Originally Posted by 1Dayatatyme

Reedling, I included this quote of yours because I pondered it for days... I came to SR for my addiction to pain pills, but as soon as my head cleared, I find the posts "over here" with the ACOA's, tend to illuminate the "root cause" of my addiction issues, my need to numb out, or to distract myself, and just recently I almost fell over at the strength of a sudden flash of insight.... I create chaos when I am scared that I am going to be abandoned or when too many changes are happening in my life. I tend to make things worse by creating chaos and when emotional issues arise, good and happy emotions, as well the negative ones, I can create chaos because I had not learned "what does a person do when experiencing emotions?" I am realizing that I have become adept at stirring up chaos sneakily and subtly, and with great harm to usually no one but myself. Anything seems to be better than to feel abandoned. I also would rather deal with the fallout of the chaos I create, then experience the intense fear of abandonment... see for me, the anxiety of waiting for abandonment to happen is more terrifying than the actual abandonment. Waiting for that other shoe to drop.... seems like most of my life, I am in a state of fearfully waiting, with anticipatory anxiety as my baseline emotion. And, as an ACOA who had a raging, gambling, alcoholic father, who himself was orphaned when he lost both his mother and father within two years of turning 7 years old, presumably from complications due to alcoholism, abandonment issues feel like they are part of my genetic coding.... yes indeed, it is in the air I breathe, the water I swim in....
To give just one example, my youngest son just graduated from college and will be getting married in late summer.... my pill addiction came on at around the beginning of his junior year... I was very adept at hiding it, high functioning, working, keeping the bills paid, exhausted often, but too busy or high or numbed out to feel the anxiety, the fear, of knowing that there will be no one to focus my caring on, no one to distract me from myself and all the resultant feelings that go along with knowing I will be living alone with little to distract me and the fear of the unknown, as this will be one of the few times I will be living alone in over 35 years. In March, though, something shifted, and I abruptly quit my pills, I was done being "out of it" and pretending all was peachy keen. Some deep need to survive emerged, and I could not continue to self sabotage any longer. I wanted to be present - to feel all the feelings a "normal" (haha) mother would feel as her youngest successfully leaves the nest.
I am so tired of being afraid of my feelings... I want to feel joy, and pride, as well as loneliness and the fear of not having to care for someone as a way to distract me from the pain and grief I have accumulated over all these years. I want to be fully alive, and I have taken the first steps in doing just that. How hard it is to articulate this to accurately reflect my process, and yet how necessary.