denial – Tender Flame Soy Candles

5-6 min read

The last week has been the hardest since the surgery. I was beyond irritable, snapping at everything, and the anger was just building up. I knew something wasn’t right. I made the decision to take myself off of my pain meds. It was necessary. As soon as I was able to be more clear headed, I was hit with waves of grief. I spent two days in bed, trying to feel my feelings. There were lots of tears, and honestly, I’m still working through it all. It always amazes me how grief likes to sneak up when we are at our most vulnerable. Grief is something that I have come to embrace and process in healthy ways. It looks much different now in my life than it did for all the years before my recovery. It was so uncomfortable at first, I wanted nothing to do with it. It was scary, stressful, painful, sad. All things I didn’t want to feel. Nor did I have the tools or support to grieve in any healthy way. After knowing how to shove it down for so many years, being healthy about it was not something I knew anything about. I sure came to learn though how not grieving showed up in my life… through anger, irritability, depression, fear, overthinking, obsession, poor coping. I could go on. What matters now is that I have all the tools and support to help me identify when I’m not doing well and how to move through grief in ways that don’t affect my life in negative ways any longer. Learning about the different stages of grief was a big part of the process of learning to cope in a positive manner. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. And each of those stages has unique ways of working through them. Even after all these years, I still move through the stages of grief of things I thought I’d accepted, and I have to work through the process all over again. You see, grief is overwhelming sadness and a series of goodbyes. It comes in waves. Just when you think that you moved through something, there is a chance of being re-triggered and having to start the process all over again. As long as you are aware enough to come out of denial, you will be able to move through the next stages that much easier. And it truly does get easier each time. The recent days I was feeling irritable, I knew that I was feeling something that I wasn’t processing properly. Every little thing was making me angry and sensitive. By taking myself off of my pain meds, I gave myself the headspace to truly see what was going on. Grief. Grieving something I’ve worked on grieving for many years, and somehow every time I am vulnerable, it comes up again and I’m working through it all over again. Something will pop up and it’s back to step one… back to basics. That’s okay. I sure am grateful that I have the ability to pick myself up when I am back there again, because I’ve come to learn that it’s a normal part of the process of working through our emotions in healthy ways. And you know what? It’s okay to not be okay. As long as we don’t stay there. Grief is meant to visit. It’s what helps us grow. I for one, wouldn’t be who I am today if it wasn’t for the grief that I’ve experienced. Grief is proof that love existed and the loss of whatever it is, was painful because that love was there. By denying grief and not working through it properly, we deny love. We deny honoring what the love gave us. Why would we do that? It might be uncomfortable to truly feel grief, I get it. But by denying it, we are denying our true, raw, authentic feelings. So… for the next few days, I plan to take extra care of myself and really feel my feelings. Work through the grief. And honor what it is giving to me. I know it will fade again, as it always does. I also know that the grief will be back again, as it always is. And that’s okay. Because honoring grief, and truly letting it show up in my life, is proof that love existed. That’s something I need because there are more days that I have forgotten that, than there are days I remember it. Just for today, I will go back to basics, taking things one day at a time, accepting I am powerless, and using the tools I have been so blessed to receive.

God, grant me the serenity, to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can. And wisdom to know the difference.
– Serenity Prayer

Though grief may not seem like it should be a part of my physical recovery, it plays a much bigger role than you’d think. For me to be intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually healthy, I have to work through it so that I can be strong enough to push through my physical healing. These are important parts of ourselves that need the most tender love and care. Otherwise, I know I risk remaining irritable, angry, and depressed, causing more harm to myself and others around me. If you are struggling with grief, reach out for help. Admit to yourself and someone else that you are struggling. We are not meant to go through grief on our own. Rely on your community, on your family and friends. Let them show up for you. And pray. The grief is worth honoring, no matter what stage or how long ago the loss happened. Grief knows no time limit. If you can practice the things I mentioned above, you will grow, heal, and find gratitude, and that’s a beautiful gift worth working toward.

Through my grief, I have found ways to express myself, self care, and to give back, to ensure I’m honoring everything I’ve received through the healing process and what I’ve learned along the way. I feel called to a higher purpose of sharing my experience, strength, and hope, to help others in their own journey of recovery. And in order for me to be successful in this, I must practice self care every day. An act many of us could do better in. To grieve and grow in healthy ways, we must learn and practice the art of self care. Because self care is the best care we can give ourselves, to help us be successful through the challenging process known as recovery.

7-8 min read.

