Mike,
Thanks for explaining. It sounds to me what you're really talking about is self-love and compassion for youself. Compassion that things were really that hard, that things really hurt that much, that you turned to relief and escape through addiction.
I am not a 12-stepper, and personally, I do not buy into a model of character defects. I believe framing things as character defects is continuing the shame and blame of the family systems we grew up in. None of us was born with these characater defects. None of us put up our hands and said, "Yes, I want a life of denial and torment."
No. Instead, we learned how to survive the best way we knew how. Before we were strong enough to face the pain underneath and relearn how to survive -- hopefully to thrive.
No, denial is not a character defect. It's a behaviour learned when we were young in order to survive terrible pain of the realilties we lived in -- and as children were unable to change that reality.
So yes, keep focusing on reality. That your pain really was that big.
gf