Powerless and in Pain

For therapy I am doing a relationship history. Looking at patterns: the kind of men I pick, the kind I love, the kind I leave. I am here one more time asking: “Why this man?” I am full of insight but perhaps not wisdom. So much therapy. So much recovery. It can only be up to God now. That is what steps six and seven are about. Twenty-five years later I am again sick and tired of being sick and tired. So we say it’s Step One and that means powerless. Am I really powerless? So hard to imagine. I sought this, chose it, flirted, had coffee with him again. Reader, I kissed him. The rest is painful history.

So where is the powerlessness? Maybe if you believe in the schemas of cognitive therapy, that they are not just psychological but neural as well, that they engrave patterns on our nervous systems as well as add scent bait to the wrong partner, then yes powerless. Today it just hurts. I am powerless and in pain.

What We Don't Tell the Newcomer

This is one of those days that I think: 25 years of recovery, an equal number of years of therapy, every self help book underlined and memorized and still...and still…

Working too hard, doing too much, feeling bad about a relationship, not letting go, trying to control, criticizing myself, worrying that I am unhealed and unfixable. I have all this and knowing I am changed and changing, loved and loveable, knowing that it is progress and not perfection. But still…and still. I wish I were different and I wish circumstances were different and I wish I had not caused pain or received pain.

We don’t tell the newcomer that you can hurt just as bad 25 years later, and in fact, maybe even more because you have fewer things to mute the pain.

Thornton Wilder's Wounds

Without your wounds where
would your power be? The
very angels themselves
cannot persuade the
wretched and blundering
children on Earth as can one
human being broken in the
wheels of living. In love’s
service, only the wounded
can serve.

--Thornton Wilder