Anger and bitterness
Hi everyone,
I am relatively new to ACA - just got my 3 month chip last week and I am working the first step. Finding ACA has been a great blessing and I am so grateful for it although I find the work quite challenging.
Right now I am struggling with a lot of anger and bitterness and it's hard for me to find a positive or constructive perspective on it. I am really finding it hard to see any way of ever releasing that bitterness.
Specifically, it is a bitterness about all the things in my life that I feel like I have missed out on because of the dysfunction in my life. I turn 38 in the spring and have never been in a longterm relationship (and I am still single), have no kids (which has always been a dream of mine), always had big career goals and although I have had some great opportunities through the years I have been selfsabotaging and getting in my own way and the chances of the level of success I dream of seem very small now and my entire youth was wasted on anorexia, depression, crippling anxiety etc.
There are so many things I wish I would have had the chance to experience and that I feel is now too late for me and although I see my parents for the adult children of dysfunction that they also are and although I know that I must take responsibility for my own life (and Lord knows I am trying and most days doing very well compared to where I have been) I am also feeling a lot of resentment toward my parents. I am angry and bitter at them because I feel like they broke me into a million tiny little pieces and my entire life has been spent feeling like a bad puzzle with missing pieces when it should have been spent enjoying life, enjoying my youth, doing all the things that young people do. I came into this world with such enthusiasm and gumption. For the first 6-8 years of my life I was so full of joy, excitement, boundless creativity, originality, courage and confidence and I feel like all the dysfunction, all the constant criticism, humiliation and emotional neglect and scary things I went through in my childhood home stripped me of all of that. I feel like I had so much potential and I have squandered it because my family dysfunction has stripped me of the best parts of me and left me paralyzed by fear.
I feel deep, deep shame writing this but it is just so present within me these days and I can't seem to find a way to reassure myself that I'll be able to get past it. I am so grateful that my Higher Power has led me to ACA and I am happily walking the path of healing - but at the same time there is a part of me that wonders if all my life will ever be is full of regret. Regret, bitterness and sadness over never having any of the things I so wanted in my life. Things that seem so easy for everyone else to achieve but for me seem impossible. I was never allowed to be angry as a child, it was one of the forbidden feelings and I was shamed and dismissed whenever I tried to express anger - but now that I am going to meetings, working the steps, reaching out, talking to my sponsor etc...I just feel so angry at my parents. So, so angry and bitter.
Do any of you recognize this? Is it possible to move past this?