I’m not sure what it is I am even looking for here, but these are my thoughts today.
I have gone to SA meetings, seen a CSAT after countless therapists, and hurt my family time and time again. Through all of this my wife has begged me for change, my daughters have been frustrated, and I’ve felt confused and like I was trying with no result. I had a year of sobriety, but nothing was actually different. My wife could show a happy face to try to heal and hold up her end of the bargain, but she always was hurting and hating who I am.
I relapsed and still they beg me to change. It’s not even the acting out, it’s the lack of empathy and ability to see what I need to do to show I love them. My wife says it’s like when she leaves the room she disappears from my heart.
12 step programs don’t seem to help. I text my sponsor and he says it isn’t my fault and I can’t beat myself up. It is my fault though. It’s my fault for choosing to not feel the impact. Softness allows for error, and error is damaging.
So the thing I feel today is that it’s all just garbage. I am only selfish. I want desperately to feel loved. I will manipulate and lie and cheat to feel loved. It’s etched into my soul to seek that feeling out. I’ll take it in and drink that feeling unendingly. When my wife or kids are upset I’ll make excuses, I’ll make promises, I will do anything to smooth it over and move to a place where I can pretend they are there because they love me. When that illusion fades I have always tried to soothe myself through my “addiction” if that is even a real thing, to numb the pain of thinking I am alone. To forget the feeling.
What strikes me is that this is not a special feeling unique to the “addiction”. Where we say we are powerless and nobody can understand, they do. They just handle it without using it as an excuse. The extreme measures I would go through to not feel that feeling is the same feeling I make my family feel through my actions. I put myself first in my heart by thinking I feel something unique. It is not.
Where I struggle to find a place to understand how they feel and how to show up for them, I feel like I find something in the understanding that this most painful feeling I feel is the feeling they feel. I caused it in them. Everything they say and do and feel is because they feel that feeling too. So they beg me to make them not feel it. They are just as desperate. In that I find understanding and remorse and love and empathy.
Please, just let me stay there. I don’t want to act selfishly anymore. I want to help them. I feel like I have moments of feeling it right and empathy that come and go or fade. I need to find a way to stay there, to actually put them first in my heart always. To not default to self-preservation.
