I’d love to have people write about their process and how they’re coming out on the other side of it and I will front page it here on the blog with or without credit (your choice–let me know how you want it credited).
It doesn’t have to be your whole process but can be or parts of it that you’d like to share. How you know you’ve made progress, what has helped the most and what wisdom you’d like to pass on to others, and what your life and well being looks like now. How have things changed?
So If you would like to be “front paged” just send me a post. I don’t care how long or how short or how practical or ethereal and I will put them on the blog with their own headings.
There are many of you who have been here a long time and are moving on or have moved on or have definitely changed in significant ways and have much to share.
And I think we’d all love to hear it!!!
I’ve just found your website. My long term boyfriend is a SA. I tried to leave him last December. He started going to meetings, 1:1 counseling. I’m learning I’m a co-dependant. I’m also going to couseling. we started going to couple’s sessions (his idea). It worked only until he became complasant and started flirting again. 5 months he fell off the wagon. I can’t seem to get out of this relationship and seem to think there is still hope for us (he always begs for forgiveness and tells me it’s not about me, it’s his sickness). So he’s back into counseling and SA meetings. I worked thru the worksheet on breaking a relationship, did some initial list making, but have not followed thru yet..i can’t seem to help myself despite all the affirmations, mediations, couseling and prozac.
i was with a man for 2-3 years, when i met him it was like id met the man of my dreams, i knew him for years and always liked him. i had been told he had been abusive to his ex but that wasn’t the picture he painted of it, in fact much the opposite and like a fool i believed him. the abuse started early on every time he got drunk, what a shock!! at first it was little things that in the morning he couldn’t remember, but i could! every time this happened i became more and more un happy. things like calling me names and accusing of being with other men. he would pretent to hit me nad throw me around the house like a little rag doll, at his worse when i heard him come in i would hide.
Then one night when he was drunk he tried to kill me, he strangled to the point where i couldn’t breath and i thought i was going to die. he pinned me down and called me all sorts of horrible names and i believed him. by this time i wasn’t going out only to work i nearly lost my job because of him, but i didnt care because i was so low all my focus was how can i make him love me enough to stop hurting me. It was always me that said sorry.
The next day he called with no memory or as he said, but he was so sorry for what he’d done and i believed him that he would change. I had a 2 years daughter at this point (not his i might add) and she kept me going, she luckily didn’t witness any of this. I would stare at her pictures for hours when he was out on a bender wishing for happier days. my friends by this point had had enough of listening to my tears and from then on i was on my own. That was a choice i will always regret. how can anyone choose a man like that over her friends but i did because i always thought he would change. No such luck!
i then found out he had cheated on me and then things got really bad, he always thought that i would do the same back, his drinking got worse and so did he.
he broke into my house one night when i had gone out, the phone rang and it came up home! i panicked but for some reason i didn’t tell anyone i was with and went home to face him. when i got home i found him asleep in my bed, i woke him and told him to leave and he got very violent, i noticed on my way upstairs he had pinned notes up all around the house saying that i was a slag and he would kill me, when i woke him he had a knife in his hand, i thought of my beatuiful little girl and nothing else as i thought this would be my last memory. This is jusy the tip of the ice berg i could go on and on.
It feels better to talk about this, thanks. i might just add i did get away from him with alot of help from my friends nad thankfully have now meet the REAL man of my dreams xx
I filed for divorce May 2008 will be finalized if all goes well in August 2008 because I did not seek alimony and he walked away from so many responsibilities that they all in my name any way. I do not want anything from him. There are times I still wonder what I did that could have caused this man to become such a self centered stranger. But I give myself too much credit I cannot control how others choose to exist in this universe. I am the first to admith that I am not totally perfect but I would never ever hurt any living creature intentionally. I have two dogs and three cats I rescued from the animal shelter and since the poison pet food issue I make my own pet food. (Yeah they are spoiled wih love and attention). But my moment of truth came when our then 14 year old daughter started having issues some caused by adolescense but a lot due to me not dealing with a bad marriage. I think the ligth bulb came on when my husband objected my taking my child for counseling. I had allowed my sense of being, my moods, my happiness, my existence to be determined by his affirmations of well done or his darker side of continually blaming me for taking away his masculine pride but his girl friend made him feel like a man!
