My First Answered Prayer

I’m sure I reached out to God many times before I came into recovery.

But if I’m honest, I think I often called on Him when I was in the foxhole—when things were bad enough that I needed help getting out.

My first truly sincere attempt at prayer came just a short time before I got sober.

By then, I had reached an emotional bottom so deep that I couldn’t see a way out.

I had tried so many things to make the pain go away. I had looked for comfort in relationships, in alcohol, and in anything that might help me escape what I was feeling inside.

But nothing worked.

The pain kept getting worse, and I finally reached a place where I knew I couldn’t keep living the way I had been living.

I didn’t have a plan.

I didn’t have an answer.

I didn’t even know what to ask for.

All I knew was that I needed help.

So I got down on my knees.

This time, something was different.

I wasn’t simply asking God to fix a problem so I could go back to doing things my way. I was reaching out from a place of genuine desperation. I had finally come to the end of what I knew how to do.

I needed help beyond myself.

And within a month of that prayer, I was sober.

Looking back now, I see that moment as the beginning of a relationship with God that would change my life.

I didn’t know then what recovery would bring me. I couldn’t have imagined the healing, the lessons, the people, or the spiritual growth that would become part of my journey.

I only knew that I had asked for help.

And somehow, my life began to change.

Was it an answered prayer?

I believe it was.

Not because everything suddenly became easy, or because I would never struggle again.

But because something opened inside me when I finally became willing to surrender.

For the first time, I was no longer trying to find my way out entirely on my own.

I had reached for a lifeline.

And I was willing to take hold of it.

That was my first answered prayer.

And perhaps it was also the beginning of learning that I didn’t have to do this life alone.

Letting Go of Storytelling

 There has been a storyteller in me for as long as I can remember.

Unfortunately, many of the stories that began in childhood were frightening. And without realizing it, I carried them into my adult life.

It took me a few years into recovery to recognize that I was hurting myself by continuing to tell those stories.

I would replay painful experiences from childhood, revisiting the hurt, the fear, and the unfairness of what had happened.

I believe deeply in examining our experiences so we can understand them, heal, and eventually let them go.

But there is a difference between looking at the past to heal it and reliving it over and over again.

One can help us move forward.

The other can keep us stuck.

To my surprise, I’ve recently discovered that my storyteller seems to live in my nervous system, too.

Even when I understand something intellectually, my mind can still return to old patterns. It wants to revisit the past, anticipate the future, and imagine all the things that could go wrong.

It wants to awfulize.

And some days, learning to interrupt that pattern is deeply challenging.

There is no question that I have experienced a great deal of difficulty in my life. I don’t need to deny it, minimize it, or pretend it didn’t happen.

My story matters.

But I’m beginning to understand that I don’t have to keep telling it to prove that it mattered.

I can honor what happened without continuing to live there.

I can acknowledge the pain without rehearsing it.

I can learn from the past without allowing it to determine how I experience today.

And when my mind begins creating frightening stories about the future, perhaps I can gently remind myself that I don’t know what is going to happen.

I don’t have to prepare for every possible disappointment.

I don’t have to keep reliving yesterday or worrying about tomorrow.

I can come back to this moment.

This breath.

This day.

I know this is not something I will master overnight. These patterns have been with me for a very long time, and I am learning to meet them with patience rather than judgment.

Perhaps letting go of storytelling doesn’t mean silencing the storyteller altogether.

Perhaps it means learning when her story has served its purpose.

I can listen to what the past has taught me without asking it to tell me the same story again.

I can be compassionate toward the little girl who needed to make sense of what happened to her.

And I can gently teach her that we are allowed to move forward.

The past deserves to be acknowledged.

The pain deserves compassion.

But my life is happening now.

And perhaps it is time to give the present the attention I have spent so many years giving the past.

Pain and Passion

 A few months into learning Inner Child work, about thirty years ago, I discovered something I didn’t expect.

I found a passion.

I became deeply interested in understanding the little girl inside me and the healing that could happen when we learned to listen to her, love her, and give her what she needed.

That passion didn’t fade.

It is still alive in me today.

And now, thirty years later, something unexpected has happened again.

This past year, as I’ve faced physical issues and chronic pain, I found myself drawn into learning about the nervous system.

At first, I wasn’t looking for another passion.

I was looking for answers.

But in the last few weeks, I’ve realized that something familiar is happening.

I’m fascinated.

I want to learn.

I want to understand.

And I want to teach what I’m discovering.

There is something about the nervous system that feels strangely connected to the Inner Child work I’ve been doing for decades.

Both invite me to listen more deeply.

Both ask me to understand rather than judge.

Both remind me that patterns can develop for very good reasons, even when those patterns no longer serve us.

And both seem to point toward the same thing:

Healing begins with compassion.

It’s almost as though a new door has opened.

I never would have chosen chronic pain as the way to find it.

But perhaps that is one of the mysteries of life.

Sometimes something difficult leads us somewhere we never expected to go.

And here I am again.

Learning.

Discovering.

And feeling that familiar spark of passion come alive.

The Kind of Pain Others Can’t See

 From the time I was a youngster and well into my adult life, I carried a kind of pain that no one could see.

Emotional pain.

As an adult, I became very good at disguising it.

Even the people closest to me had no idea how much I was suffering internally.

I could smile.

I could take care of things.

From the outside, everything looked good.

But inside, there was a very different story.

It wasn’t until I came into recovery that I began to reveal those hidden parts of myself.

Little by little, I started telling the truth.

I began doing the healing work.

I began allowing myself to feel the things I had spent years trying not to feel.

And then, fairly early in my recovery, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

At the time, I had no idea what that meant.

It took years before I really began to understand my experience with it.

Once again, I was living with a kind of pain that other people couldn’t see.

But this time, I wasn’t hiding it.

I talked about it.

I acknowledged it.

And yet, initially, there was still some shame.

There was something about having an illness that other people couldn’t see that made me question myself.

Could people really understand how I felt?

Would they believe me?

Was I somehow supposed to be stronger?

Looking back, I can see the irony.

I had spent years hiding emotional pain because no one could see it.

Then I had physical pain that no one could see.

Different pain.

But both taught me something about what it means to live with an experience that exists inside you, even when the outside world can’t see it.

Maybe that is one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned:

Just because pain can’t be seen doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

And just because someone else can’t see what I’m carrying doesn’t mean I have to carry it alone.

And a good reminder that we never know what somebody else is going through either.