Walking through darkness
My husband and I have been together for 23 years. And for a lot of it we were in a super s**tty relationship.
Like AWFUL.
We met when I was 21. We were both damaged, traumatised people who knew nothing about emotional safety.
My coping mechanisms for life were drinking, making sure everyone around me was OK and if they weren’t I would be in mad fixing/helping/supporting mode, and then more drinking.
We had dark, dark years. Unhappy years. Years of feeling trapped.
Why we stayed together, I do not entirely know. Maybe it was the deep sadness that we both carried, that deep damage that had been done to us, tied us together like two people lost in the same deserted land.
I used to say that what was really f**ked up about me, worked with what was really f**ked up about him. And that is true.
It’s true for many people in relationships where the two individuals are unhappy, trying not to drown, and not sure if it’s them or being together that is doing it.
I was so deeply ashamed of how damaged I was. How I could go out for a drink with some friends and arrive home 3 days later having gone on dangerous and stupid journeys, into strange and dark places.
In a way because his damage was different, because he didn’t understand my loss of control around drinking, and because he hated it, I clung to him like a rock.
Hoping his hatred for my drinking would keep me safe. Would stop me from being this wild, unhinged, scummy mess.
My drinking slowed in my late 20’s, but occasionally a crazed and destructive night would punctuate my life as a mother. A shocking event, an experience that would fill me with pure disgust. A castigation from my husband. I would want to scrape of my skin off after these ‘slip-up’s.
The shame I felt at being someone who couldn’t trust myself, couldn’t stop her self from unhinging from the reality that she found so shockingly suffocating, was torturous.
I was filled with vile pure pain about who I was.
Oh how I yearned to be sensible like my friends.
Oh I how yearned to have normal problems, normal struggles, normal ways of being.
Oh I how I yearned to have a sensible, boring life where I could live without this searing pain within me.
I share this to say that I get darkness. I get doing bad things. I get the horror, the shame of living at the edges.
I get the horror of seeing bad things. Of experiencing the darkness of other people, I have spent many years trying to unearth the imprints of darkness on my body.
Gabor Mate says – “It’s not why the addiction but why the pain.”
I didn’t use alcohol because my life was fine and I wanted thrills.
I used it to try and dampen the flames of pain.
I had no other tools to process the traumas that had happened in my life. I had no ways to tend to my broken heart, and broken spirit.
I yearned to be healed and whole, but I was desperately afraid, desperately alone, a small broken girl hiding in the body of a woman.
I hold myself now with such strength and tenderness, such grace and love, I wish – oh how I wish – I could go back 20 years and say to that terrified woman and say – it’s going to be OK. It is really going to be OK.
You will find the ways to heal. You will heal yourself, and in doing so you will shine the light on the healing path for your husband.
You will have a relationship that is in no way perfect – but holds such incredible tenderness, strength, love, acceptance and safety for you it will blow your mind.
Your husband will be your best friend. He will give you unconditional love.
There will be incredibly beautiful moments when he sees something happen when you are with friends, he will instantly recognise a wave of shame explode within you, and he will know what to do.
He will know how to love you in everything that you are. And you will learn that he always did.
I get the darkness.
If the darkness is something that follows you too much, know that there is always a way out.
If I can find a path, anyone can.
With love,
Di
