“Taking care of myself is a big job no wonder I avoided doing it for so long”
Growing up in an alcoholic home that started generations in the making sets forth a pattern of being. It is a pattern of being that is a coping mechanism way of life dependent on how others around you are acting and feeling. It seems like your normal, it is as natural as breathing, but there is nothing naturally healthy about it. But you are a child and you will not know this until you are older and the pattern becomes a way of behavior that no longer serves you. The funny thing about life is that what does not serve you in the long run, does not serve others as well.
As an adult now that has had a life enmeshed in drug addiction and alcoholism in every which way, I had to learn to be a person of faith. Faith in me and my God and not faith in how others were behaving. I learned thanks be to God that my OKNESS (my word) could never be dependent on someone else’s OKNESS.
This week God has put me in direct contact with several friends who are learning how to take care of theirselves, me included!!! They are trying to figure out when does loving my brother or sister or friend become care-taking and victimhood. For me I had to learn it to survive. When your entire family is wrapped in this disease your only way out is UP!!!! You have to find a way of coping that is a healthy way of loving yourself and caring for yourself. This also gives others the freedom and the dignity to care for themselves and make their own mistakes that are necessary for growth.
It is funny how life brings things to you just when you need them. I am re-reading Present Over Perfect AGAIN and once again I wonder just how many times I will need to read it to live it!!! I guess as many times as it takes. If we are open, God is really good at sending us the message that we need at just the right time.
Hugh used to always tell me that in an alcoholic home there emerges one that tries to take the attention away from the disfunction by being an over-achiever, the one who is always. peaceful, always happy, deflects from the crazy, does all that they can to make others happy. Does this sound like someone you know? Our attributes If left unchecked can be our downfall. I love how Shauna puts it in Present Over Perfect: “The very thing that makes you you, that makes you great, that makes you different from everyone else is also the thing that , unchecked will ruin you.”
Well Dang, Shauna when you put it like that how can I not take notice? I am on a grand adventure of discovering what exactly God has in store for me the next half of my life. I guess that is my optimistic way of saying I will live to 120!!! I know that I have learned so much, so very much. I have learned it through pain and death and back again. I have not learned these things because of a constant happy environment. I have however learned to. be truly content and happy right here, right now, where I am with what I have. I have learned to be at peace even in the middle of an otherwise crazy situation.
I have learned that my peace, my happiness and my joy can never ever be determinant on the joy or the happiness of another. I of course want to spend my life in the pursuit of kindness towards others and love towards all of God’s kids. But there is a difference in loving others and losing ourselves in them.
I am so far from where I want to be but so far from where I started. I am so thankful that God seems to send me friends that remind me of the lessons that I never want to forget. I want to grasp onto the knowledge that I truly am the one that is here to take care of myself with God’s help and direction.
Oh how thankful I am for a group and a community that I can share my heart wide open and full, no holding back, lifting up, revving up for a life that is free to be fully me!!! And so it is.
With the deepest of love to all of you!!!! Thanks for loving me so well!!!
Karen