8 months.
Member
Join Date: Jun 2016
Posts: 73
Originally Posted by sleepie 
I passed 8 months sober a day or two ago.
Have we any Nick Cave fans here?
He did a great cover album, "Kicking Against the Pricks". I really recommend it. Another fine cultural contribution from our Aussie friends.
https://youtu.be/Zc2oKEXFL5w?list=PL...B04c47OMmQq6xk
Have we any Nick Cave fans here?
He did a great cover album, "Kicking Against the Pricks". I really recommend it. Another fine cultural contribution from our Aussie friends.
https://youtu.be/Zc2oKEXFL5w?list=PL...B04c47OMmQq6xk
Member
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Posts: 81
I am shy about sharing but I don't think nastiness has a place here. Sleepie is battling with her own things. She also has compassion and kindness toward others which, in my books, means everything.
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Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Posts: 81
Might I add. I have spent my entire career as a social worker working with people in unbearable pain. But it didn't help my pain which is well...personal. Actually it would be insulting to my clients to use them as some way to help me.
Catch 22
Join Date: Jun 2016
Location: South Africa
Posts: 327
"What fresh hell is this" - Dorothy Parker.
John, your assumptions about what Sleepy and others for that matter must or must not feel in recovery is uncalled for and misplaced. You sound like Monty Python's four Yorkshiremen trying to outdo each other in the poverty stakes.
Mental anguish and battling in recovery has nothing to do with how comfortable or well off a person is. It is a unique and individual battle for each of us. The number of famous and super wealthy people who battled with addiction over the ages speak for itself. George Best springs to mind.
Assuming that you know the depths of some one elses struggle is just ignorant.
John, your assumptions about what Sleepy and others for that matter must or must not feel in recovery is uncalled for and misplaced. You sound like Monty Python's four Yorkshiremen trying to outdo each other in the poverty stakes.
Mental anguish and battling in recovery has nothing to do with how comfortable or well off a person is. It is a unique and individual battle for each of us. The number of famous and super wealthy people who battled with addiction over the ages speak for itself. George Best springs to mind.
Assuming that you know the depths of some one elses struggle is just ignorant.
Member
Join Date: Jan 2014
Posts: 3,293
I was simply suggesting that by helping others, you are helping yourself. You get a much better perspective and appreciation of your own situation when you help others deal with their own situation. I think that's pretty tough to argue with. Getting out of yourself and focusing on others is healthy and helps get a clearer perspective of your own situation. Anybody would benefit from doing this, no matter how difficult their situation is. Besides, it can help by seeing what others have used to survive tough situations and apply it to your own situation. John
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Join Date: May 2012
Location: Wisconsin, USA
Posts: 16,945
Folks, lets keep all assumptions about the intentions and motivations of others out of public discussion. We are all here to help each other find solutions and support and arguing helps no one.
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Join Date: Aug 2012
Location: Chicago
Posts: 5,450
The real tragedy of having a horrible childhood is that the people who took from us the things we needed to be self-loving, self-validating adults can't be the ones to give those things back to us. They took those things because someone else took them from them, and they thought they could just take ours, but it doesn't work like that. What they stole wasn't tangible, and it wasn't theirs, and so it was useless to them. They were never brave enough to nurture their own.
What I found is that the capacity for those things to return and grow remained within me, even though those seeds were so tiny I thought they were non-existent. Nurturing those seeds was pretty lonely at the beginning, and felt like a pointless endeavor - for years, I'm talking. It required me to do a bunch of things I was not comfortable with - for me that included therapy, removing toxic people from my life (including members of my immediate family), and sitting with a metric ton of bad feelings. But it also included taking esteemable actions and actively making choices that felt so, so wrong - like spending time only with people who made me feel good about myself, spending time not in a relationship. Loneliness drove me to do things that I never would have - I auditioned for shows with companies I thought were "too good for me", a funny little writing exercise from a book I was reading turned into a full-blown novel. The crappy job I hated and had been complaining about for years? I asked myself what would happen if I invested all of myself into just doing the job, and not worrying about how I felt about the job. After all, until I could get a new one, that job took up fifty precious hours of my life every week, what if I chose to make those hours as worthwhile as it was in my power to do? You know, the job didn't change - it was still an ill-defined position in a poorly run company full of unhappy people - but *I* changed enough to realize that I actually deserved to work somewhere better.
