Experiencing Loss

 One of the things we begin to understand as we become our authentic selves is that we may lose people along the way. Sometimes, those losses can even include members of our own family.

As we grow, change, and begin honoring who we really are, our relationships may change, too. The choices we make may not always be understood or accepted by the people who have known us for years.

And that can be painful.

There may come a time when we have to make a difficult choice: Do I lose myself trying to hold on to someone else, or do I risk losing that relationship in order to remain true to myself?

I don’t think there is any greater pain than losing ourselves.

For many years, we may have learned to keep the peace, make others happy, or set aside our own feelings so that we wouldn’t disappoint someone or risk being rejected. We may have confused keeping a relationship with keeping ourselves safe.

But what does it cost us when we continually silence our own voice, ignore our needs, or pretend to be someone we’re not?

Becoming our authentic selves doesn’t mean we stop caring about others. It doesn’t mean we walk away from every relationship that challenges us. Relationships take patience, understanding, and sometimes compromise.

But there is a difference between compromising and abandoning ourselves.

Sometimes we can work through differences and find a new way of relating. Other times, we may have to accept that a relationship cannot continue in the same way.

There is grief in that. We can love someone and still recognize that we need something different. We can miss people and still know that choosing ourselves was necessary.

Perhaps one of the hardest lessons in growth is accepting that we cannot always take everyone with us.

But we can stay with ourselves.

Waiting to be Rescued

 Did you have fantasies as a child, such as believing that Prince Charming would someday show up and save you in some way?

When we have a difficult childhood, these kinds of fantasies can offer comfort. Perhaps imagining someone coming along to protect us, love us, and make everything better helps soothe some of the pain and fear we carry.

But what happens when we take that fantasy into adulthood?

I hopped from one love relationship to another, looking for that person. I wanted someone who would make me feel safe, loved, and protected. Somewhere inside, I was still waiting for someone to come along and give me what I had been missing.

It took many years and many experiences to reach a different understanding.

I began to realize that the person I had been waiting for was, in many ways, myself.

The hero in my story, as it turned out, was the woman I was becoming.

There came a time when I stopped looking outside myself for someone to make everything better and began looking inward. I started discovering the parts of me that needed attention, understanding, and love.

That didn’t mean I no longer wanted love or companionship. It meant I was beginning to understand that I could feel whole while still wanting someone to share my life with.

I could learn to stand beside myself. I could become the person who offered that frightened little girl the safety and reassurance she had been searching for.

Perhaps the greatest turning point was realizing that I didn’t have to keep waiting for someone else to make everything better. I was learning to offer myself the love and care I had been looking for all along.

Buried Dreams and Desires

 Do you remember how you felt as a child when you thought about the future? Did you have big dreams? And if you did, have you worked toward fulfilling them?

The first dream I can remember having was in my late teenage years. I thought I would like to join the Peace Corps. At the time, I didn’t really understand why that idea appealed to me. I didn’t yet recognize that I had a deep desire to help others or know how that desire would eventually find its way into my life.

Recovery helped me discover that part of myself.

Early in recovery, I found that I loved sponsoring others, even though I didn’t have much confidence in what I was doing at the time. I simply knew that helping someone else find their way in recovery meant something to me.

Since then, to my surprise and delight, I have found many different ways to pay it forward. Through sponsorship, teaching inner-child work, supporting women, and sharing what I have learned along the way, I discovered that helping others was not just an idea I had as a teenager. It was a desire that had been waiting for the opportunity to grow.

Looking back, I wonder how many of our dreams and desires get buried along the way. Sometimes life takes us in directions we never expected. We may set aside the things that once excited us, or we may not yet have the confidence or understanding to pursue them.

But perhaps a dream doesn’t always have to happen in the way we originally imagined.

Sometimes it finds another way to come alive.

Meeting More Parts of Ourselves

 Just when I think I know myself well, I catch a deeper glimpse of the little girl who still lives within me.

She is the part of me who was punished as a child and somehow came to believe she deserved it. That was never the truth, but it became part of her story.

This morning, I spent a little time talking with her. I wanted her to know something she may have needed to hear all along.

She did not deserve to be punished. She was a child who needed love, safety, and understanding.

I told her that I will love and care for her forever. She doesn’t have to earn my love, prove herself, or live in fear of doing something wrong. There will be no punishment from me.

I wonder how many parts of ourselves are still carrying old beliefs, even after years of healing. We may understand something intellectually, yet a younger part of us may still be living as though the past is happening now.

Perhaps meeting these parts of ourselves means slowing down enough to hear their stories—and gently helping them discover that things are different today.

I am not that helpless little girl anymore. I am the woman who can stand beside her, protect her, comfort her, and remind her that she is loved.

And perhaps, as she begins to trust that, something inside me can finally loosen its grip.

It’s time to let go of the old pain.

Not by forcing it away, but by giving that little girl what she needed all along: love, reassurance, and the freedom to know that she is safe with me.

When Life Unravels

 I came across one of my old blog entries this morning, and it was timely. I needed to hear my own words.

The quote began:

“There comes a time when things start to unravel. It’s called GRACE. This kind of grace can be illness, loss, despair… Sometimes the only way we are willing to change is to first be humbled by our experience. When grace is fierce, it smashes through our denial.”

I sat with those words for a while.

I usually think of grace as something gentle, but perhaps grace sometimes arrives in ways we would never choose. Life brings us to our knees, our usual ways of coping stop working, and we find ourselves facing things we cannot control.

