Let Go and Be Free
Discover tips on self-healing, overcome a dysfunctional childhood and find happiness.
I recommend that you pick up Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not an Apology. Here’s a quote to think on: “I want to assure you: Radical self-love is not light years away. It is not away at all. It lives in you. It is your very essence.”
I remember being a kid and my father taking me to the local park during the winter. It was cold, so cold that the creek had frozen over. I walked across the ice and saw kids playing hockey, other parents bringing their kids onto the ice, and my father told me: “Do you see that patch of snow on the ice? Don’t step on that.”
He turned away and left me on my own as he talked to other parents. I played on the ice, but my curiosity got the best of me. I walked up to the patch of snow and stepped on it. Too late, I realized that the snow had covered a hole in the ice and I fell in up to my knee. The shock from the icy cold water hit me hard.
Yesterday the first person in the United States received the Coronavirus vaccine. But we also crossed a nightmarish milestone: 300,000 Americans have died from the virus. I am living in a time that historians will look back at and see as some of the darkest days in America. The news is mixed because we have hope as the vaccine is being rolled out, but it will take several months until most Americans can receive the vaccine.
Relief is on the way, but it’ll take time.
As a child, I grew up in a dysfunctional home. I took on extra responsibilities and learned quickly that if I wanted something, then I needed to do it on my own. I had to figure out a lot of things on my own and didn’t have the help that I needed as a kid.
Now, decades later, I often hunker down and push forward to get through problems.
Day after day you are saddled with a heavy burden, or so you think. Each of us is trapped within our own struggles and it’s difficult for us to put those burdens down and to relax for a bit.
Guilt, repression, depression, anger, hate, fear, anxiety, and all sorts of challenges can rise up and try to strangle you and pull you down. You can ignore your feelings, repress them, or numb them with drugs, alcohol, work, sex, or a whole laundry list of things.
When I began my journey on recovering from growing up in an alcoholic or a dysfunctional family, I felt alone. I went about my day and did all that I needed to do to keep moving forward in my life. But I kept stumbling upon situations that would cause me pain. I’d go to a party and see people abusing alcohol and I just didn’t fit in.
People would be drinking a lot and I found that I didn’t enjoy that type of life. I tried to stay away from such situations, but I found out quickly that “normal” American life consisted of people getting together and drinking. I found my way to surround myself around friends who I trusted and who understood my background and why I didn’t drink much.
As I write this, it’s 15 days before Christmas. I’m part of an Adult Children of Alcoholics group and all of us are struggling with the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic. Yesterday 3,053 people died from the virus in the United States.
There will come a time in which you hit your stride. You will go about your day, weeks, and years, and then you might be tempted to think that you’re cured of all the bad things that happened to you in the past.
But suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, you get hit with a problem and you find that you fall hard. Old behaviors come roaring back and you look at yourself in the mirror and think: What the hell happened?
The more we blame others in our life, the longer we’ll suffer in our lives. We cannot go back and change the past. We can blame our parents or those who abused us, but that isn’t going to solve the problem either.
It’s a lot easier to focus on blaming others. We could full well within our rights to be angry about our upbringing, how we were treated, and the trauma that we lived through.
When I started writing my Let Go and Be Free series back in November 2019, I wanted to share my experiences of growing up in an alcoholic and dysfunctional family with people. I also wanted to share the skills and tools that I learned over the years that helped me recover.
But what I didn’t know is that in March 2020, the world would have to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic. I have kept writing through lockdowns, loss of my job, rising virus cases, schools closing, great political and social upheavals, but there is good news today.
If you are suffering and going through a difficult time, it will not last forever. I remember how I felt after a bad breakup: I thought that I wouldn’t be able to sleep again. My brain kept racing, and I realized that I had lost the person that I loved forever.
Forever.
That feeling of permanence hurt any time I thought about the loss.
