Self care is paramount to recovery of any sort. Self care is a number one priority in a healthy persons life. Self care is something I focused on a lot in this blog over the year I was maintaining my sobriety.
Whats the flip side of self care?
I am not in self care yet. I am still pulling out of my relapse of self harm. Coming to understand that relapse is just that.... a trip back into self harm.
Self harm for me might not be the same for others. Self harm starts simple in my relapse pattern. It starts with a single thought. A thought that I need something outside myself to 'complete' me. I have had enough relapses now to be able to trace each one of them back to a sense of incompleteness or lack of self worth.
Self care gives me a sense of wholeness. I feel love for myself when I am taking care of all my needs for myself. Paying my bills with money I have earned. Cleaning my body with products I have made from organic items. Feeding my body with healthy foods and exercising in a way that nurtures me. Building supportive relationships in my life and connecting regularly to my higher power.
Those are the things that start to slip when I begin to seek outside myself for that Love.
I seem to always get it in my head that an easier path for me is to find a man that will take care of those needs for me. A man to pay my bills. A man to take me out to eat because cooking is a terribly redundant task, This one and only guy will be all I need for supportive relationships... it will be him and I against the world and he will be my god!
Yup that is always the single thought..... hhahaha yup I will repeat 'single' thought that leads me away from my self care program and back into the realm of self harm and the 'I give up, this shit is too hard!'
It is after that thought that I actually stop going to the gym because I am bored with it. I stop all the self care practices one by one for different reasons and soon find myself away from my once profound happiness and back in the blackness of misery. Sitting in the misery with no guy and shocked at how I got back to this place of 'yuck'.
Why do we actively choose misery over happiness?
I make the choices in my life systematically that take me back to misery every single time I reach happiness. Why is that? What does misery still hold for me that makes me give up my happiness? What is the magical allure misery entices me with to give up all I have worked for and trade it for where I have come from?
I ask this most humbly as I claw my way back out of the whole that is so well known to me, back up to the mountain of happiness I have built for myself.
I do know as I work my way through the landslide I am taking new awareness's with me this time. I do understand on a much deeper level the why's of my life and the hows as well. For this I am entirely grateful for my recent back slide. Seeing my life as a spiral that is constantly moving forward has helped me accept the dips back into the hole which is wonderful, yet at the same time terribly frustrating.
Coming out if this dip I am faced with my impending self care and the grip I have on my self harm.
I 'know' from previous personal experience what to do to feel better. I know all the steps and actions to take to get my body back in good health and my mind too. I am working on a new area, the emotional body and that's exciting, but the rest is known deeply enough to be second nature.... yet I resist.
Why is that?
Why after all this time and all this experience am I still holding on to some misery.
I blog it here to figure it out. My therapist asked me last week what it is I am still getting out of my obsessions. Because I am getting something from them if I prefer to live in them, then in my happiness that is so easily obtained.
Why do I resist the treadmill when I know my body will ache less and I will feel tremendously better after I run for a bit? Why do I choose the cold pizza over the apple, knowing I hate the way the grease of the cold pizza is gonna taste on my tongue? Why do I choose to lay on the couch watching movies instead of calling one of my amazing supports and gaining valuable insight into my life?
Is ignorance bliss?
I started a course a few months back. A course that took that little seed sitting in the pit of my stomach and fed it a growth hormone. That seed now has busted through its shell and is making its way up my esophagus.
It's so easy to follow the sheep. Its so easy to do what everyone else is doing. Be it the lazy self harm way or even the get fit cause that's what we are all doing way. Following blindly what others do is how this course started out. It was a course on societal trance. The proverbial sheep.
Todays Just for Today reading was about making choices that are good for us and owning those choices. When I came into narcotics anonymous I did the suggestions cause I was told to and when they didn't work for me I left the program thinking everyone in the program was an asshole.
Suggestions are just that..... suggestions. Some work and some don't. Being told what to do was the way I lived my life and the rebellious nature in me was to do the opposite but only because I was following what I was being told. Contradiction, I understand.
Self care I am starting to see is way way more then just eating right and paying my bills on time. Even more then being connected to my higher power. Self care is about knowing what I need in that moment and not feeling like I am suppose to being doing something because it made you feel good in the past.
It's really about feeling good, isnt it?
I have always sought to feel better. I am constantly chasing the feel good dragon. When I am not copping out with dope I am busting my ass at the gym to feel better. Always with the positive and running fearfully from the negative. What is so wrong with the negative?
I get that to a person that is always in the negative then yes lets teach that person the flip side and the light. For me personally I have always been in the light.... superficial light albeit but light none the less. For me to accept the negative is absurd. For me to embrace my shadow is not okay. For me to have a negative feeling when I know a million and one ways to get out of it seems ridiculous to stay in it.
That is the societal conditioning that I learned about so many months ago. Take Care of yourself.... go to the gym. Take care of yourself.... pay your bills. Take care of yourself.... raise your kids well.
Whats if taking care of myself right now was just sleeping and eating the cold pizza. Whats if taking care of myself was fantasizing about my knight in shining armor coming to rescue me from my miseries. Whats if taking care of myself was letting my girls pamper and care for me just for today.
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I think I am learning that listening to my body and my inner knowings is what self care really is about. I know that going to the gym will give me energy, but I am also learning that a great deep breathing yoga meditation does the same thing and is much easier for me right now. I am learning that getting out of my feelings has always been my way and sitting in them is actually pretty cool too.
I am seeing that when I go into relapse there is almost always a reason for me to dip back down into the pit of healing. I knew what I was doing when I picked up that first drug. I knew what kind of world of hurt I was in for when I brought that first drug into my lungs. Yet I still did it anyways.
As much as I have beaten myself up for the why's and hows I have not given myself enough credit for having the courage to move in that direction in the first place. I am not condoning conscious relapse for anyone, but for me it was the necessary path for me to finally get what I wasn't getting any other way.
Relapse brought me to a personal crisis that needed to be broken wide open in order for me to finally move forward and away from the constant need to have a man take care of me. I am sure I could have taken a softer easier route to come to that lesson. And many of my friends have been preaching that lesson to me along the way, but I am one that has always needed to learn through my own experience.
What my friends could not teach me was the opening of my heart. Through this current manifestation of addiction in my life my heart has been cracked open. My emotions are finally flooding my reality. The dissociation I had with my feelings for my entire life has been lifted and for the first time in my adult years I am feeling again.... truly feeling. not superficial feelings, not mimicked feelings but real emotional outbursts of feelings.
This is the self care I was missing in my recovery before. This is why I was always seeking the guy to fix me..... because I knew somewhere deep within me that only a guy could awaken me to my feelings. Had I continues to listened to my friends, I would not have awoken my feelings. I now can finally move on from having the need for a guy to take Care of me because I was only leaning on societal hypnosis as my avenue to get what I really needed.
I guess through this entire post I have finally come to understand what my choice to be in misery is really giving me..... balance. To really feel the full range of my feelings. I choose to be in misery today because I have never given myself the choice to sit here before. I am always trying to feel better...more more more better. I have never allowed myself the luxury to actually consciously choose a negative emotion knowing that I can easily get out of it if I wanted to, but I choose to sit in it instead. Misery is giving me something today.... a choice.
And I am learning...... Misery is not the bad guy. It is just part of all that is. It is not 'sad' to be in the negative... it is balance to my abundant light.
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