You are beautiful and there are ways to teach your heart to believe it.
Truly Step Eleven has brought me the most enlightenment, healing, self awareness, and fulfillment of all the 12 steps. Granted, the other eleven steps are necessary for recovery. But had I not spent years in meditation I would not know myself or my Higher Power very well.
My Higher Power is light and life. I am light and life. Connecting to my H.P. during prayer and meditation allows me to absorb the gifts the Spirit has for me. The most wonderful experience and closeness to The Creator I have ever
felt was during a time of desperation and addiction. Five other humans lay hands on me and prayed. They circled around me. They spoke in languages unknown to me. At first it scared me. I had flashbacks of shooting Cocaine and I began to sweat. And then I felt the Spirit of my Great Grandmother shoot through my heart. It was her I felt her as sure as I am sitting here today she was there to reassure me. And then came the light. My entire body became full of oceans of love. Image if an entire ocean could be in your body what that would feel like. It would be nearly impossible for your body to hold such power inside of it. But somehow I was able to feel an ocean of love inside me.
Spiritual things cannot be explained with carnal or earthly words. They just don’t fit. That is why I use metaphors to describe my spiritual experience. The reason I was desperate enough to request prayer from these people was I suffered from heroin addiction. For the whole story read my book: https://www.recoveryfarmhouse.net/paradise-for-the-hellbound/ I was at my wits end. All it took was a mustard seed of faith to believe that just maybe my creator would help me overcome addiction. I stayed sober for years just by one spiritual experience.
However without the emotional coping tools I so desperately needed I was destined to experience my original pain and to numb that pain again. Why was I in pain? Because I believed I was inferior to every person on the planet. My Father taught me that I was bad, wrong, and a failure. I suffered abuse at his hands. He left me to the wolves to suffer more abuse while I searched for Love in all the wrong places. What my father taught me was I deserved to be beaten and abused. Since I have thoroughly processed the emotional ramifications of that abuse I choose now to move on. But not before I expressed and felt my original pain.
You see recovery does not consist of whitewashing who I am and what I have been through. But rather recovery is about delving into self to release out our core issues the reason for our pain. It’s about learning knew ways to process pain in a healthy way. All too often people in AA will shut you down when what we need is to cry, to share, and to express our original pain and suffering that we repressed for so long. Ignoring our core issues by saying “this too shall pass” or “out of the problem into the solution” is not always the right way to handle what we are going through. There is a time for grieving and our own heart is the only one who can dictate that. Please, crying is a healthy emotion. I spend at least three years in early recovery screaming in my car to get out all the pain I had stuffed own for so long.
It took me six months to cry when I got sober. I had shut off the faucet of tears and replaced the flow with a stifled pill of anger and rage. Rage does not get out that which we need to let flow from our bowels. Anger will not disseminate the pain in our soul. Doing step four and step ten is a great start. But we women must learn deeper emotional expression, we must if we are to heal. Guttural sounds from our bowels will disperse stagnate pain that lives in us causing depression and severe anxiety. IT MUST COME OUT.
We need a place we can be alone to moan, groan, scream, cry, write, and journal our anger, wrath, pain, feelings of inferiority, disgust, bitterness, shame, and guilt. What level of healing to you want? I am telling you now that you can be free of anxiety and depressing simply by learning to express core emotions from the past.
There is another element of which we women need so badly. We require sister who will stand by us and validate our pain. NEVER gravitate to people who think they need to shut you down in anyway. When you cry, it’s for a reason. We need a sister who is an empathic listener and can relate to our deepest feelings of fear, shame, inferiority, guilt, disgust, and who will see our inner power.
Once we release (and it can take months or years) our core issues we can rise up and stand in the female power we have been given by our Creator. Men are incapable in most cases of giving us the empathy we need. We need validated. “I know what you mean, I have felt what you are feeling, you are a good woman, you have suffered at the hands of an awful and abusive man.” You are allowed to express being a victim.
Don’t let status quo’s tell you what your heart is and is not allowed to express. Truly to heal we must get in touch with the child who has been victimized and feel the anger toward our abuser. Take a plastic bat and beat the tree or the bed with it. Visualize your abuser. Express your anger in this healthy way. Then cry your tears. NO FORGIVENESS SHOULD COME PREMATURELY BEFORE YOU HAVE EXPRESSED THE PAIN ATTACHED TO BEING ABUSED.
We shall not forgive a soul until our pain has first been expressed and let out. Please do not confuse condemnation with processing anger. Don’t concentrate so much on the evil in your abuser. Concentrate on how your abuser made you feel. Tell him on paper how he made you feel and how he hurt you. This is where the healing comes from. If we just swim around in condemning our abuser we will not heal. That doesn’t mean you cannot express how evil he is. Just don’t limit your emotional process to that alone.
It’s our heart that needs to express it’s core experiences. We might write: “I feel worthless”. “I feel like I don’t deserve anything good”. “I don’t know what Love really is because no one showed me true caring and Love.” or “Those I trusted most as a child betrayed me profusely! Now I feel like I can’t trust anyone.” Until we process our core issues we will relive our wounds in every sick relationship we get into. We will relive our issue over and over without even knowing what it is we are doing. We will sabotage possible loving relationships just so we don’t have to be rejected or abandoned.
Pick up the pen and write. See yourself as an innocent child. Children do not hate themselves for no reason. Children are taught to hate themselves. Who told you that you were garbage? Who taught you that you don’t deserve good things? Get in the car and scream. Do the weird guttural moans when the pain flares up. Get out the plastic bat and beat the bed when you are angry. Start the meditation to find out what is at the core of your sickness. Do the 12 steps to see your patterns of behavior and your part in the drama of your life. Learn about your Higher Power by seeking It daily in prayer and meditation. Before you know it depression will be a thing of the past and you will be showing other women how to heal.
Allow the visions of the supernatural to guide you. Let your third eye and your chakras come alive. Let your light shine. Never speak negatively in the “I am” context. Go over all the good positive things you have done today. Let your step eleven be filled with positive affirmations of what you do and who you are. And find your empathic sister who will always validate you and never shut you down. Your heart does not lie. You have been an addict for a reason. It was your way of surviving a broken heart. But your solution has become destructive. It worked for a while but not anymore. It’s time to move on to healthy solutions.
Blessings!
God don’t make junk.