Tags
abstaining, Addiction, Anger, character defects, complex ptsd, Family, Father, food, God, overeating, post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, recovery
I’ve been so angry lately. The little girl is angry. The one who took all the abuse for the rest of us. She’s angrier than all get out. “It’s not fair”, she says about taking the excess food away. “As if trying to live in this world isn’t bad enough for me, now you have to take my food away too?!! What’s next!!? Are you going to try to get rid of me altogether!!?”
I don’t know what to do with her nor how to handle all this anger she carries. It’s a real trudging deal right now with her. I’m not going to ‘get rid’ of her. That’s for sure. She needs love – lots and lots and lots of love. Even then, I don’t know if this will satisfy her nor assuage her pain. The pain and anger seems to be pouring over the dam in hundreds of gallons. She’s boiling mad.
She’s alcoholic, bipolar, has oodles of complex-PTSD to deal with, and it seems that she has taken on more than a few of her father’s character traits so that she scares people with the result that she is in a sort of forced solitary confinement. She’s so, so, so lonely. Even our husband is afraid to engage us/her.
This is how angry she is.
The Big Book of AA says;
“We were prepared to look at it (our 4th Step inventory) from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how? We could not wish them away anymore than alcohol.
This is our course: we realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person next offended, we said to ourselves: “This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.”
But what about when that sick person was a parent with the power to step all over your still malleable personality? You can’t fix a sick and twisted mind with a sick and twisted mind. It was them that twisted and sickened my mind. The result?… a child with a sick and twisted mind.
I shouldn’t have made it in AA. I shouldn’t be sober 34 years. I’m too sick and twisted up to have made it sober this far. Maybe if there had been even one person who was on my side while I was growing up… just one person. There was no one to help me and I became a sick and twisted alcoholic as a result. But now AA demands that, if I am to live a life of good result, I must have pity on this person I hate… she hates. But she’s only a little girl. You can’t ‘reason’ with a little child. There has to be another way to get through to her so that she would be willing to give up all this hate.
And then there’s the ‘borrowed’ character defects, she got from the father. What is she supposed to do with those? They stick to her like gorilla glue and cause her to live in solitary confinement. She’s so lonely. We’re so lonely. It’s an absolute and total mess to deal with. I haven’t a clue about how to overcome all of this, but I really don’t think that trying to ‘think’ my way out of these immense emotions she has will fix the problem.
Only God knows how to heal me of all this anger. I don’t have a clue how to do it. Yet, there is a way I know of to connect with this God. That’s to abstain from; first of all – alcohol; and then from – overeating. It’s a very painful process to get to Him this way, but it has worked to heal me of many things so far and I’m hoping it will be the path to even more recovery.
Just don’t ‘use’… no matter what.
I don’t know if it will work, but this is the only answer I know of to get the anger out of her. She has to surrender it… somehow. This is a very ‘down and deep’ inner process, this getting inside of her to help her untwist and de-tangle the anger from around her bones and marrow.
God can take all the anger you have. Hand it over to Him. He’s a big God. Then let Him cradle that little girl and love her with all the love He has. You both deserve it.
Right now God and I are somewhat estranged. My psychiatrist (for the Bipolar) put me on a new medication that’s supposed to slow down one’s adrenalin glands. He’s finally begun to ‘see’ that I have a ton of PTSD too. He actually asked about the trauma I’ve been through and thought that this medication would help with that. I can tell it’s definitely doing something because I’m not as hyper as I usually am. But now I have to deal with a whole new way of approaching God. Before this medication I had no problem feeling the constant presence of the Holy Spirit. Now that’s all but disappeared and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. Oh well. We shall see – but I will continue the medication because I feel like it’s necessary to slow my adrenals down in order to join my brother and sister human beings.
Medication is necessary – I know. It’s kept me sane and helped save my life.
If you don’t mind, I’ll be praying for you to find your way back to Him. If you’d like to email me, I’m at fox_susanirene@yahoo.com
No pressure, no proselytizing – just support and prayer.
Hello again, A1too!
Its often hard to respond to your challenging stories. What frustrates you most thrills the reader; you think you are stuck even as you are working things out. I can’t interact with you as I might if we were in a forum, but I haven’t felt at peace enough to start checking the forums out.
I made a choice several times in my life to prioritize my inward journey, not at the expense of my outer journey but it always ended up being that way anyway. I was too damaged and didn’t know it. And talk about anger! My inner boy has a rage that’s a sight to behold. I never really had a choice but to take the inner journey. I think that if I didn’t I wouldn’t be here now. I would’ve gone down in humiliation and defeat. Yet it appears that most people in terrible situations choose the outer path, not the inner one. It’s the ones choosing the inner path you don’t hear about.
The fighting in Gaza right now, the fighting in Iraq, in the Ukraine, in Syria, at the US-Mexican border; the extreme confrontationalism in American politics right now; the War on Women, on Gays, on Blacks and minorities, the War of Words in the blogosphere; these are all caused by people with horrific emotional wounds who are nonetheless trying to heal them by way of the outer path, and it just doesn’t work.
I keep on hoping that there’ll be a crossover time when I can devote myself to collective healing, but the inner path hasn’t offered me an exit yet. I have too much fury to manage without making other people suffer for it any more than they already have. My Anger Management is my Peace Work, at least for now.
A1too, I set out in 1987 to journey down to my own structural foundation and reboot it. Last month I do believe I did. As much as I’ll ever get to rewire myself in this lifetime. It can be done, not by trying to make it happen but by holding the intention in your heart. I’m not myself a Christian, and I’m not an alcoholic or a substance abuser; I’ve never been connected to a 12 step program and here in Japan I’m not likely to be. But I have my mystic resources, the I Ching, Spirit Guides, my art, yoga, meditation, and yes, prayer. I held an intention in my heart for 27 years, and it led me to a situation, more than once, where I was utterly terrified (of landing in the streets; of falling between the cracks) and had only God to count on. It was only in this profound fear that I could hit the reset button.
Now I’m still letting the first settle, which I expect will go on for the 7 months off thisnew and temporary job.
I’m not done. I’ve only just begun, apparently. Let me know know how it goes with you.
Vic
Thank you so much for reading my stuff and for your understanding heart Vic. I don’t feel alone. I too believe that fear and stress can be my friend – if I can manage to handle it well (for me that means – to not use anything to get away from it). I have also, more than once, experienced th ‘reset button’ you talked about. It’s crazy when that happens isn’t it? Just pure craziness. Suddenly I can ‘see’ something I could never have seen before, something that was there all along but that I was blind to. Talk to you soon buddy. A12
🙂