My physical challenges have brought me to one of those places. I am learning new tools, practicing compassion, and trying to meet pain and uncertainty differently. Some days, it is harder than others.

I have spent many years in recovery, yet I am still learning. Perhaps that is how growth happens. We learn something, and then life gives us another opportunity to practice it more deeply.

I don’t believe we have to suffer to grow, or that every painful experience has a purpose. But I do believe that something meaningful can emerge from difficult seasons.

This morning, finding my own words felt like a message from an earlier version of myself to the woman I am today.

Perhaps the unraveling isn’t the end of the story.

Perhaps it is an invitation to let go of what we can no longer control, meet ourselves with compassion, and remain open to what comes next.

And maybe grace is not asking us to understand everything.

Maybe it is simply asking us to surrender it all.

Feeling Defeated as a Child

 When I look back at my childhood, I see the many ways my family robbed me of the opportunity to feel good about myself.

My mom didn’t believe in giving compliments. I don’t remember being encouraged to feel good about who I was or being helped to recognize my worth. Instead, I became familiar with shame at a very young age.

My dad was the punisher. His rage didn’t show up often, but when it did, it was frightening. I learned to be afraid, and I learned to associate fear with the possibility of physical pain.

My sister was the middle child, and she went to great extremes to get attention, even if it meant getting negative attention. She tried her best to make me look bad, even if she had to lie to do it.

And my brother? He was busy doing boys’ stuff. I don’t know that we really learned how to connect until we were adults.

Looking back, I can see that I was a sensitive child trying to find my way in a family where I didn’t know how to protect myself emotionally.

I didn’t know how to navigate a family that used shame, blame, and guilt, or where jokes at someone else’s expense were part of the way people interacted.

I didn’t have the tools to understand what was happening or to recognize that I didn’t have to accept every message I received about myself.

When you are a child, your family is your world. You depend on those people to help you understand who you are. You look to them for reassurance, acceptance, and a sense of belonging.

But what happens when the people you look to for those things leave you feeling ashamed, frightened, or inadequate?

How do you learn to believe in yourself when the people around you aren’t helping you do that?

I wonder how much of the little girl’s defeat came from simply not knowing how to navigate the world she was living in. She wasn’t equipped to understand the family dynamics around her. She didn’t know that other families might communicate differently or that she could grow up and create a different experience for herself.

She only knew what she knew.

And perhaps she began to believe that something was wrong with her.

There are days when I can still feel that sensitive child inside me. Even after all the years of recovery and the work I have done, I sometimes recognize how deeply those early experiences affected the way I learned to see myself.

But today, I can look back with a different understanding.

That little girl wasn’t weak because she was sensitive. She wasn’t wrong for wanting kindness, encouragement, and acceptance. She wasn’t responsible for knowing how to handle situations that were beyond her understanding.

She was a child.

She needed to feel safe. She needed to know that she mattered. She needed to be able to make mistakes without being made to feel ashamed of who she was.

And she needed someone to help her believe in herself.

Today, there’s no shortage of love. I continue to give her all the things she didn’t get as a child. And I remind her that she’s my very favorite person and that I believe in her.

Using the Tools

 No matter how long we have been in recovery or how much work we have done on ourselves, life will continue to challenge us.

We may think we have worked through something, only to find ourselves facing a situation that brings those old feelings right back to the surface. Or life may present us with something entirely new that we have never had to deal with before.

That is why the tools we learn in recovery are so important.

We don’t learn them just for the challenges we are facing today. We learn them so that when the unexpected happens, we have something to draw on. We have choices. We have ways to support ourselves instead of falling back into old patterns.

But knowing the tools and remembering to use them when life gets difficult are two different things.

This past year, I have been learning new tools to help me navigate physical pain and explore the possibility of neuroplastic pain. It has been a different kind of recovery, one that has challenged me in ways I could not have anticipated.

And this week, I have found myself being challenged again.

I am being asked to keep learning how to use the tools I have been practicing throughout the past year. It is one thing to understand these concepts when things are manageable. It is another to put them into practice when I am hurting, frightened, or uncertain about what comes next.

I’ve practiced compassion. Also being with pain rather than trying to escape it and co-regulating with someone safe.

Some of the tools are very similar to the tools I learned through recovery from codependency.

In codependency, we learn to stop trying to control everything outside ourselves. We learn to recognize our feelings, take responsibility for our own responses, establish healthier boundaries, and offer ourselves the compassion we may have spent years giving to everyone else.

I cannot always control what happens in my body. I cannot force pain to disappear, and I cannot know exactly how my healing journey will unfold. But I can learn to change how I meet the experience.

I can notice when fear begins to take over.

I can remind myself that I don’t have to solve everything in this moment.

I can reach for compassion instead of criticism, connection instead of isolation, and curiosity instead of immediately letting fear take over.

I am human. I will have moments when I struggle.

Perhaps recovery is a lifelong practice of remembering what we have learned and discovering how those lessons apply to the new circumstances life brings us.

I have spent many years learning about myself, and I am still learning.

This chapter of my life may be asking me to practice some familiar lessons in a new way.

I may not have chosen this particular challenge, but I can choose how I meet it.

And today, that is enough.

I don’t need to know every tool I will ever need. I just need to keep practicing the ones I have, remain open to learning new ones, and remember that I don’t have to walk through this alone.