Recovery

Some of you may or may not know what these chips represent. I will explain. I am in a 12 step recovery program at a local church called Celebrate Recovery. This program works with people who struggle with addictions of all kinds. The group I attend is for co-dependency. These chips represent how many days I have been "sober" of addiction. I am celebrating 6 months clean. With every day that passes I am finding out that I don't want the person that I am avoiding back again. This, for me, is a huge victory because it is amazing what kind of betrayal that I learned to put up with just to hold on to some form of "love." This type of "love" is toxic. It masqueraded as love, until the blinders of naivety were removed and I began to see the truth. 

God is beginning day by day to shed the truth onto every lie that I have believed. I don't feel shackled to anyone. I am not bound by loneliness and grief over missing someone that did not really love me. I am finding myself complete in God and not in a desperate frenzy to have someone's "love." I am almost in shock that I am happy. Or maybe the real word here would be peaceful. Lately, I am drinking in the peace of God that more than replaces a toxic counterfeit. God's love is solid. It is not fickle. He does not love you one day and cheat the next. He is faithful.....even when we are unfaithful.  I am trying to grasp this beautiful concept of fidelity from Him, so I can offer it back to Him.

My spiritual journey: en medias res

I am about to get into a more serious side of blogging.  I am not sure how deeply I am going to blog about certain aspects of myself and specifically my past, but i am going to go into some detail that will probably be a bit risky. So here goes. Many of my friends here know things about my personal life because we became close and I was pretty upfront about certain parts of myself. So for me to say I had a lot of relationships go awry is not a mystery to them. 

Last December was a very huge reality check for me. The only way I know how to compare it to would be the equivalent to an alcoholic coming to his senses after he ran over someone and killed them while DUI. I am not a drug addict, at least not one that you may typically label an addict.........I don't do drugs and I am not addicted to alcohol, but I have another addiction.   I get attached to people and they become addictions. The other day I ran into my therapists office in a panic thinking I had borderline personality disorder. She kinda looked at me funny, as if surprised, and said, "No Tammy. You better check the DSM again. You don't have BPD."

Whew! I had read a book on that and wow. These folks are really hard to treat and one major reason is they think everybody else in their life is their problem. Their idea of rejecting them is they have called 5 times in one day and the 6th one you can't answer because you were in the middle of a funeral and they go cut themselves believing you don't care. I am in NO WAY trying to make fun of people with this issue. I used a somewhat fanatical explanation, but borderlines can really be that extremely clingy and justify it in their minds. And i can sympathize with that because they are living in an unreality that is a very painful reality to them.  I have never been this unreasonably clingy, but I have been way too clingy to others, but usually I notice it and keep myself in check over it.

However, some  aspects of BPD mirror co-dependency. I have never understood what that meant, well, until a few weeks ago. There is a christian author that has written a very biblical approach to this term and it opened my eyes to so many things. I will save some of the things that God taught me about this subject on my next blog. I want to shorten these posts so I don't overwhelm everybody with these long blogs.