Originally Posted by long at this
When did normal end and how do we get it back? I don't think people realize what damage has been done to very normal people.
Hi long at this,
As I read your post, I felt a lot of pain and exhaustion. Exhaustion at the struggle of life and the problems you've lived with for a long time. Pain at living through it all. I can sympathize and relate.
But I also heard something else. As you ask when normal ends, and about the damage done to normal people and undoing that damage, you write as if this -- your life, your marriage to an alcoholic, your struggles -- was something that was done to you. As if you were on the receiving end of all this without choice.
There are times too that I have felt like a victim. God knows, it's so easy to fall into that trap. But through my recovery I've come to understand the critical role I played, and the choices I made, in living 'unnormal'.
No one else is to blame, at least not in my adult life. Yes, I lived through terrible abuse. Yet I always had choices. And the reason I made some choices, and not others, stems back to my own issues, my own childhood, my own wounding and pain that I brought into every adult relationship.
Understanding all that and processing it in my own recovery and therapy, and taking full responsibility for my own happiness, is the only way I have become my version of normal.