Worthy of love

I am intending to let go of everything, all the pain and fear and control and clinging, and give it to God, but also hold it in mindfulness: I don’t know how I didn’t know about Noah Levine’s Refuge Recovery but it sounds pretty awesome and I think both approaches to recovery, this Buddhist-centred approach and the higher power centred 12 step approach, whatever it actually is I am recovering from right now, will be of benefit to me.

All the pain and fear and control and the ways I hide and really let all these things get in the way of intimately relating to others and to the world and to myself I think I can safely label as addiction. At least as a philosophical concept addiction might help me understand the source of my sense of alienation from myself and from the world and when those impediments are removed I think I can act more authentically as who I am but truly I am so terrified of what comes next, of never figuring out who I am, of never finding the encouraging support and love I need to know that I am not alone on this journey particularly when it is so easy to believe that the world is against me and that will never change. All of these fears, the terror, the grasping for control, the clinging to hopelessness and depression (and to hope and to ecstasy), I have to let it go and give it to what I trust as the unconditional love in the universe and hope that it is not too late for me to heal and that I can find support in the healing. I want to have a truly alive experience in the world and to help others to have that too.

So I meditate and let the light of love surround me and relax me and find that unconditional love in the deepest place in my heart, feel the real feelings that are held there and moment to moment, day to day, let it go, and trust, and hope that somewhere or other I will find my place. A whole lot of fear came up last night when I started practicing letting it go; I doubt that I have the strength and resilience for it, and it is hard sometimes to imagine anything bigger than my heartbreak, loneliness, confusion, and sense of worthlessness. I want to “fully give myself to” my life and that means to all of my relationships. I no longer want to be burdened with so much pain and turmoil that keeps me from reaching out at all; I want to be all in on what life offers me, whatever that is, and not be contantly distracted by many things that do have their roots in clinging and control and wanting more (i.e. addiction). I want to be able to fully appreciate what is before me. I am not sure whether depression and despair itself is addiction or a symptom of addiction but in any case I feel like doing this work will be just as effective for issues of depression and trauma and abuse… or I hope that it will, anyway.

I downloaded this literature for SLAA anorectics (there is sexual, social, and emotional anorexia) and I am finding so many of the concepts that are coming together for me now so valuable. I am terrified of being vulnerable. I do not give myself fully to others because I try to protect my vulnerable thoughts, feelings, and experiences, those I am afraid that no one will ever understand, and I give up on connection before I have even tried. If I had the courage to own these things about myself years ago, maybe something would be different, but right now I have so much worthlessness to unpack, and I wonder if anything, even a higher power, can convince me right now that I am worthy.

Am I “regularly drawn to others who withhold love, affection, and commitment” from me? I think that is such a difficult thing in my relationship with my mother and I keep trying to be in control and find some power in what gets more and more manageable. That is such a hard place to just let go of expecting more than I have gotten my whole life but I wonder if I keep trying, too, with other people and communities that do not really display any kind of commutment to me, and it should be so much easier to see what is happening walk away, but I don’t think it necessarily is. I am programmed to keep trying and to keep fighting when I am not getting enough or when caring is being withheld from me. I don’t necessarily trust my own perceptions that I am not getting enough and that I deserve more and try to figure out what the problem is rather than giving up and surrounding myself with other people. I don’t know if in the case of this retreat center, that is what has been happening, or not, but I think I am now more capable of discerning when caring or meeting my needs is being withheld from me, and I would like to see what happens when I give myself a chance to love and be loved in that context one more time. Part of me does feel like a failure though for not just moving on and finding other less complicated places to express and receive love… maybe I am drawn to them because I feel them withholding a commitment to me, but I really do want to trust that we can come to terms with each other and work things out. It was so often my inability to articulate my needs that likely let to these feelings after all, and I don’t mean to judge anyone; I just wonder if my highest discernment will turn out to be letting go of all expectations and giving this place a chance to hold me once more…

In anorexia it is the powerlessness we feel over neglecting our own wants and needs which are shouting not to be ignored anymore. YES, I need social support, loving encouragement to help me remember that I am worthy and I can let go of the addiction to consistently ignoring my own personal and social needs until they boil over and the pain of the loneliness becomes unbearable and unmanageable. These words from one of these booklets is helpful: “The cumulative effects of our sexual, emotional, and social starvation have produced concrete signs of unmanageability. We begin to acknowledge that it is unhealthy to hunger for love but not experience it. It is unhealthy to reject our humanness and need for sexual expression, or to experience suicidal thoughts at a life devoid of meaning.”

These are words I would like to hear from a loving friend these days and it is almost like these are things I’ve never experienced before: hey, it’s not healthy to yearn for love but not experience it, and you deserve it! It is so vulnerable to admit this even to myself — that emotional and social starvation is not healthy — I went to these retreats longing for someone to convince me of this but I don’t think I was able to be honest about my emotional and social anorexia so as much as I was told I was worthy of love and even ecstasy there was a huge part of me that couldn’t possibly just believe it. I maybe felt secretly like all my addictive patterns would come out if I decided to be vulnerable and open to connection; little did I realise my intense resistance to connection and putting so many parameters around it *was* an addiction… but one that needs to be treated with such grntleness because much the powerlessness is in refusing to believe I am worthy of love and of healthy, stable, grounded loving connections; the lack of it gradually wears on you and it gets harder to believe it is possible to meet my social/emotional needs. I become addicted to the story that I am not lonely, that I do not want or need it, that what I want is impossible and no community of support could help me achieve it.

I have become addicted to the patterns of my years of heartbreak, to disappointment, to betrayal… to my refusal to forgive myself and allow myself the possibility of feeling loved. I like the Refuge Recovery forgiveness meditation, it is almost scary powerful: I forgive myself, and others, as much as I can, in this moment… and even when that is not much at all, it is still quite a lot.