STORMY WEATHER (It's Wet & Raining Outside As Well!)

I am still weathering a bit of a storm inside of myself these last couple of days...every day to some degree really. I find it quite interesting that shortly after I got sober I started to use a weather metaphor to describe my emotional state...stormy, sunny, partly cloudy...they work well in describing human emotional states because most of us in our society understand the weather terminology therefore the translation is fairly easy.

Often I'll have waves of emotion wash over me, an emotional Tsunami if you will...those waves can run the spectrum from very positive emotion to the most painful and negative. There are many things that factor into this emotional state of being...the most significant to me today is that I am not masking, ignoring or trying to run from those emotions in any way. It is obvious that in the past I avoided feeling at all costs and I was usually successful at doing so. Naturally this didn't make the pain go away it just pushed it deeper so that it would grow and fester even more.....and ultimately find a way to make itself known...in a most damaging way.

It is a cliche but I was an emotional time-bomb...it was not a matter of if I would explode but when and how would it happen. It was a self-destructive, self-fulfilling prophecy. It had the affect of feeling like I had a Hell-Hound on my Trail. In other words I was totally aware that something very bad, something evil even...was chasing me down. I vividly remember the feeling yet I had no clue that this had anything to do with my repressing or avoiding my emotions through my use of alcohol and drugs.

I was living on instinct...a base, bottom-line survival instinct really where I always came first. I never second-guessed it and how can you...when an addict does not take care of their needs (for drugs mostly) immediately, they get tremendously sick so there is simply NO alternative: we have to be completely self oriented and selfish...often, life itself depends on feeding THAT monster. Certainly when you get to the point where I was of being so physically addicted to the drugs AND the alcohol.

But today it is HAVING and being forced to cope with the emotions that brings on the storm...and that is OK. It 'tis how it should be and I am getting better at dealing with whatever comes my way and in real time. In a follow-up post I will do my best to detail how I learned to live with the "bad stuff".

So until then...