Lullabies of Addiction
The songs that shame sings
I know that addiction is a fucking, lying bitch, and so is shame. I believe the opposite of love is shame, not hate. In fact, it’s shame that has caused me to hate myself.
In the Book of Common Prayer, there is a prayer for the communal confession of sin before the priest offers absolution. I pray it along with everyone else:
We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
My problem is that I love my neighbor far more than I love myself. I have compassion for my neighbor that I don’t give myself. I have never loved my neighbor as I love myself because I have never loved myself.
Before I can be absolved for not loving my neighbor, I need to repent of hating myself.
Shame and guilt are two different things. I feel guilt when I’ve done something that is wrong, but I feel shame when I believe I am something that is wrong.
My biggest enemies have never been the ones whose prejudices, bigotry, and religious beliefs crushed my tiny spirit and abused my very soul. Those are horrible, and they are truly enemies, but my biggest enemy has always been myself.
The lies that I have believed, the hatred I have taken on about myself, the things that tell me personally that I do not even deserve love.
Addiction feeds off my trauma, my shame, and all those things I hate and despise about myself and think make me unlovable. Addiciton loves all of them.
As sweetly as addiction sings, and holds me, and hugs me, and gives me fake love before betraying me, I’ve still returned time and time again for the rush and comfort of my vices.
My vices have chagned over time, to whatever suits me best at the time. Whatever I can hide, but sex and violence have always haunted me.
I was wounded deeply before I was even old enough to walk, sexually, spiritually, physically, and emotionally believed, my spirit crushed.
I never got to know who I was created to be. I never had the chance to figure it out until now.
In step two, instead of saying that I know God can restore me to sanity, I say that I know God will bring me to sanity, because there is a difference.
People talk about how they think I sould go back to the person I was before they destroyed me, but they destroyed my spirit as a baby and so that person never existed.
I am now having to discover who that person is, who it was that God created me to be, instead of the person they were forcing me to be.
It’s always in those moments when I have a lot to lose that I suddenly realize that my life is unmanageable and that I need to sober the hell up.
Sobriety is a fucking gift and I don’t feel like I deserve it because I was mesmerized by the lullabies of addiction by the time I was four years old.
I’m radically pursuing healing, though, and so, with fear, and trepidation, and a lot of shame, I have started to come clean. Part of coming clean, part of repentance, is to forgive and love myself.
