Do I have the willingness to be happy?

My life has been going so good that it hurts. A newfound intimacy and committment to honesty with my husband, uncovering painful but useful parts of myself, building new and close relationships with women for the first time in my life, even having the willingness to get honest in ways I've never been honest before.

Today I want to act out, to fall deep into a relationship that I can get lost in. Find an extramarital partner who I can make my Higher Power, so that I don't have to build and intimate relationship with a true power greater than myself, or get close to the REAL people in my life. I want to do this because yesterday I acted out.
After months of physical sobriety, but still playing too close to the fire for too long ... testing myself and God ... I let it sneak up on me. Today I feel disgusted and ashamed with myself. And I have to realize that something about this horrible feeling works for me. Perhaps it is that it propels me further into my disease ... that giving a quick hand job in a parking lot leads me to be obsessed with the need for more, more, more.

I'm so sick of writing about relapses. But apparently not sick enough. I'm so angry that I was so stupid to let this happen, to skip meetings and isolate ... to cut myself off from what I needed to stay sober just long enough to be drawn back in.

I can't change yesterday, and I'm having a hard time changing today, even though I did ignore two messages from people I could have engaged with. Those two messages tell me that I'm putting the energy out there. I'm ready to scream. The quick hits don't get it anymore, but they can set off a shit storm of hurt.

I knew there was a chance for this. I came so close to acting out just a couple of weeks ago. I just didn't take it seriously enough. I got too cocky (pardon the pun). I literally despise myself right now and that makes it all the more enticing to go out and find someone to "love" me.

Thankfully my niece is coming tomorrow and will be here through Monday. I hate it that my withdrawal will interfere with my chance to be close and open with her.

Am I really even willing to accept the real love that is around me? Am I willing to be happy? I thought that's what I was working for? Why do I keep fucking it up so royally?

I'm just writing because it's the only thing I know to do. And I'm crying ... because I don't know if I'll ever be better. If it will just be a few months of getting better only to have another painful slip. How can I forget all the things I've learned? How can I forget how many people hurt?

Thankfully my friend EC was there to listen and not yell and to remind me that I have made progress ... just refraining all these months. But now I may act out for a few months. Who knows?

Someone shared recently that they couldn't take another relapse because they weren't sure they could come back. Coming back to recovery is the only thing I keep doing right. Everything else I keep really, really screwing up.

Too much

I went in for more exorcism today ... revisiting the past in EMDR therapy with hopes of reprogramming my sick brain. The therapy is working pretty well at culling out emotions and shifting them in the right direction. Rather than being angry at myself, I'm beginning to show some real anger at my abusive stepfather. Today I succeed at calling him a fucker and saying I hope he rots in hell. I sort of stopped myself with the rots in hell part because I didn't think it was a nice thing for someone to say about anyone, even if they don't even really believe in hell. I believe that hell exists on earth and I think he and I both have lived through it. I also said that because of what he did I have felt like a failure, and while I've spent the past few years reeling in disease, recovery and therapy he has been rotting in his own misery, but doing nothing to acknowledge my pain or his part in hit. I thought of him with pure disgust and a feeling like I wanted to spit in his face. Even writing this I have those feelings.

The more I felt my anger, the more I connected with the idea that what had happened to me made me feel like a failure, the more angry I became,realizing that I had been cut off from all that was good in me. I acknowledged that I am an intelligent, productive, talented part of the world and screamed internally with anger that I have been cut off from that part of myself. My therapist asked me to think of what it would feel like to connect to that part of me, to eliminate the obstacles that cut me off from my core goodness. As I did, I imagined myself wrapped around the world, taking it all in and offering it all up, dancing in unison, whole and complete. I am not a failure. I am enough. That's what it feels like to connect to that goodness. I know that goodness is there and I want to reclaim it as my own. I want to give and accept love, to be carefree and compassionate, to let go of selfish ego and embrace my part in the world. I can do it. I have what it takes. I saw it today.

