Support groups

(Trigger warning: some sexuality)

It is hard to let your heart break and to cry it out when there is so much confusion about what anything is all about and who is trustworthy and the world can be so vicious and right now I am just numb to it but I wish I could cry. I am in this turmoil of really wanting a simple grounded connection with somebody but having no semblance at all of having any connection with myself. I need to do more private writing. So many things I happen to hear probably aren’t meant to trigger me or point me out but they do. One of these I heard the day before yesterday was: “you think you can just tell your story and the world will rally around the injustice but the world doesn’t work that way.” Clearly not. Those words were not spoken to me but they felt way too personal and critical.

That was never what I expected from telling my stories but I thought telling my stories would have some healing power nonetheless and now I am even doubting the power of sharing stories with others. I should probably write more privately but for some reason I don’t. I want to start a group and do something with it, a group of people writing together and sharing stories, but I feel really lonely without someone around who really gets me and I have become so much weirder and have no idea how I would even begin to find that. I do not know what it would take to feel like, ahhh, this is a person who gets me, who sees eye to eye with me in some way, whose soul feels like mine, and whose presence comforts me as I journey through life. It feels so easy in the monents that it happens but I fear I have gotten old and jaded and well what is it about me, what even is there about me at all to begin with, but what is it about me that can connect like really truly bond with another right now? Having a kind friend around who cares about peace and the coumate is nice though we do have a lot of differences of opinion in a lot of ways too and I just do not know what kind of a connection is going to meet my social needs, where to find it, or if I am even worthy of it.

I am lost and have no direction. Hearing about everyone else’s struggles with loneliness and connection is so hard and makes me despair more. Few people talk about ease and joy in relationship and when they do they cannot necessarily explain so well how it happened for them. I think in a world with kinder and more compassionate systems more of us would meet people who get us. I am in between never wanting to connect to anyone ever again and wanting to force the thing right now.

As far as the support groups I am going to, I find CoDA to be helpful but there aren’t any relationships I am working on except with my mother and I have absolutely no idea what to do with that one. Cutting her off completely when there are still things she can do for me doesn’t fedl like the right option and when she claims to care and sounds believable I don’t want to end the connection as hard as it is when things unexpectedly fet horrible.

She can be so callous and hurtful with every word beyond anything I can comprehend sometimes but then for days lately she has been perfectly kind towards me. Not that I can bring up anything I am struggling with at all but she has been kinder and if I simply mention the surface level of it she is not lashing back at ky pain and making it worse. She coaims she cares and wants to help me and she is the only one in the family who can convince me that might be true, though I do not understand any of ger hurtfulness whatsoever, and she could just be saying these things while internally betraying me. I am so tired of fears of betrayal and of never knowing where they are going to come from.

Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families can be a really really helpful group right now. I live the stories that often get shared there and I can relate to so much; it is maybe a little more interesting and relevant to me right now than CoDA because there are not many relationships in my life I am working with. The gentleness of the group and talk about the inner child snd such things are really helpful.

SLAA, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, is a group that I still can’t quite tell if it is super relevant or not. It does make me kind of lonely and depressed sometimes hearing others talk about their relationships. There is so much diversity, people with masturbation addiction, fantasy addiction, romantic addiction, and codependency (so my co-dependent issues can be expressed in this group, too)

I don’t want to pile up too many addictions but I am thinking about compulsive masturbation, for sure, and I have done a lot less of that lately; but I have also been so shamed around masturbation and sexuality that my life force has been so suppressed and I need to remember that sexuality and even this can be healthy, so much for what Liam Neeson’s priest says! I need to uncover it from shame… and, um, keep the details of it private private private especially when the details concern someone else. 🙁 I feel more terrible than I can ever say about things like that. I am hesitant to think of it as an addiction when it seems the whole world wants me to shame me for it and in itself there is nothing shameful about it. It feels like an addiction when sexual abuse traumas come up and it is almost like I can feel someone else holding my private parts and controlling them like they are not my own and I feel powerless and abused and masturbation is a way for me to claim my body as my own and get out of the panic attacks that might cone up otherwise. But it feels necessary to regain control of myself and it relaxes me so is that an addiction?

I will maybe talk at one point about masturbation and when it is and isn’t helpful to think of it as addiction when it is a pleasurable, nurturing, body healing response to flashbacks of sexual abuse. When I don’t have control to do what I want with my body when i feel tied in knots by these memories and traumas I can kind of freak out…

I think maybe I feel a little bit lost there and that is because I am much, much more on the anorexic end if the spectrum which isn’t talked about nearly so much (only 15% of meetings in England are anorexic focused mestings). Anorexia in tbis context means I avoid connection and intimacy like the plague, and I may want connection and i timacy too, but there are two cery conflicting parts of me and the one that finds a way to run away I guess usually wins. Now I do not know who I might get close to who is likely to stab me in the back and honestly I feel so powerless over people’s emotional manipulation and deception so I feel totally anorexic but scheming ways to maybe feel some kind if connection with someone at the same time. If I’m not connected with myself though how am I going to feel it with anybody else? I need to find some way to become more resilient around that. Anyway, I wonder, if I commit to SLAA with an anorexia focus, will anything change? Will I find more connections in my life? It is such a kind of paradoxical thing that avoidance of sex and live and romance falls in tbe spectrum of sex and live addiction but I am glad it does brcause otherwise I would feel a lit more out of place.

I am such a quiet person, I just want someone to want to be with me and feel good about it and relax. I want someone to be curious about what getting to know me would be like… but there are so many ways i feel cropped short when I try to connect: I am introverted and often slow and quiet and I hate when everything about me gets criticized in some way. It is like, maybe if I make my issues clear, they will help me and I would really prefer to make friends by word if moyth or mutual connections than trying to go online or whatever. And i just don’t trust that someone who is likely to really get me might be found at a random local event, and if they are, I’m at a loss how to talk to them. Once I’ve settled down, like we’re cuddling and chilling, then I can start to be more of myself and reveal myself, but until then it is so hard.

Now I do not know which if my former friends hates me or thinks what about me and even most of my family that I thought would basically stand on my side clearly would not mind if I were dead and this is a really hard world to navigate trusting socially: I love people, they might actually hate me. How do you take action then, where does your heart flow, how do you not get racked up with doubt? If I try to make a connection, they might just be using me. What do you do when you are starting off trying to build social networks from such a vulnerable place? I need to stop avoiding both my desire for connection and my fear of connection. I am like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita who sees his own friends and family taking the battlefield against him: “Conflicting sacred duties confound my reason!”

Maybe of these groups I’d get the most out of SLAA, especially meetings with an anorexic focus, and then ACA, and maybe CoDA after that. But it kind of goes back and forth depending on how I’m feeling.