Hi
When does all this work finally pay off?
BTW this piece is really long.
Some of us have been through some really fucked-up shit.
We grew up in homes where we weren't safe. We were abused, bullied, abandoned, rejected, or made to feel that there was something fundamentally wrong with us. Some of us learned very early that the world wasn't a particularly kind place, and the people who were supposed to protect us weren't always capable of doing so.
And we didn't have the resources to understand what was happening. We didn't have therapists explaining trauma. We didn't have coaches helping us question our thinking. We didn't understand nervous systems, automatic thoughts, or the ways our brains were trying to protect us.
We were just kids trying to survive. And survive we did.
But surviving came with consequences.
We developed beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. We learned to anticipate rejection, to protect ourselves from disappointment, and to look for danger even when there wasn't any. We found ways to escape uncomfortable feelings because nobody had taught us how to be with them.
For some of us, alcohol became one of those ways we used to cope with life. It worked, too.
Until it didn't.