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to heal was not something i believed i ever needed. not because i lacked any damage, rather it was something i always thought i was capable of doing on my own. i did not believe that addiction came between me and healing and looking at it from this side of a few cycles of twelve steps i see that i did, in all actuality, require recovery to free me to heal from the slings and arrows of life before recovery, of which there were more than a few. the one thing i never would admit to when i was using, or even in early recovery was that i was some sort of victim. the logic continues thusly, if i was not a victim, then i was not harmed and if i was not harmed, there was nothing to heal. after nearly a quarter of a century clean, i finally “owned” the one trauma that defined me since i was five years old, and started the release of all the garbage i piled on top of it, in order to bury my shame and defend myself from it ever happening again. as i “heal” from the events that release have unleashed in my life, i understand what being free to heal really means.
this morning, as i ponder all the other places i need to heal, i can certainly see that as numerous as they be, i would have never arrived at a place where i had the desire to open those little booby-trapped boxes of pain and suffering, to see what i could do to move past them, if i had not cleared the way, with my last FIFTH STEP. what i am uncovering are fairly innocuous and the FEAR i have of them destroying my progress to becoming the sort of person i have always wanted to be, is severely misplaced. in reality, it is holding on to them in some sort of sick attempt to preserve an identity of who i am not, that is the unhealthy part. each and every time i release one of those little parts of who i am not, i move down the path of who i am becoming. i know that the whole paradigm of rebirth and being a different person is a hand that is way overplayed in the recovery community, ad nauseam. i use that as a piece of “common ground” so my peers may relate to my journey. i am actually of the opinion that i am not really changing, i am the same person i always have been, i am just scraping off the crust of garbage i put on top of that person and showing the world who i really am and more than likely could have always been. having the freedom to heal facilitates that transformation and this morning i am grateful that i =have the ways and means to do just that, just for today.

∞ DT ∞