I’ve been in therapy for almost ten years. Every week, I sit with my therapist and work hard to be a good therapy patient. To come out looking clean, and good, and evolved. She knows it, I know it. I remember feeling this way at first, and she called me on it again today.
I think I’m fooling her. I think I fool myself.
This is a hardest time of my recovery. It is hard because it is so complex and vulnerable and I want to go back to when just not drinking was enough.
Why do I have to break into my own heart?
It makes me think about what I was like after I’d had lots of drinks. I was me, but not me. I was in there, but gone. Taking on the full responsibility for all the things that have happened to me is like being in a blackout. It’s not the whole truth. It’s a person with their memory gone and still going through the motions anyway. I don’t want to remember or deal so I shut it down with “It was all my fault.”
It already hurt enough. It hasn’t hurt enough yet.
I was talking to a dear friend the other day, telling her some things about my life, and her face crumpled into pain and tears. “I’m so sorry, you were just a kid",” she said. I teared up, mostly because of her tears, but there were tears of my own there too. She hugged me tight, not in fixing or pity, but with such firm care.
What is it about the helplessness of a situation that makes it feel better if I’m all to blame? I know that my parents often blamed me for accidents like spilling my milk or getting hurt- things that were no one’s fault but needed someone to blame. They blamed me for our relationship struggles when I was a teenager. I blame myself. I blame myself for being sexually assaulted at thirteen, losing my virginity in a blackout at fifteen, for the twenty seven years I spent drinking to deal with my pain and confusion and hurt. I blame myself for not being smart enough, or together enough, that I wasn’t lovable enough for someone to save me.
There are places inside me where I don’t want to go. Where I decided with a grand sweep of my hand that I will take full responsibility and we can all just move the fuck on. No need to be sentimental here. The taking of the responsibility means I can control the narrative. It means I don’t have to worry anymore, that I can dust myself off and pick myself up and never ever look back. If I don’t want to blame anyone I don’t have to. And also doesn’t this make me look good and right, evolved?
How do we know where responsibility lives, and with whom?
Anything one-sided is not whole. If I take all the blame I am full on one side and empty on the other, I will be lopsided for life. It is a frightening thing to think of moving over into the middle when it comes to accountability- to both/and- I have taken on other people’s acts as my own, and left my own responsibilities hidden away in a box in the dark.
I am a believer in wholeness. I can see the ways I am one-sided, and I am willingly looking out at the rest of the view. I can contemplate what it looks like to hold my own responsibility with honesty, to give to others what is theirs, but it still seems kind of far away. It feels like wanting to learn another language, like I’ve been dropped into another country and I can’t understand what anyone is saying, I’ve been trying to look as if I know what everyone is talking about but I’m so tired of faking it.
This, to me, is my deep recovery. It is being in a place I don’t understand and letting myself know that I don’t, letting myself be vulnerable enough to stop pretending the way things have always been is the way they really are. It becomes clearer, like a sky or one bell. It is whole, like a heart that understands the language of the truth.
Beautifully written.
I relate to trying to seem completely together in front of my therapist — I know why we do that but also, why do we do that?