“I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become” - Carl Gustav Jung -
It is my deepest belief, that the root cause of my addiction and ill mental health issues, is suppression of my spirit. My true essence. The person that I was born to be. I talk about it and write about it often. That suppression came in the form of forced dogmatic religion, societal conformity to perceived normality, lack of freedom to express my truth or any truth, and shaming and abuse of my sexuality and femininity. I believe that for many others in recovery or indeed in addiction, this is a relevant issue. Many of us, both male and female, who ran from life through addiction are free spirits forced to live in situations that are intolerable to us. Most of the time we aren’t really conscious of our deep inner conflict with the world because we are led to believe it is wrong to question. Yet it’s very real. When I chose and had the courage to face this as my reality, I truly started to recover.
And that is what recovery is for me. A recovering and decision to live my life completely and authentically as me. My belief will have no relevance in the medical world where we look for solutions from the people who many times, enable our self-destruction for money and power. It will have no relevance in the political arena where we fight for equal rights for addicts from the people who will not confront the ethics of big pharmaceutical companies and those who approve highly addictive drugs. It will bear no relevance in dogmatic, organized religious groups, who’s twisting, destruction and purposeful misrepresentation of supposed holy texts, serves only to control and degrade.
However, it bears relevance to me. And before I search outside of myself for solutions to my issues, for someone else to tell me what I need, I inevitably find that the answers are inside of me. I speak as a woman. Because before anything else on this earth, that is what and who I am. My role as a woman takes on many forms. It is a beautiful and powerful existence that should be honored and celebrated. Yet at thirty five years old, I came into recovery having been so beaten down that I thought I would never rise again. Some of that beating down was done by myself. There is no denying that. I believed what society had lead me to believe. That I, as a woman was less than. Less intelligent. Had less human rights. Existed only as a sexual object. That I as a woman do not have a right to be angry, to speak out, to ask for anything, to make boundaries. Only punishment in the form of mental, emotional and physical violence happened if I asserted myself.
When I stopped drinking and using, the reality of the way I was treated became so overwhelming that I wasn’t sure I could survive it. The trauma came at me in floods. The anger rose in me that I had drank down and numbed out with drugs just to survive. I was angry at myself for conforming and accepting such horror in my life. I was angry at myself for making decisions that put me in situations to be horribly abused. I was angry that people who enabled my abusers were still pointing the finger at me. I was angry that I had lost myself and become someone I couldn’t even look at in the mirror. It came up out of me like an erupting volcano. I cried and screamed. I became ill and depressed and anxious. My anger was so fierce that I directed it at the wrong people out of fear of being destroyed all over again. Facing the reality of my past experiences was akin to being trapped in a straightjacket and spending every day and night for years, trying to escape from it. To escape from myself. I was beyond exhausted. Yet the fire inside me kept burning and I refused to give up.
People kept telling me recovery was possible. But not just superficial recovery. They were talking about real, deep, soul recovery. A life beyond my wildest dreams recovery that didn’t involve yachts or mountains of money. The kind that even in my darkest pain, a drink or a drug wouldn’t enter my head. I found people who were willing to listen, who understood. I found women and men who were not interested in supressing me, or telling me lies. And they came to me with their arms out wide ready to catch me. And they caught me over and over again until eventually I stopped falling down, which admittedly, is just a recent thing.
I found respect for myself for the first time in my life. I realized that by holding onto anger and trauma for decades left no room for my spirit to live inside me. It followed me around waiting for the time it could sit, comfortable in the knowledge that I wouldn’t reject it again. As I began to unload the grief initially through therapy and 12 step fellowships something started to shift inside me. I began writing and sharing my experiences. The walls began to come down. Loving my children, and allowing people to love me began to feel very different. I returned to my true spirituality and healing abilities and my spirit found its way back inside me. Now I sit comfortably in my own skin and my own truth unapologetically.
Having recovered myself as a woman I am creating a life - my life, which often appears unconventional, weird, messy, rebellious and chaotic to other people - but to me all those things are what true living is about. Making my recovery a completely personal journey has helped me not only survive but begin to thrive.
My wish for women across the world is that they find the strength and courage to become who they truly are despite whatever adversity they encounter or are recovering from. We as recovering women are the ones bearing and raising children into homes of freedom, open mindedness, tolerance and compassion. We as recovering women are finding a new strength and dignity and sharing that with our communities - and that is how we tackle the root causes of pain and therefore ridding our world of one of the greatest symptoms of trauma - Addiction!
