When I first admitted I had a drug and alcohol addiction, I was relieved more than upset. I finally had a reason, a solution to the mess my life had become. I had an addiction a disease that I was powerless over and that helped me to forgive myself for the harm I had caused others and myself. It gave me hardcore facts about why I behaved the way I did and things began clicking in my brain left and right, it was like a ton of ahhhaa moments that enabled me to slowly awaken from the self-induced coma I had placed myself in with my addictions. As I began to awaken, another reality hit me hard, my secrets kept me sick. I heard this phrase my first day in rehabilitation center for my addiction and it hit me like a freight train, my secrets were the reasons I used. Wow. It was a major light bulb moment and a flood of relief came upon me like nothing I had ever felt. I can recover, I can live a function life, I just have to deal with the secrets that I have kept hidden and locked away from years. The reality of it was so completely obvious to me that I marveled in my therapy session about how it never dawned on me before. How did I not realize that my past demons, the things I’d never speak of in public were the very things keeping me tied into a path of destruction that almost lead to my demise. I was quickly reminded that it was mainly because today I was clean and sober and that clarity was allowing knowledge and in some ways common sense to permeate my reality.
Now that I had discovered what I needed to do, I had to figure out a way to bring my darkness to light, I had to pull out the secrets that I kept safely tucked away in my subconscious. The biggest secret of all for me was that I was raped at age 12 and had never dealt with it. I had experienced a significantly traumatic victimization as a child and it had altered my entire reality, behaviors, view of the world and view of myself. It was the start of my addictions and in fact it was the very root cause of my continued addictive behaviors. I woke up each day and poured every substance I could inside of me to quell the pain of my victimization. I denied its reality by never talking about it and I got so good at it that most people in my life never ever knew it happened. I buried it deep within my soul and it ate away at me like a slow moving cancer that I fueled daily with drugs and alcohol.
So I learned that I had to figure out how to put the pieces of my childhood back together in a meaningful way so as to never pick up the negative coping mechanisms I had trained myself to use. Coupled with a strong foundation in a 12 step program, I dove into therapy and began to really peel back the layers I had placed over the victimization. I exposed it, just as I had exposed my addictions to the light of day. I cried, I screamed, I wrote, I grieved the loss of my childhood in a safe place. I began to heal. I began to pick up all the pieces of my childhood that had been shattered around me the day I was raped. I went in search of books that would help me heal and dug into them like a hungry student. I wanted to learn, to educate my mind, spirit and body with recovery. I began to feel confident and with each piece I placed back into myself, I began to become whole again. I began to feel who I was before the crime, I began to understand that I would never be the same person but that I could be pure and whole again in my own way. I realized that I didn’t have to live encapsulated by the event, the crime, I need not be defined by it and that I would be whoever I desired to become. I felt free. Free from the pain and free from my addictions. It became very clear to me that in order to maintain my new found recovery, I had to deal with all of my past wounds and victimizations. I had to take my secrets from under lock and key and deal with them. Since this time I have dedicated my life to helping others do so. I work for a victim’s services organization that deals daily with the aftermath of crime, victimization and trauma. I walk others through the process that I had to walk alone. As an avid reader, I had a hard time finding a resource that really brought these tools together. So I wrote Picking Up the Pieces Without Picking Up as a short, concise tool that would take what I had learned about my own process and place it in a usable easily digestible format for others to follow.
One of the other lessons I learned is that you only keep what you have in life by giving it away. This new guidebook is my way of giving back and I hope it helps people to feel the freedom that I do today.
