working with betrayal and abandonment

"Our survival skills have served us well. They have gotten us through difficult times—as children and adults. Our ability to freeze feelings, deny problems, deprive ourselves, and cope with stress has helped get us where we are today. But we're safe now. We're learning to do more than survive. We can let go of unhealthy survival behaviors. We're learning new, better ways to protect and care for ourselves. We're free to feel our feelings, identify and solve problems, and give ourselves the best. We're free to open up and come alive." - Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go

I wish I trusted all of that more. I do not feel safe, and rarely have, my entire life.

 I still feel like this is life most of the time

In Beattie's Codependent No More, she mentions Nathaniel Branden's formulation of what lies at the core of all recovering people: "a nameless sense of being unfit for reality." You hear it all the time at meetings. "I never felt at home. I always felt like I didn't belong, I didn't fit in. I could never function the way other people did." These and hundreds of other formulations of anomic alienation—it's an archetypal theme.

I feel this, hard. I don't think I have ever felt like I really had a place in the world. I have usually felt like a guest. Passing through. Trying not to take up space. Sometimes even creating that exact dynamic in the pre-existing homes of women. They would try to "make space" for me when I would move in, but it was always their house and I was always a guest. Even when we moved into a new house together, I always felt like I got one corner of the place, and the rest was hers. I have heard this is common for men. 

But this is how I feel about the world, too, unless I am out in the wilds, where I do in fact begin to feel at home. 

But even more than the physical ways I manifest being out of place, I feel characteristically unfit for most human company. It's interesting how many people have said I was "weird," or that they had "never met anyone like me," or thought I was just bizarre. I have had several experiences of just talking about stuff I love and having people react—sometimes in a mean way, sometimes in a bemused way—as if I am incredibly eccentric. I guess I am, but I have always just thought I was interested in what everyone should be interested in, enthused about things that are worth being enthused about. 

When I do connect with someone else, I think this is why it is so powerful. It is a plain fact that I spend the vast majority of my life lonely. Loneliness has been a constant...companion? since I was about five years old. Sometimes I feel safe enough to enter into pleasant solitude that is peaceful. Often, I am simply alone, and I know it. I have frequently felt this way in relationship. 

Having someone get it is rare and sends me. 

I feel less alone with my recovery community. We understand each other. We laugh about the same shit that a lot of people would not find funny at all. To some degree, we have the same language. 

But there are huge swaths of myself that I do not share with recovery people at all- the music I love, my radical Left politics, my cactus life, my PhD. There's no truly simpatico recovery buddy here in AZ for me. And none of my friends outside recovery really get what recovery is about, either. I think "all the God stuff" scares a lot of them, even though I'm an atheist. 

Anyway, a major portion of accepting sober life, and going through love and romance withdrawals, sex withdrawals, food and sugar withdrawals is simply accepting loneliness. Easing myself into solitude. 

There was a newcomer at a CoDA meeting last week who was talking about the weird tension between loving living alone and being sad and lonely. I was talking with her after the meeting and it was clear to me again that the hardest times are the transitions. I leave a good AA meeting and it's just me- and the bottom falls out, sometimes. I get hardcore cravings for a woman, company, sugar, anything, anything at all. But if I just let that wave of existential nothingness and aloneness wash over me, and allow it to rise and naturally fall, I'm usually basically okay on the other side. I have been watching this very closely lately. 

Last night I almost set out for a nice dinner somewhere, late, after the LGBTQ CoDA meeting. I sat in my car a second and realized I was just trying to avoid a wave of deep, dark grief that was passing over me. A kind, compassionate voice in my head- a new-ish thing for me- said, "why not just go inside and make dinner and meditate and go to bed? You'll be okay."

And I did, and I was. I meditated for a half hour and went straight to bed, turned off all electronics, and slept straight through from 8:30 to 4:30, which I hardly ever do. 

Betrayal, abandonment and loneliness were regular experiences for me, just the plain fabric of my childhood. And I internalized those dynamics, and became good at picking people to betray and abandon me, or who I could betray and abandon, or I chose to betray and abandon myself. Repeatedly, many, many times. 

It's weird how a seemingly small thing like not going out for dinner but just going inside and encountering whatever I'm feeling is what growth looks like. So much of my life has been spent avoiding myself, and the most efficient ways for that have all been addictive. 

nothing to be afraid of in the dark, when it matches what's inside.