Boy did I suck this up and really went to work to make him feel good bout himself. Until I looked at myself I looked 20 yrs older than I am and my daughter was on antidepressants. My mother who is deceased came to me in a dream and let me have it. I had put myself through college I have a master’s degree I am the breadwinner of the family and at one point I was a strong loving independent woman. I even had self esteem! I started writing a journal and when I would get the desire to call or communicate with hm I would read why on earth would you even want to speak with this person again? and I would continue to write. I joined a group of co workers at work and we walk and watch our food intake I have lost 16 lbs since April. I got a new hair do, some new clothes, enrolled in a digital camera class initially to have something to do. I also meditate and take long walks. I focused on my 15 yr to get her through and she is off medications, made friends in fact she is visiting her little boy friend now so this is why I have the time to write this.
I am at peace with my self now but I worked diligently to get here some times it was minute by minute ( can’t tell you how many loads of laundry, floors I scrubbed, ovens, refrigerator I cleaned in the Am when the urge hit me to call or text him). Bottom line it worked and I sincerely hope that my story will help someone else going through this.
Amber,
Your description of what your ex did to you — attempting to KILL you — sounds horrible. You say you have met the man of your “dreams…can you tell us some of the process you went through to heal from your previous abuse?
Thank you for your post.
Seeif
Amber,
Your description of what your ex did to you — attempting to KILL you — sounds horrible. You say you have met the man of your “dreams…can you tell us some of the process you went through to heal from your previous abuse?
Thank you for your post.
Seeif
Someone whom I deem to be very wise, recently gave me some great inspiration. He used the analogy between the old way of taking photographs with film -v- the new way of taking shots digitally. He compared these two methods to an unhealthy relationship -v- a healthy one.
Film photography equals a lot of effort and time, many rolls of film are used up not even knowing if you have captured a good enough shot. Then in a darkened room, that film has to be enlarged and transferred to paper, which then needs to be developed in up to 3 types of chemicals (known as fixers!). It’s a long, messy process and the results are sometimes good but more often than not are unsatisfactory, leaving you with all too few beautiful images to hang on your walls. This results in buying more film, investing more time and energy trying again to make, take and then develop the perfect image you are after. It’s tiring and time consuming and a large amount of that time is spent in a small, dark place with toxic chemicals!
Digital photography cuts out all that mess. There is no film, just the ability to take endless shots, to view them instantly in perfect clarity and to erase the ones that don’t meet the grade. Sure, mistakes are made but with just one click they are gone and more positive images take their place. Its easy to move on to a better image each time and the blips are easily forgotten.
My friend’s analogy got me thinking about my childhood and my own memories of photography. My father was a photographer and my real life experiences of film photography are in fact all positive. I used to love going out on shoots with him or to the studio and watching him work. I actually loved the dark room and the smell of the chemicals he used to develop his photographs. If he had lived longer, I think I would have learned a lot more about photography and if he were still here, I do believe he would have made the jump to digital!
Like all great photographic artists, my father’s gift was in seeing beauty and form in even the simplest of everyday things or in highlighting the extra-ordinary in the ’seemingly’ most ordinary of people. His skill was with light and in bringing out the personalities of the people he was photographing by effortlessly helping them to feel relaxed and at ease. Most of his photography was in black and white, but he always waited for the right light and it seemed he had a magic touch, which coaxed the hues & contours of a particular landscape or scene into somehow intensifying. I have so many beautiful, natural shots of me up until age seven, that’s when I lost him. My favourite shot Dad took of me is a big photo taken in a tree in our garden (the tree is a memory because it’s not in the shot). My round and blissfully happy 5 year old face almost fills the whole frame. In my teens I was still too young and numb to be stirred when I looked at this photo. In my 20’s and 30’s I rarely looked at this image because it would make me sob uncontrollably from somewhere very deep inside. I have tried many times to write a story about this photograph but I have always been unsuccessful, until now.
It was only when I turned 40 and my closest friend asked what she could give me as a gift, that I unravelled this old image of my younger self and asked her to have it framed for me. At first, I hung it in my hallway where I saw it every day and so since then, at least once every day I have smiled at myself. Then, another close friend and armchair Feng Shui enthusiast, saw the photo and told me it should hang where I would see it the moment I opened my eyes each day. She also suggested that at that moment I should think of an affirmation, something positive I could say to ‘ME’ to reinforce my self-worth. My photograph now hangs on my front bedroom wall and ‘I AM’ the very first person I see and talk to each morning. In that image, my father captured my innocence, warmth and openness, the very essence of an emotionally secure, happy, playful, expressive and much loved child. You can see the look of adoration in my eyes; I can almost see my father reflected in my pupils. I have the sweetest little ‘lips-closed’ smile on my grubby face. My hair is tousled & windswept with the wonkiest fringe (bangs) you have ever seen. I’m wearing my granny’s pearls (not real but precious!) under the collar of my cute little dog-toothed patterned dress. Now, every day I wake up see that image and say to myself ‘I am going to feel like that again and I am going to start making it happen NOW’.
