Yesterday marked my one month anniversary of recovery.
This last week was about acceptance, grieving, and a slow, inevitable move from immediate crisis to the real work of rewiring my daily thoughts and behavior. Brief bursts of bawling still hit me out of the blue while I was driving, or I’d find myself sniffling into my bowl of soup while watching Breaking Bad. I only had one instance of waking up in the middle of the night with a heavy chest and needing to get my breathing under control this week. But I allowed these short fits of emotion and anxiety to pass. Most importantly, I remembered to acknowledge whatever feelings were coming up for me. I understood that I was crying for the loss of the past, as I fired off emails to co-workers about meetings and events, two months from now, that will not include me.
I also started to watch Breaking Bad from the first season all the way through to the current season, and it has been fantastic therapy! A little passive, but cathartic and riveting, to say the least, and I so enjoyed watching a former mild-mannered suburban father and high school chemistry teacher, turned meth-lab **** lord, undergo one of the most villainous transformations on TV. I read a great article about what makes a person bad, “…— his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3.” (http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions.)
This week I also started to **** – as in food – not Breaking Bad “****ing" . This was quite a shock, as I’d never had any interest in ****ing my entire life. I was never food motivated, and usually the slowest eater at the table. Until recently, I often found myself skipping meals. And then seven days ago, I started preparing and ****ing every meal for myself, every day. My therapist and I believe it’s an expression of nurturing behavior, re-learning how to care for myself, and taking the time to slow things down. I enjoy cutting and dicing, the visceral experience of handling the food, and the process of preparing a healthy meal. It’s a soothing and meditative practice that I am coming back to, through a new activity, transferring some of the meditation skills learned from a lifelong avocation in the martial arts.
So with these fairly normal and minor activities, the daily restructuring of my physiological and psychological well-being had begun.
I also told my therapist that, with the exception of one instance of thoughts about my unused free play this month, I was a little confused that I wasn’t experiencing more gambling cravings. She explained that once a CG has been able to make the connections between their addiction and the underlying causes, then the cravings naturally start to drop off. I said, “Okay, and then what?” My perceptive counselor asked, “And then what about ‘what’? Do you mean, specifically, what happens after our calls end, or what happens next week? Or…?” I beat around the bush a little bit by clarifying the first items, but came around to my real fears.
My real fears came up whenever I started to think about the future and the unknown. Like every normal human being would in my position, I suppose, I was struggling with where I would be working and living in two months. I’d been running or hiding from making changes in my life for many years, and I’d come to a place where all of that work started all over again. What happens now? The answer is I don’t know. It’s a little less scary to admit that this week. I just need to continue to keep breathing and to keep ****ing for now.– 9/2/2013 7:51:04 AM: post edited by Sirena0215.
