Delayed Reactions

At some point in my early childhood, I became numb and by that I mean that I no longer experienced emotions.  I don't remember ever being happy or feeling loved and wanted, but there were things that delighted me, such as taking walks and riding my tricycle and later observing the natural world.  I remember clinging to my mother, even though I had no confidence in her constancy because she seemed so lost in the world.  What I felt for her was not "love" exactly, it was more like wearing a life jacket in a leaky boat adrift in an angry sea.  I learned the feeling of love the first time I touched and smelled a horse, but I had very little access to these magnificent creatures for most of my life.  Mostly, as a child, I remember people saying and doing unkind things to me and being incapable of responding because I would become paralyzed.   Rather than try to understand why I lived like a deer frozen in the headlights of oblivion, I distracted myself with obsessions and addictions.

My overarching problem was clinical depression, often quite severe.  When Prozac came into my life and put that beast in the dungeon, I then realized that I needed to face the emotions I had avoided by freezing away the pain.  After a couple of decades of acknowledging past hurts and learning to understand more recent feelings, I noticed that I was consuming a lot more alcohol than was appropriate for a woman of my size.  Problem or symptom?  Both, it turned out.

Until recently, if something made me feel angry or sad, I would "let it go" and look forward to happy hour.  Now that I have stopped drinking, I can no longer hide behind my evening buzz and this has given me the conscious choice of either speaking up about my feelings or allowing resentments to fester.  Hanging onto resentments is classic alcoholic behavior and so I am retraining myself, with increasing success, to let people know how their words and deeds make me feel.  The art is in not reacting negatively but rather in a way that assumes the other person did not intend to make me feel bad.  I remind myself daily to use this sentence, "When you said (or did) _________ it made me feel __________ because ____________."

Such a simple sentence and so powerful.  Try it, it works.