I don’t feel like I have a lot of problems. My life hums along at a lovely pace. Most of the time my life feels very balanced, stable and easy. Work is work but good. Kids are kids but alive and moving forward. Parents are healthy and close. Friends are loyal, loving and fun. Sobriety is deeply ingrained in my life which enables all of the above to be what they are. I know, without it, all of the above gets thrown into the mix and all that provides me such stability and calm, becomes the source of shame and regret.
I take care of myself. I work out, hiking, meditate, write and yoga daily. I try to treat my body like a temple, some days I will admit that it is more a carbohydrate dead end. I love those fuckers. And so far, my success at giving them up, is sporadic and incomplete. I kind of think of it as an “oh well” and move about my life.
I can tell you for sure that most of the above was a source of problem for me before I got sober. Almost everything in my life was in complete chaos a great deal of the time.
I did not include my love life above because I guess it is the one area of my life where I cannot seem to get any semblance of normalcy. And I believe, in part, that is because I generally like having it be in a state of flux. This feels familiar and I know I select the familiar hell over the unfamiliar heaven repeatedly.
I will also admit it is because I am lazy and prone to addictive patterns. I don’t mind doing the work, I am a hard worker. But I find myself particularly stubborn where love and men are concerned and being willing to do the whole thing differently. I tend to have this stubborn resistance to changing up my old patterns. I tend to repeat them with different names....
One of the other reasons my life is so stable and carefree today is because I realized that most of my problems were caused by an unregulated nervous system. I think I was just born a little off and then a whole bunch of shit went down and then that was just how I lived. I can trace it all back to like six or seven. I know, without a doubt, that my nervous system was fucked from way back then.
I have done a lot of EMDR and other trauma healing protocols. And guess what? It has worked. I have made huge strides in healing how I relate to my life and changing my hard defaults in a way that has a lasting and loving impact on how my life moves forward.
For me anyway, all of the problems were caused by addiction and a fucked up nervous system. And when I addressed both of these, my life leveled out. I was able to grow up and I have been able to string together a stable and purposeful life. I am capable of showing up where I am supposed to, when I am supposed to, most of the time.
Why am I writing about this today? Because I didn’t know. I didn’t know that my addiction and dys-regulation were having the impact on my life like they were. I just didn’t know. So I am offering this up today in case you don’t know either. All of the problems in my life have been handled, to a very large degree, by getting sober and working on helping my nervous system not be in a constant state of fight or flight.
I think the one place that has been a persistent struggle for me is in my most intimate relationships. This is the place where I have needed the most healing and this is the place where I have had the hardest time and least amount of growth. I mean, I am growing, it is just slower and feels like I am moving through quicksand so much of the time. I want to be light and breezy...but I can only pull that off sporadically. I want to not care, but I do, I care a lot.
What I have identified as the source for all the problems is me. I am the problem. It all starts with me. The people I choose, the belief in people I should not, the desperate attempts to heal the past with the present using the unhealed nervous system to try to limp the whole thing along...that has been a hard and repeated lesson.
Today I know, because I have walked the gauntlet, my nervous system is this amazing, ever evolving thing that if I take the time to care for it and heal it a little more every day, almost all of my problems just cease to exist. And perhaps, some of this is because I fail to see them as problems anymore. They receive a different trajectory...just one of living and learning and loving and moving forward. The problem gets address, to some degree, because I stop labeling it a problem.
The rest of the problems are healed and unfucked because I know that my nervous system is wack. And I have to do more work than the average person to unwack it. And in this difficult but subtle acceptance of this most basic thing, I have resolved most of the problems in my life.
So far, all of the problems are handled by dealing with my addiction, helping heal my nervous system and trusting that when something horrible happens in my life, it is just my turn. Life is not punishing me. It is just providing me an opportunity to practice all I have learned and healed. And that is a great way to view all the problems. I am either wounding or healing. The choice is always and forever mine. And I am exceptionally grateful to keep chasing healing.
Again...still.
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