Awakening Blackout Girl by Jennifer Storm
Author:Jennifer Storm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hazelden Publishing
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00
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Part of my healing journey included forgiving myself for hurting myself in the first place. I had to give myself permission to let go of my shame, guilt, and anger over the fact that I had harmed myself. I developed an understanding that cutting myself was a negative coping mechanism that I used at a time when I didnât know any better. Looking back on my history of self-harm through the lens of a person who has been clean and sober for so long, it makes perfect sense. Everyone needs something to help them ease pain. When I was a highly traumatized child, no one taught me any healthy coping strategies. All I was left with were temporary fixes for an immediate sensory overload. It didnât matter to me that the fixes I used were actually causing me more harm in the long run. I was blinded by the pain of the present.
For me today, recovery is all about finding alternatives that help rather than hurt. There will always be pain in our lives; that is simply unavoidable. How we deal with painâthat is now squarely in our hands. Do we deal with it by adding more trauma, more pain, more shame, and more layers of guilt upon ourselves? Or do we find things that actually relieve the pain and make us feel like we can breathe again? Herein lies the true freedom that recovery can offer us if we work for it. In early recovery, I learned healthy coping mechanisms that allowed me to deal with my feelings when they came up. This was not an overnight process. Like any major change in my life, it took me time to figure out what worked for me. At first, my main strategy was writing things down, getting them out of my head so they no longer spun around in a shame spiral. Once the words were written down, I then had a responsibility to really look at them and feel what they meant. Feeling was the big challenge. I had to cry, get mad, process my anger, and allow the hurt behind it to be revealed. After doing this, I found that I didnât have a need to turn to drugs or self-harm anymore.
But we canât do this alone. Once in recovery, I was surrounded by amazing people also in recovery who really held me accountable. I would go to a Twelve Step meeting every day in the beginning, which gave me a place to filter my thoughts and my actions. The others in my group helped me understand and appreciate when I was moving backward into old behaviors. The amazing thing about recovery is the community you find when you embrace it. I discovered that there are good people who have been through what I had been through and who are also trying to get better, be better, and do better. If you have yet to find a community of like-minded people who can support you in this way, check out the resources in the back of this book.
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