Willing to hurt, willing to heal
Willing to hurt again
I’ve been in weekly therapy for about eight years now. Once a week, my therapist and I talk about my life, why I am the way I am, what happened to me, and how I can heal.
It’s strange to say, but I feel like I have taken all eight years of therapy to get to a place where I am willing to heal. When I first quit drinking, the was enough healing- it was enough for me to just not drink and stay sober. That was all I needed to do, and I did it.
At around 6 months in I joined a women’s recovery group. It was weird for me- sharing my feelings in this way wasn’t something I was used to at all. I got more and more comfortable, and then there was a personality difference in the group and it came with some toxic behavior that the therapist leading the group didn’t contain in time and I ended up leaving the group for my own protection.
I couldn’t handle dealing with the difficult dynamics so early in my sobriety. It was a good decision for me to leave, but I didn’t find another group and I wasn’t interested in going to AA. So I stayed on my own, wrote my blog, and kept not drinking.
I found my therapist at about two years in. I knew I needed more help, that I was recovering in a vacuum and I would stay stuck unless I pushed myself to say things out loud to another person who was trained to listen. It’s funny, I called a few people, and then called Margaret (not her real name) and left a message. She called me back immediately, saying, “I don’t normally call people back like this, but did you just call me?” We laughed and I said I did, that I was looking for a therapist and she offered to talk with me the following week. It felt meant to be in that funny way where things happen in an out of the ordinary way, but are meant to be.
It has taken me so long to trust her, and in some ways I still don’t, and- I understand that isn’t me not trusting her, it’s me not trusting me. It is difficult to be willing to heal, to be willing to say this is true and also that and here’s my part, and this was my fault and this wasn’t my fault. It’s hard for me to be angry about things, I know that’s the next thing and it scares me.
The interesting thing is, after not drinking for a few years, I still had the behaviors of someone who drank- a dry drunk. I still sabotaged myself with relationships that hurt me. I didn’t have any boundaries. I said yes to everything. The only way I took care of myself was not drinking, and going to therapy. Everything else was a crap shoot. I made agreements that I’m not proud of and struggled through endings. I knew my diagnoses, but I didn’t want to heal from them- I wanted them to go away.
It feels weird to get to ten years of sobriety and feel like I’m in year one of recovery. I have done a lot of work, I have worked incredibly hard to get here, and I have healed. And don’t get me wrong, I know. I know that I have healed things and grown in extraordinary ways. I know that I have learned a lot. There’s big stuff to unlearn now.
I pretended for a long lifetime that I didn’t matter. That my drinking didn’t matter, my feelings didn’t matter, my sexual assaults didn’t matter, my painful childhood didn’t matter. That if I cared about any of those things I was making a big deal about nothing. “You’re ok” I would tell myself, acting as if my heart wasn’t broken. I wasn’t willing to heal, because I wasn’t willing to hurt.
That, I think, is the greatest gift my longtime trusty therapist has given me: the willingness to hurt. I don’t know that you can heal until you’re willing to hurt. She has listened to me for hundreds of hours process through my life and watched me avoid my pain, patiently waited with me as I’ve gotten closer and closer to it. Listened to me make excuses for myself, for other people, for my actions and the actions of others. And she has waited for me, like I’ve waited for it: the pain. The thing I’ve avoided at all costs my whole life: the hurt of my life.
I know it sounds like a bad thing, but it is not. It is real. It’s what I need: reality. The hurt of reality, which is the thing that turns into the willingness to heal- I could not see that before, not like I do now. I tried all kinds of tricks and sleight of hand to maneuver healing into place, everything but feeling the hurt I need to feel. God, it sucks. And God, it is good.
It feels more honest than anything I’ve done so far: the ability to accept life as what it is, and in this case that means feeling the fullness of my life and not leaving part of it out. I have been so afraid, and I still am. I’m afraid of my anger, but I’m getting not afraid of my pain.
That feels like progress, big progress, to me.
Thanks for reading,
Amy