These kinds of changes did not happen overnight, and they required a lot of faith on my part (I am an atheist, so this was a bit of a challenge for me). And certainly my childhood circumstances were different than yours. But I believe that we all have the power to restore the things that were taken from us when we could not defend ourselves, even you, sleepie. Especially you. Some days it was all I could do to muster up the courage to do one esteemable thing - write a paragraph, edit a chapter, prepare for one audition for just five minutes. Still, those things added up. Each one made the next thing more possible.
Luckily, I also learned that one is never too old to do this. All of this is many years in my past now and life is so much better. I know there is, and always will be, a hole in my heart where a good childhood should be, and that that hole can never be filled. But whereas twenty years ago it felt like that hole encompassed my entire being, today it is merely a small piece of me. It's mine, but it is not the entirety of who I am, and I can live with it.
What I found is that the capacity for those things to return and grow remained within me, even though those seeds were so tiny I thought they were non-existent. Nurturing those seeds was pretty lonely at the beginning, and felt like a pointless endeavor - for years, I'm talking. It required me to do a bunch of things I was not comfortable with - for me that included therapy, removing toxic people from my life (including members of my immediate family), and sitting with a metric ton of bad feelings. But it also included taking esteemable actions and actively making choices that felt so, so wrong - like spending time only with people who made me feel good about myself, spending time not in a relationship. Loneliness drove me to do things that I never would have - I auditioned for shows with companies I thought were "too good for me", a funny little writing exercise from a book I was reading turned into a full-blown novel. The crappy job I hated and had been complaining about for years? I asked myself what would happen if I invested all of myself into just doing the job, and not worrying about how I felt about the job. After all, until I could get a new one, that job took up fifty precious hours of my life every week, what if I chose to make those hours as worthwhile as it was in my power to do? You know, the job didn't change - it was still an ill-defined position in a poorly run company full of unhappy people - but *I* changed enough to realize that I actually deserved to work somewhere better.
These kinds of changes did not happen overnight, and they required a lot of faith on my part (I am an atheist, so this was a bit of a challenge for me). And certainly my childhood circumstances were different than yours. But I believe that we all have the power to restore the things that were taken from us when we could not defend ourselves, even you, sleepie. Especially you. Some days it was all I could do to muster up the courage to do one esteemable thing - write a paragraph, edit a chapter, prepare for one audition for just five minutes. Still, those things added up. Each one made the next thing more possible.
Luckily, I also learned that one is never too old to do this. All of this is many years in my past now and life is so much better. I know there is, and always will be, a hole in my heart where a good childhood should be, and that that hole can never be filled. But whereas twenty years ago it felt like that hole encompassed my entire being, today it is merely a small piece of me. It's mine, but it is not the entirety of who I am, and I can live with it.
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Thread Starter
Join Date: Apr 2010
Posts: 8,614
I'm exhausted. My sleep has been awful and yesterday after being up for 24 hours I slept until 7, then just took a Benadryl to try and sleep at night again. This has always been an issue for me. For whatever reason it was exacerbated by having my heart dashed to smithereens, set afire and left a pile of ash many years ago. Funny how things linger, no matter how you ignore them, move on, put them out of your heart and mind, they'll still affect a person like a noxious smoke that's been inhaled, long dissipated and forgotten but for the mysterious ailment that's set in one's bones.
Thank you sunshinel for your kind comments. I do have battle with my own difficulties and I wish I could just toss them aside, live for today. That doesn't apply much when you've been exposed for many years to certain things. And it doesn't help much that many won't understand where you're coming from, it's alienating and lonely. And you'll be judged at worst, dismissed at best, in real life it's a case of silent suffering if you can't just "play the game" and it's shallow, ridiculous rules. I was never cut out for any of that.