That’s my real life experience of film photography. In metaphor though, I easily relate it to the small, cramped, ‘dark- room’ that until recently existed inside my own psyche. A place where I have spent too many years of my adult life putting in exhaustive efforts to ‘develop’ partnerships with fellow ‘emotionally wounded’ human beings in one desperate failed attempt after another to fix my own sad past. They didn’t ask me to, but I tried to fix each and every one of my partners in an effort to create a picture perfect image, to prove to myself that I was still whole. Over time, my toxic, dank, dark-room became piled so high with out-of-focus, over-exposed, blurred and distorted photographs, that eventually I found I had no space left to try and develop any more images.
Finally, I had no choice but to look at the damage my sadness was causing to my mental and physical health and to my much loved daughters. In that moment I knew I had to let my last ‘captive’go. How could I possibly have thought that I could MAKE someone love & respect me when I did not even love or respect myself? Finally, all alone in my dark-room, realising I had no space, energy or time left to invest in this fruitless work, I so desperately needed to get out. I felt so claustrophobic and terrified of the relationship disasters ‘I’ had permitted existence, that I had no choice left but to fling open the door of that stagnant, cluttered space and open wide the blacked out windows to allow light and fresh air to flow through. I gathered the strength to let go of 22 years of hard work, turned around and walked out of my dark-room and the FOG.
I’m out of there now and its taking me time to adjust to the brightness of reality, the fresh air of freedom still scares me too and the realisation of the vastness of opportunities that are now available, overwhelm me. However, I’m slowly getting used to my new environment. To make it easier to re-visit the room, as I know I must, I’ve now cleared enough space to paint it white, and I’ve placed a vase of fragrant freesias in one corner, these symbolise a step towards forgiving my mother for her emotional deprivation between the time of my father’s death and her own premature death 15 years later. I have even mounted a few of the better images from my work on the walls of my new internal room to keep as happy memories and to reassure myself that it was not all wasted time. Happy faces of my confident happy daughters adorn the walls. The people I lost too early are there too, my parents and my beloved grandmother. My friends and my brother are also smiling there and I’ve even made space for snaps of happier times of me with the wounded souls I chose to share some of the darkest parts of my journey with. I am learning to look at these people with whom I share painful history and to wish them well.
I’m very busy re-building my life outside of that room now and I’m trying not to get put off by the gargantuan task I have ahead of getting the rest of my house in order; It’s been neglected and needs my focused attention. Still I make time, almost every day, to return to my freshened room for a little while to look at and take stock of some of the sad images I created there. I mourn each one before placing them in a box, which I take to a sacred place within my heart and burn them in a furnace of self-forgiveness and compassion. Each day the piles get shorter!
One day I am going to clear that room – then I am going to knock down the walls and integrate it with the rest of my internal house. Right after the sorting and renovations are complete, I am going to learn how to fly!
Did I mention, I’ve gone digital?
Klarity Belle,
Ah, I love this story–thank you very much for sharing it here. I’ve been working on a way to articulate the shift in my personal work from the process of building up strong, healthy boundaries to the new process of opening myself back up again. For some time I have been doing the necessary work of keeping the unhealthy creatures out of my sacred space (the release of my captives, as you so eloquently put it), and now I am focusing on keeping my space sacred and protected but with the windows and doors open so all the good stuff can still come in. I’m working on living this balance…creating a natural balance of what must go/stay out and what can come in. Your room and photography metaphors really speak to me and will help me articulate my own ongoing process.
Congratulations on going digital. I wish you the best with your room renovations. :)
You write beautifully.
Hi Kathy
Thank you. Now and then the line between myself and truth clears and something inspired comes forth. Writing seems to be an invaluable tool for so many of us in recovery from co-dependency.
The transformation of my own internal room was key to me because it now makes it easier to visit, even though there are still huge piles of ’sad and painful’ memories/images to sort out. In fact the journey has only just begun. I now get to do that sorting in a light and airy space as opposed to a dark room, where I guess it was easy to let ‘bad’ shots slip by into the keep piles. Even on difficult days I am no longer scared to visit my room.
Good luck with your sorting too to. KB