But it was too much to take in at once. I can't hold on to all of it right now. I can't contain it all and have to let it soak in and process a little at a time. I feel sadness and emptiness right now, because I want to embrace all those good feelings right now. But I also acknowledge my hope and my patience. Today is just one day in my journey. These are all huge emotions and they are just too much for this one day.

Feeling sad and looking back

A year ago today I wrote this: My State of Mind

A few days later I wrote Emotions vs. Thinking, which I consider to be a reflection of the beginning of my deepest level of understanding of myself to date.

It is interesting that I had forgotten what my therapist had said when I told her I felt insane. What I wrote in My State of Mind is almost identical to how I feel today. I have had such difficulty after returning to work. I have trouble concentrating, I can't focus and I wonder how in the world I'll ever hold down a full-time job. It is not that nothing has changed within me in a year, I can look back to where I was a year ago and realize that at many levels, I'm not nearly as "insane" as I was then -- stuck in the middle of an affair that was driving me crazy and moving to a new place, not knowing what it was I wanted or needed to do, trying to please too many people and having no clue how to please or take care of myself. I know there has been growth, and I know that for some reason that growth has had to be very, very slow.

I dropped my husband off at the airport last night for him to go on a three day business trip and drove back to lay in the arms of another man. I was exhausted from the drive through the snowy conditions, but I had already told this man, who travels to our area once a month, that I would see him. My codependency far outweighed my sexual addiction in this scenario, though I would say my love addiction was in full-swing. I couldn't seem to bring myself to have conversation with him, though he's a great conversationalist. Instead, I simply engaged him sexually -- honestly deep down wanting to be finished and to go home. It is not that I dislike this person nor is it that he gives me a high. I was just there ... going through the motions, not uncomfortably, but without feeling. I ultimately faked an orgasm so that he would stop his efforts to bring me there, and two silent tears fell from my eyes, as I pulled him to me and asked him to hold me. I felt comforted there in his arms, as he slowly drifted off to sleep and I got up, kissed him goodnight, and went home, feeling empty and uncovered.

Today, I have chosen not to beat myself up over the events of last night. They serve as a reminder that this addiction is no longer serving me. Yes, I am still drawn to it -- because it has become a way of life, but it has no return. Or I should say, the only return is emptiness and pain, a far cry from elation and euphoria. In AA,they say recovery messes up a good drink. That's for sure.

Happy to be on the journey.

Out of sorts

I'm having a tough day today. I can't concentrate on work, despite the fact that I really have some serious deadlines I have to meet. It's snowing outside like crazy and my husband took the car so I can't really go somewhere very easily. This all is stemming from the pressures of working again when my mind won't let me concentrate, feeling like I will never "fit in" in a workplace again, and on top of all of this worrying about how to handle paying off a significant debt I generated during my affair with R.

I am thankful to have rediscovered my conscience, realizing that I don't feel right about "sneaking" money from my current earnings to pay on the debt, but I also don't want to hurt my husband by telling him the whole truth about the debt either. Anyway, it's another opportunity to grow and I'm doing my best to be thankful, but it's through some major gritted teeth. It's bringing up a lot of shame, guilt and pain ... and in fact, extreme anger at myself for being so fucking wrapped up in my disease with R. back then that not only could I not be there for my husband when his mother died, but also giving him oodles of money that he will NEVER pay back, all so he could marry someone else and ruin her financial future. Thank God I didn't ruin mine.

I can't imagine that I gave him the money to help him get into an apartment that he stayed in ONE FUCKING NIGHT. The rest of the time, he stayed with her until he married her two months after I left. After terrorizing me, threatening me that he was going to expose me to my husband, scaring the shit out of me over and over saying he was going to kill himself. God I was so stupid.

All this is in the past and I know I'm hysterical now because I don't know what to do and I am afraid. I have prayed and tried to turn this over ... but I keep getting in my own way. I need to be present and know that God will take care of me.