Anyone who has trauma in their past had moments where they had to adapt how they were thinking in order to go on. You have to accept as normal what was highly abnormal. You have to shrug your shoulders at things which should enrage you. You have to learn to push things which bother you out of your mind. You have to sequester parts of your consciousness, and do your best to pretend they don’t exist.
All of these things allow you to survive. You become functional in a dysfunctional place.
I think self sabotage–and obviously this is highly relevant to me–is really a recursion to patterns which worked at one time. It is, in some important respects, healthy, because it recalls things which were highly adaptive at one time.
For me, the ability to check out emotionally was absolutely critical. I spent large chunks of time just not there, lost in fantasy, lost in my thoughts, somewhere else. Drinking is, I think, for me a way of repeating that pattern, of not feeling, of just disappearing.
But my world is not that bad now. It’s far from ideal, to be sure, but it’s really not that bad. That pattern, that need, is something I can let go of.
I am perhaps reciting truisms here, but I’m trying to work my brain around all this. Giving up drinking is giving up a last vestige of something that saved my life. It’s necessary to take the next step, to grow into what I am meant to grow into, but it feels odd.
For people like me, self sabotage FEELS RIGHT. I’ll get a healthy behavior set going, then a few days in, some overwhelming compulsion will come along, that FEELS RIGHT, that upsets the apple cart, again. I need to describe this pattern, so I know to expect, know what it needs, and know how to feed it without losing myself again.
There are millions of people like me, too. Probably hundreds of millions. Life is an odd thing, but it seems to be getting easier for me.