I have spoken at length in the past about my many volunteer gigs, and frankly I find it tacky to mention them. I don't do things so that I can talk about it and boast. I'll mention only this once more, that I have volunteered many times- including at a food pantry when I myself was unemployed and had little money for groceries. I hid the fact that I was very poor, lived in a dangerous neighborhood where people were shot regularly and hoped that nobody noticed my thrift store clothes. I don't know what gives anyone the impression I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, however I can assure everyone I was not. I have a working class background and have been on my own and "no contact" with FOO, which is it's own special kind of heartbreak, for many years. I worked 2 jobs many times in my life to pay my bills, and student loans. I lived as a solitary female for many years, no mate, nobody but me. I have been in a position where I made barely enough money to pay my bills and buy my meds and then had nothing left for food. I recall vividly the pain of hunger entwined with the deep humiliation of not doing better for myself. I have never "done well". I know that it is absolutely because of the traumas I suffered for the first two decades of my life. If I have anything now, at all, at my age and after living on low or modest wages my entire life, handling myself on my own with no FOO and an abusive upbringing and having never been taught that I have any right at all to feel good about myself or deserve anything in life- I like to think that maybe, just maybe life threw me a small bone in the same arbitrary nature it gave me near 20 years of several kinds of abuse for the first half of my life. If there are resentments for that, there are plenty of truly unconscionable folks with a lot of money in their pockets that might be more deserving of it. Maybe one could set up a protest or engage in some activism against such a thing, there are countless greedy corporations deserving of this.
I have not been rich in my life, not in money, family or beauty, not in love or talent or grey matter.
I'm tired and down, I can respond more later but I am worn out and sad folks.
Sparklekitty I appreciate your thoughtful response and would like to comment but in awhile, I'm really worn out. I do especially appreciate your insights though as another who if I am correct had to go "no contact" with FOO. It's not a common thing, and it has to be pretty bad if that's what needs to be done.
Thank you sunshinel for your kind comments. I do have battle with my own difficulties and I wish I could just toss them aside, live for today. That doesn't apply much when you've been exposed for many years to certain things. And it doesn't help much that many won't understand where you're coming from, it's alienating and lonely. And you'll be judged at worst, dismissed at best, in real life it's a case of silent suffering if you can't just "play the game" and it's shallow, ridiculous rules. I was never cut out for any of that.
I have spoken at length in the past about my many volunteer gigs, and frankly I find it tacky to mention them. I don't do things so that I can talk about it and boast. I'll mention only this once more, that I have volunteered many times- including at a food pantry when I myself was unemployed and had little money for groceries. I hid the fact that I was very poor, lived in a dangerous neighborhood where people were shot regularly and hoped that nobody noticed my thrift store clothes. I don't know what gives anyone the impression I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, however I can assure everyone I was not. I have a working class background and have been on my own and "no contact" with FOO, which is it's own special kind of heartbreak, for many years. I worked 2 jobs many times in my life to pay my bills, and student loans. I lived as a solitary female for many years, no mate, nobody but me. I have been in a position where I made barely enough money to pay my bills and buy my meds and then had nothing left for food. I recall vividly the pain of hunger entwined with the deep humiliation of not doing better for myself. I have never "done well". I know that it is absolutely because of the traumas I suffered for the first two decades of my life. If I have anything now, at all, at my age and after living on low or modest wages my entire life, handling myself on my own with no FOO and an abusive upbringing and having never been taught that I have any right at all to feel good about myself or deserve anything in life- I like to think that maybe, just maybe life threw me a small bone in the same arbitrary nature it gave me near 20 years of several kinds of abuse for the first half of my life. If there are resentments for that, there are plenty of truly unconscionable folks with a lot of money in their pockets that might be more deserving of it. Maybe one could set up a protest or engage in some activism against such a thing, there are countless greedy corporations deserving of this.
I have not been rich in my life, not in money, family or beauty, not in love or talent or grey matter.
I'm tired and down, I can respond more later but I am worn out and sad folks.
Sparklekitty I appreciate your thoughtful response and would like to comment but in awhile, I'm really worn out. I do especially appreciate your insights though as another who if I am correct had to go "no contact" with FOO. It's not a common thing, and it has to be pretty bad if that's what needs to be done.
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