the road to recovery

It would have been great if the road to recovery was lined with flowers, puppy dogs and candy but the reality is it's filled with anxiety and thoughts of "am I making the right decision"?! The choice was clear that Luis and I needed to be done with each other. I had made the right decision to choose life over death on this earth. A metaphorical death of living under someone else's control. I had to come to the realization that even though there were no secrets about this horrible situation I was going through, there didn't seem to be an easy choice to overcome the after effects of the decision I had made. I would wake up in the middle of the night with sweat dripping off my body as the stress poured out of every pore in my body. I was spewing out all the toxins and stress one day at a time. I look back now and understand it was the beginning of real change but going through it can make you feel like your dying and make you question what you did might be causing more problems. NO. It's causing different obstacles to work through, but it is NOT causing new problems or urging you to go backwards. Whenever you pursue to fix the problems in your life your going to have to push all the stress to the surface to work on it. Once that stress is out and in front of you if you make the decision not to face it because it looks bad or too big or overwhelming you'll be sorry you did. Conquering the stress of bad relationships will always require you to clean up the mess you made. It's like throwing a party. It's always fun while it lasts, but there's prep before hand and there's cleanup afterwards. It's real life. Once you decide to get out of a relationship you will need to begin cleaning up your messes. I would have these mini panic attacks. I learned to run towards them instead of away from them. I would allow my mind to think on the information that would just "POP" into my head. What was the big deal? Why did my brain bring this to my attention? What was the underlying problem? Why does this need me to take another look? ALL OF IT, I MEAN ALL OF IT WAS NECESSARY for me to work through why I had made those decisions in my life and why I allowed other people to take advantage of me instead of bring more good to my life. I realized that while I had lived in a home that would use words to manipulate your decisions, we also used words from the Bible to create "shame" in the air to control your actions sometimes to the point of NO ACTION. I had been on a path for a long time watching a mother and father not work as a team and no one around them seem to be able to derail that misery. I had become accustom to watching people in authority over me make decisions not for the greater good, but for their good at the time. Which inevitably led us down the road of mental and physical sickness. Yet.....no one seems to be able to speak to it to change our minds to choose something better for everyone involved. SO...in turn I had learned to do the same things, just in a different setting. It wasn't hard to pinpoint where I had learned it from, it's just it was really easy not to pinpoint it. As long as my mind didn't bring it to the frontal lobe I was able to believe this was my own walk outside of my parents and I was nothing like them. I was stabbing in the dark with every choice I made. Not so far from real life once you move out of your parents by any means, just this life was a life I wanted to avoid but had jumped right in. It's true everyone makes mistakes and no perfect parenting can ensure every child will make great decisions when they become young adults. I am speaking specifically to families and you who can relate to the times when we WEREN'T taught. When there isn't respect in the house to respect yourself and to communicate to the best of your abilities your left making decisions in the quite parts of the brain where you think it will never come back to haunt you. Not true. If you ever want to face the truth about why you choose what you choose, you will be lead right back to your childhood every time. You will need to reach a place where you can feel the vulnerability and work through the self doubt and lack of self worth and love. It doesn't kill you but it can feel like it inside your body when your having a panic attack. I've been there. I get it. It's scary because while your required to handle the present life you have your required to make future decisions while managing the clean up of bad ones in your past. WOW! Yes all true....good thing is your brain is incredible and can do it. You just have to work through the uncomfortable state of "feeling" like you can't. If there is one thing that I wan't you to get is that feelings are NOT FACTS. They are only the brains way of starting the whole feeling, thinking, action process. Feeling allows us to think through all the decisions we've made or will make or what we've seen others make and then decide what action to take from there. Keep in mind we need to make the decisions on the people WE WANT TO BE, not on the emotions we feel. This will be the hardest thing to master, for what I found to be mostly true is that the large majority of people on this planet make decisions based on their emotions and not the person they want to be. While it felt impossible at times to make the right decisions I learned very quickly I never died from the anxiety welling up in my body. I never actually lost the ability to choose. I never was incapable it just felt overwhelming at times. Until I made the decision to do it. Walk towards my problems instead of walking away. I have to fight the uncomfortable urges not to face it every single time. The feeling never goes away and I've learned because it is always going to be equated with choosing to face the issue. The emotion of frustration,failure, relationships not working will require me to be more involved not less. I had a lot of flashbacks while driving. I don't know why the car is so invasive on the brain but most likely it's because your driving by yourself and can hear your thoughts. I was continually having mini panic attacks on the way to work or the gym or the store. It hurt like the dickens every time. My head would burn and my chest would tighten and oddly enough I lived through it every time. I was left feeling empowered to thinking my body was working all that stress to the surface and the last place for the stress to reside before it was gone was in that frontal place in my brain recognizing the actual pain the stress caused.......and then it vanished. I have to say the feeling of dying and the actual feeling of healing can fool you into thinking to take the wrong action. This is why it is so important for you to be cognitive to what's really going on. Let me give you a great example so you know what I mean. I have been a cosmetologist for 18 years and one of the hardest things for women to realize is when they start getting facials they will break out. Meaning they will actually see blemishes and pimples come to the surface after they have treated the skin to a facial or massage. Women are often just super irritated seeing their skin be imperfect. Here's the biochemistry on the blemishes. The surface is the last place for the impurity to show itself before it works itself out and vanishes. The facial and massage worked the blemish from deep inside to the surface so it could be dealt with. The facial didn't create the blemish, on the contrary it was the facial that was strong enough to work the blemish out of the skin's deep layer where it was being held. This is a lot like our lives. We hid blemishes and impurities deep within our bodies and when we are working them all the way out we feel the pain and the discomfort the entire time, but once it is to the surface it can begin to vanish and we move on better than before. While you may not like that I equated our personal lives to a pimple. I believe once you let that sink it, it isn't all that bad. Pimples come and go and we all know it isn't the end of the world. Life goes on.