, it should probably be the most painful experience I have ever had.  That may be difficult to prioritize.  I maintain that out of all the things I have gone through, the loss of my husband and the way it happened was the most painful.

I will try to let this go and let you know how the experience affects me.  Wish me luck.

Peace Love and Blessings to all.

I was reading a handout on the different phases we go through when we get off of drugs. It talks about how your brain chemistry changes and your moods. There is a honeymoon phase when we are clean, and I believe I am leaving this phase.  I now realize that my short-term memory issues may be more permanent than I had first thought.  I am now in what I am choosing to call the scattered-yet-working-your-ass-off phase.  I am done with anti-psychotics, and other psychotropic medicines.  They only seem to make my memory holes wider.  I am using an old technique I learned back in college to exercise my brain and memory.  I think of an oldies song that I loved and I try to force myself to recollect the lyrics.  You can’t pick an easy one though where they just repeat the same verse over and over.  The one I am working on now is a 70s song by Reunion called Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me), which is about the names of about a billion oldies artists. Check it out on You-tube –the lyrics go really fast!

Anyway, I won’t say that I have lost enthusiasm for my program of recovery.  I am committed to my surrender each day; to allow my Higher Power to have control over my life and I have had to face this dilemma….In working the steps, I’ve had to recall choices of self-will (give examples of where I asserted my will.)  Well that could go on forever, but the point is that I had to recall certain triggering memories in my past, and understand the difference between due to my disease of addiction versus accountability for my actions. Do you know what I mean?  I feel like the literature illustrates in the first step that we are “people who are afflicted with the disease of addiction”…”whose lives are controlled by drugs” and other statements that make it sound like we had no control over what we were doing.  “…we were powerless over our addiction and our lives had become unmanageable.”  But understanding what my disease of addiction means to me, and holding myself accountable for my actions while in active addiction is a harsh awareness at times.  I hold high standards for myself and for those around me.  Sometimes too high.

So what’s my point today?  Hard work has always been a part of who I am; both my standards and those of my children include a strong work ethic (which by the way seems lacking in the millennial generation).  I am committed to working hard at my job, as I am committed to working hard at my recovery.  That being said, I am having to motivate myself to work at memory recall, checking in with myself, doing my daily yoga and meditation, doing my step work, and going to my meetings.  It is in this phase that I will find out what I am really made of and who I really am.  I still use DBT skills to process my emotions, and other skills to maintain mindfulness and not dissociate, and I am not ashamed to admit that I am in the mode of pushing myself (and probably pushing others around me as well).  I have memorized a lot of the standard literature from the meetings and this is good for me because it does force me to exercise my memory.

As for my mood swings, yes I have noticed manic episodes and depressive moods, but I also know how to normalize these feelings and not let these interludes last long.  Do I still use sex as an escape mechanism? Yeah.  But I understand why I do it now. It’s my way of forcing myself to feel and deal with something.  It should just be all about the pleasure, and it will be for me at some point.  It’s the prescience of the act itself and the foreplay that makes it satisfying for me; the ability to tantalize someone.  These escapades of fancy keep me in the moment.  It’s a reason to keep moving forward; to keep working hard; to stay clean.  Today is 150 days clean for me.

Peace, love, blessings and motivation to all!

I heard a share by a young man tonight who captivated the attention of fifty people in the rooms by sharing his story which included, among other things, sexual abuse. This sparked a dialogue with the other men in the room who noted that it seems to be a forbidden topic; yet a great many of us have suffered some sort of sexual trauma or abuse.  That’s one of the main underlying causes of addiction.  Another man shared his story of being molested by a priest.

So why is this topic so taboo?  I think I understand why it is more difficult for the men to discuss; society places these ridiculous expectations that a man by definition is stronger than a woman, and therefore, cannot be taken advantage of sexually; cannot be raped.  Well you don’t have to watch an episode of SVU to know that’s bullsh*t.  It happens to a lot of men when they are young and more and more of them are coming out and discussing it openly.  This takes real courage; we should laud them for their bravery to discuss a topic which has been deemed “off-limits” for centuries.

Don’t get me wrong — this does not minimize the rape, abuse and sexual trauma that women experience.  Me included.  Here’s what I can share.

[Disclaimer: I do not recall all of the details as I have said before.  I am now aware in therapy that I have blocked  a lot out] Rough, but here goes….

I believe I was sexually abused by my half-brother (the drug-addled pimp) from a very young age.    A lot of this is repressed so I will share more later as I remember it.  I remember too when I was ten and was on my way home from school.  I remember what I was wearing because I had an argument with my mother about wearing it (buying it). It was a green and white plaid blouse with puffy sleeves, and a white pilgrim-style collar with embroidered flowers across the collar.  I thought it was too babyish.  I chose the nylon stretch bell-bottom pants that matched it.  I hated the whole outfit but wore it at my mother’s insistence.  Anyway, as I said, I was on my way home from school and I decided to cut through the woods to my house on a path.  Once in the woods, a young guy (about 17) jumped out in front of me and scared me to death.  Each direction I tried to get past him, he blocked.  Then, four others came out from behind the trees.  They surrounded me and taunted me.  They told me if I wanted to make it out of there I would do whatever they told me to.  The leader of this pack was a teenage girl about 16 or 17.  She took out her switchblade pocket knife to frighten me.  It worked.  They encircled me at a tree and tied me to it with rope.  Then they cut my blouse open with their knife.  I already had breasts, but was not fully mature yet.  They took turns molesting me, rubbing and pinching my nipples and did the same with my vag.  I was terrified and sobbing.  When they finally let me go, they said if I told anyone they would kill me and my family, ending with a trite “we know where you live” as I ran off.  I was screaming all the way out of there, and remember that I ran all the way home so fast that my heart was pounding so hard that my chest hurt.

Long story short, I never received any kind of therapy about this incident.  Now, later, when I was about thirteen, I got dumped with my half-brother for him to babysit me.  He was always wasted on drugs and alcohol and had a violent temper (as did my mother). He told me to watch the girls (his pros who turned tricks in front of me), and to make sure they did not leave with anyone or go anywhere (the tricks came to his house and left when they finished).  When he came home, he told me to get in his bed and go to sleep.  I would get in his bed in my clothes.

He would eventually come to bed and would kiss me and molest me.  That’s all I can say.

On my 18th birthday I was raped (by my best friend’s father).  When I was 26, I was raped in a hotel room.

I am now feeling very uncomfortable and nauseous and sad and angry and I think I will stop here.  My point about this being a taboo topic is valid though.

P, L, B to all.