Keep Telling My Story
In
my family of origin, keeping secrets was sometimes the “spoken” but more often
the unspoken rule. My Dad was an addicted gambler and serial adulterer and Mom
was an alcoholic. Yet such facts were hardly ever articulated and any
verbalization of these truths resulted in knee-jerk reactions of denial,
minimization and most of all, rage.
Consequently, throughout my childhood, I was never sure what was safe for me to
say and consciously doubted many things that I intuitively knew to be true. Cognitive
dissonance is defined as the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or
attitudes, especially relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.
Prior to my recovery in CoDA, cognitive dissonance described me to a T. I
convinced myself that life was manageable and kept family secrets (including
that of my wife’s alcoholism) from the world and, to some extent, even from
myself.
My shadow-life of silence, denial and minimization came crashing down in
February 2018 when my wife was dying of alcoholic cirrhosis in the ICU. Life
became so unmanageable that I had to admit the truth of the situation
regardless of emotional pain, shame or my old habits of denial and
minimization. That crisis became my rock bottom, and led to my journey of
recovery in CoDA. I immediately started attending meetings, sharing my story at
meetings and with my sponsor, working the Steps and asking for help.
As I approach my third anniversary in CoDA, this basic fact has remained the
strong spine that supports my recovery. I tell my story, I keep telling it, all
of it, especially the parts that I’m ashamed of and in this way the shame
dissipates and my recovery continues to strengthen and stabilize.
Richard W - Port Richey, FL
10/28/20
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