dox

The past haunted me as well.
Things I did as a teen.
Speaking to a therapist didn't help much.
To be fair, I wasn't entirely honest.
I was so embarrassed.
It wasn't until my step 5, telling all of this stuff to my sponsor, that I was able to let go of the past.
I still look back sometimes (like now), but under an entirely different Light.
I am free of the guilt and the shame.
Forgiven.

NYCDoglvr

I suggest asking God for the grace to accept what happened and the ability to let it go. And, keeping your focus on today. We're powerless over the past and the future, our power lies only in what we think and do today.

thisisme

Rio,

I don't waste energy on things I have no power to change.
I don't look back, I'm not going that way.

Best

davaidavai

I've been exchanging emails again with my father, who has a meth addiction and blames me for stuff. Yesterday he said that, ah, he stopped communicating with me because he couldn't handle my sorrows anymore. Sort of a classic thing to say. The man doesn't have a leg to stand on. Meth ruined his life. He stopped communicating when he started meth. In 10 years, he proudly spent 400k down to the bone while I struggled. But as ever, he'll find ways to blame other people, to blame me. He always used to say I was over sensitive as a way of glossing over how hard it was to live with the man, as a way of avoiding himself.

I guess, my point is that we're raised a certain way. I'm not as resilient as a normal person because I wasn't given the space to develop a healthy self concept. The stuff that washes right off a normal person doesn't wash out so easily with me because I've been sensitized to nothing ever being right with the world. I'm sensitized to people who make excuses about their behavior, how the whole thing, the world we live on is built around this false self love, this 'me' BS that my father and his brothers truck in at the expense of reality.

I think I'll always have a deeper sense of shame than other people. But I think I need to find another less shameful way of living where I'm actually of benefit to the world, rather than being a vainglorious cog. Which, lets face it, doesn't work if you've been rattled and maintained a sense of conscience.

Rio97

I can relate to how you feel, Davai.

I got out of a conseling session a little while ago and my therapist really took it to me. We made a lot of progress dealing with this. Not just the family issues, social circumstances, and my own youthful foolishness, but my own underlying issues. Funny, it turns out, that's what needs to most work. All the other stuff just gets in the way. I went from about a 2 to a 4-5.

I realized that alcohol really has influenced me being that low on the scale. Plus the withdrawals. But it clarified how bad I need to quit drinking and gives me motivation to fight the cravings, which are actually starting to kick in. Anyway, I view it as progress.

davaidavai

I think the people who 'got through' for whom life came easier, had positive childhoods. I think other people make it through after a period of reckoning with themselves. It's not an overnight process.

You know, it's my hope that I'll get there someday and someday start living a meaningful, rich experience. As it stands, I've got a cruddy job, am doing nursing pre recs, live in NYC, am 37, never had a serious relationship, probably due to my distrust of people, am lonely a lot, shy in group settings, or clownish. I've goofed up so much. Tremendous public drunkenness episodes synchronized perfectly with defensive, terrified, sad clownishness. Epic embarrassments.

I take stock in Carl Jung, the psychiatrist, what he says about adaptation. Working on where you are going is just as important as processing where you are coming from. They feed each other.

I hope you get to where you are going and find a vantage on your past that feels more comfortable. CJ Jung says that the 'cure' is never really fully reconciling with your past. His patients, he said, moved on and found comfortable vantages on the past, like looking down into a valley from above.

Let's stay in touch and IM me if you want to chat. I don't have many days myself.

Rio97

After a while of therapy and months or more of journaling, today I finally discovered my biggest demon, and it provides a lot of clarity to why I've subjected myself to such self-sabotage and years of alcohol abuse. At the root of it, although I was actually unaware of it, is that I've basically been killing myself with alcohol. At least through denying its harmful affects to my mind and body.

I hope this is a moment of reckoning, and I can build on it to finally achieve sobriety and turn my life around. I have a lot of repressed emotions. This is just the beginning, hopefully, a breakthrough maybe.

lssnheer

I am not so good at dealing with the past. At least not yet. There are a few particular memories/phases from my life which have become like great monoliths, and I struggle now just to turn a blind eye to them. I suppose the best way to deal with the past is to accept it, in much the same way you grieve and eventually accept the loss of someone you love; it is something inevitable and entirely impossible to change, so regardless of how you may feel about it, even if your feelings are legitimate, you have to let it go -- sometimes only time can help you do that, but you must not let it control you all the while.

EDIT: davaidavai, I just read your post and it strikes a chord. Very well put, thank you very much for your insight.

sugarbear1

I don't repeat it, I stay sober, I worked and work those 12 steps. I was desperate and hopeless enough and willing enough to try something different.

Berrybean

Same for me. Counselling didn't do much to help me either - the step 4 and 5 work was kind of amazing in what a relief it was. A lot of the things that made me feel bad, I realised that I didn't really understand why I felt as I did about them or why I'd acted as I did. Coming to terms with those things helped me work past them. There were a lot of memories from my childhood and teens that were pretty much crippling me - I was walking around tied in knots of resentment; fear; and shame. Step 5 was freeing to a degree that I find it hard to explain.

It's amazing what a slight shift in perspective can do.

Hope you find a way to move away from whatever this memory is.