The path of recovery can be lonely

The path of emotional healing and recovery is in many ways a path of shedding, we release old beliefs, we see through illusions, we discover patterns, we come to understand those we thought were friends were really not, we face ealier loneliness in our soul that before we covered over with addictions.  My therapist Kat often reminds me how lonely this kind of psychological work can be.  And as I see others struggle too, I know I am not alone, although on some of the darker days as my followers know I find myself like Dante in the middle of a deep dark wood.  And yet in that wood there is sometimes moonlight, trees, compost and grass and lot of other critters.  There may be a little wooden shack with a fire I can light and twigs. There like the maiden without hands from a fairytale I resonate with, I may have been led to grow my own feeling hands back, something I want to touch on in another post I am currently writing and has been in drafts for some weeks.

I need to remember though that on days like yesterday when my sister refused to come to dinner, as painful as that may be, it is also maybe a blessing.   I know for a long time my path led a different way to the path of family.  I chose active recovery, to acknowledge the roots of alcoholism and emotional neglect that reached three or four generations back as well as the mother wound that repeated throughout my family.  I chose not to go on drugs, I chose to do therapy, I chose to read, to listen to dreams, to understand depression not as an illness but as purposeful, something to do with the dark night of the soul.  And as I look back, I see that all along the Self in me, as part of my purpose, guided my soul.  It is that Self that I believe gives rise, not to meaningless feelings ‘that might get me in trouble,’ but to purposeful ones which show me effective and ineffective ways to live.

At times I have been slow getting the message.  At times I have not understood where I was NOT meant to go and be.  I hungered for love and understanding from my family but it was not always meant to be.  In a way I was a pioneer or circuit breaker as far as our family trauma went.  I had to look outside my family for new family, just as the duck that I read about in another book I cannot remember the name of in recovery had to leave the poisoned pond that his other family would not believe was poisoned.  And Yes, on this journey for a lot of it, I have had to walk alone and yet in some way I know I am not alone, or paradoxically, I am and I am not, if that makes sense.

I will not lie and say I do not hunger for a soul who deeply sees, knows and loves the whole of me and yet I also know I do have that in therapy and with a few others.  I also know although I feel so alone on some days as long as I write and reach out here I am never truly alone as so many of us writing and sharing our journey and poetry here, are on a similar path, one that leads to embodiment and authentic honesty often through your own deep dark wood.  I often feel that n many ways society is emerging in and through this process along with many of us.

For those connections and all of the support I have found here during 5 years of blogging, I am grateful as WordPress has given me a medium to share, and although I still doubt my way and purpose on many days maybe it does not lie in some far off place but is actually here right before me when I get up and after breakfast turn on my computer to link to my own and others blogs.  It is then that I feel, on the lonely days, less alone, that all I have gone through does have a meaning and a purpose, one that I can choose to believe in and nurture with my recovery, my writing and by showing up in my life to be a force of love for myself and others who feel alone, sometimes and struggle feeling all alone too, just as I do.