This last few weeks have been a little bit of a set back with my blog postings. At first I was just trying to keep my focus on the project, then last week I had to work through a complex loss that required me to take a few extra days of self-care. Now I am feeling much better and getting back into my routine, without the worry of needing to focus on extra healing. It’s hard to really know where to start to share the grief that surfaced for me because I am still working on processing it all but what I can say, is that I have a lot of gratitude for my recovery and for my support. I truly know that I am not alone. You see, I am very open about my recovery from the affects of alcoholism in my life, my childhood sexual abuse, living with chronic pain, domestic violence and trauma in the workplace. There is more, but those are the main things that have driven some of my poor coping in my past and what I’ve had to work through in order to be where I am today. Those are the traumas that had me living in fear and anxiety, dissociating from reality, being angry and irritable. I am in a much better place, as I’ve worked through these things and they no longer carry any negative weigh in my life. It’s pretty amazing what recovery can do. Of course there are still things to work through as they come up, but I show up every day to put in the work. This is a lifelong recovery after-all. And though my recovery may look different from yours, it is recovery none the less.

It’s taken years of practice of my tools (plus lots of tears & frustration), to work through the trauma that I am about to share with all of you. I want to start off by expressing how grateful I am for my family. Though we have healing to do, just as every family does, I am blessed to have my parents and my siblings. My biological mom and my dad who adopted me before birth, raised me with my 3 half siblings. We each have different family backgrounds and life experiences, but we love each other still the same and I wouldn’t change it for anything. I am blessed that my parents raised me the best they knew how and I carry only love in my heart for them. And as much as they tried to protect me from harm, there are some things out of our control. Kudos to them for doing a great job.

What came up for me after this recent complex loss, was how far I have come in my recovery from the childhood sexual abuse. You see, my biological father’s family did not play much of a role in my life, and the role they did play, was broken and messed up so it was pretty short lived. For years I was sexually abused by a biological family member. It started with grooming and ended with full on molestation and rape. By the time it came out, years of damage had already been done, and that half of my biological family was in complete denial. In time, I lost my relationship with every one of my immediate biological family members. No more family reunions or summer visits. I grieved those losses for a lot of years. Reality was, it was never going to work if everyone wanted to deny that it happened. Because the truth is, it happened and I was living the nightmare of the effects it had. Not talking about it and pretending it didn’t exist, caused me to shame and blame myself because I just didn’t understand. When I think back, I am shocked that an entire family could live that far in denial. Then again, denial is a dysfunctional attempt to pretend a painful reality doesn’t exist. Over the years, I have shamed and blamed myself so much, that I honestly lived in this negative, awful survival cloud for so long, that I had created this unpleasant reality for myself. I believed I was unlovable, unworthy and that somehow I was to blame for being exiled from that half of my family. When the reality is, no one in that family had the tools or skills to handle the conflict or address the issue, nor did they want to admit something so horrible could happen by a role model in that family. No one wanted to admit that something like that could really take place. Instead it was brushed aside as if it never happened, and I was the one who suffered.

“Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot tolerate having words wrapped around it. What it craves is secrecy, silence and judgment. If you stay quiet, you stay in a lot of self-judgment.
– Brene Brown

For all that time I went unhealed, I lost my relationship with my Higher Power. I had just accepted things the way they were, but I was angry and confused. So I just lived in anger for many years. I had no idea that there was an opportunity for healing and growth, by finding support and new tools. Over the years I had met a few people here and there that had gone through similar, but never did anyone actually talk about it. It was one of those things of “That happened to me too.” and nothing more. I never had an example from someone who had healed through it. I had no idea that leaving those wounds untreated and un-talked about, was causing me to live with this underlying notion that I was somehow unworthy and undeserving. Instead the women I knew who had it happen to them too, were experiencing the same negative thinking so it became normal. I knew over the years that things didn’t feel right and that what had happened to me was wrong, but that didn’t change my internal dialogue. I was still hard on myself and unable to work through it. Finally one day I woke up, and I needed something different. I didn’t know how, but I woke up everyday to figure it out. I put myself through therapy, support groups, and I built a solid foundation of natural supports. I went through trainings and I researched everything I could in order to understand why I was the way I was. There were lots of stumbles along the way, but I know that my journey happened just the way it was meant to.

Though it may have taken me 24 years to recover fully (forgiveness and all), I am a much stronger person now. I now have the strength to stand up and speak my truth. I now have the strength to share my experience, strength and hope. I now have the strength to stand for change. My experience will help many people for years to come, and though the brokenness of that biological family is extreme, I am grateful that as an individual, I have healed. Now through my recovery, I get to help others in ways that I once needed.

Amber T

Tag: denial

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