A few loooooong thoughts have been central to my recovery this week that I'd like to share for your thoughts, feedback and ideas. Here goes
1. Since my separation/divorce I've really struggled w/getting up in the morning. Before I looked forward to my job, studies and parenting. I got up easily. Since then I lay there avoiding getting up and not wanting to face my day. Ultimately this and my son's needs took a toll on the 8-5 job schedule and I had to change that, so now I start work at 4pm daily. That was great for a while b/c recovery and a new friend got me up and going. But that stopped working. All my life I've had the primary goal to be "happy." It's a huge disappointment to me that I'm not there every morning. Then I was thinking about how negative emotions pass and I find some joy at least a few times each week. About a week ago I told myself one morning "It's ok, you don't need to be happy, you just need to get up." Oddly that's worked quite well. And most days I do experience some joy and the pain goes away for longer and longer periods of time. Have any of your experienced something like this? What do you think about joy and happiness? What's "normal"? What's realistic? Which segues to....
2. Inside Out (the movie) - I went to see it a few days ago. It's Disney, it's animated, it's playful and funny, it's profound. Bingo! Just what the "teen-age" me needed!
It's about a young teen w/a "healthy" emotional experience, but it was profound to me on so many levels. It addresses the concept of "hijacking", of the need for painful emotions, of the healthy purpose for painful emotions that Walker describes like how anger helps us have necessary power or strength or how sadness helps us (I won't say since that might spoil the movie). There are "characters" for anxiety. And it's about growing up. Transitioning from childhood to adolescence to adulthood (in the positive parent role models). And finally topic
3. Reviewing step 18 and reading about your letter and confronting your abusers was very inspiring for me VF. Thank you. It brought so many ideas for me to the here and now. And the clarity of how doing so could bring about a healthy "closure" of sorts. I've gone through the grief of losing a son and I think I really moved through those steps in a healthy way, experiencing and moving through my sadness, anger, anxiety and oddly enough a kind of "euphoria" common to grief in a proactive way.
But this recovery, this grief has been so complex, so nebulous, so painful and periodically invisible combined w/the emotional hijacking that I think I've been feeling hopeless about ever being "done enough" like I feel about the grief over the death of my son.
But this topic and your letters VF gave me the courage to really face the concept of confrontation, what that would look like in my circumstances, what might be the fall out or the outcomes, positive and negative.
So I wrote a letter. I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet. Perhaps wait and review it again, perhaps send it in a PM here, or share it w/my T. But I wrote it and I feel a lot better now.
My history of abuse and neglect was all covert and consistently inconsistent. I have memories of appropriate treatment too. And I'm realizing that my ex is even less healthy than my parents. That he played an integral part in my C-PTSD developing to the extent that it did. 22 years married is longer than the 18 years I spent in my parent's home.
And I get like VF said that it's not my fault. And I trust that I'm doing better w/my own children.
