So, what other different questions did I need to ask and what different resolutions did I need to make?
The second thing I HAD to confront and deal with what was making me tick. That was and is the the point where I have the most leverage. For me it was talk therapy, EMDR, hypnosis, CONNECTION, certain supplements, and even some medications for periods of time to shift my brain chemistry and change what I believed. Meditation, prayer, and learning more about what my gut feelings felt like and how to trust them.
This had to become the most important aspect of my life. I had to take the pressure off my child. Our children can NOT be the most important elements of our lives. We have to put our connection with our SELVES (or God, or the Universe, etc..) first. That is something no one can away from us without justification. Lawyers can sometimes manipulate the legal system to help their clients take kids away from their other parent for short periods of time, sometimes longer. If our kids are the most important thing to us we are doomed. Like the oxygen masks in airplanes, we have to put them on first so we can breathe and then do what we must.
The third thing was to gain better control over my integrity. It means I make the process as clean, and as clear, and as crisp as possible and execute it to the best of my ability. No one can make me skip that unless I decide to let them. I have has people who mean me ill and will try and convince me that the outcome is the most important thing, and without it there is nothing.
Bullsh*t.
The process is what matters most. That means that no matter what we will be all about our children having two parents. It is the one most important point to make over and over again. It is the one to exude to the best of our ability.
We sometimes get scammed into believing that when our kids act out they don’t love us anymore. But they couldn’t do that any more than they could elect to stop breathing and expect to stay alive. They are very aware of us. If we go to the bitter end of a custody fight without the outcomes we are looking for, but that message of children needing both parents is what we send out, there is no way that doesn’t affect them. That alone can start to change things.
And for those of us who are actually seeing our children having both parents again, it is amazing. When we look at it through their eyes we can realize we have, if not completely changed the course of the lives of those in our families generations we will never meet, certainly weakened the chain and made it more possible for others to do better.
Standing on Strong Shoulders
My father was the first in our family to stop drinking and stay sober most of his adult life. While I started out abusing drugs and alcohol many years ago, his sobriety “ruined” my substance abuse at a relatively young age. He married and raised my siblings and me with a mother who had come from abuse and behaved in an emotionally dysregulated way. We learned to be lonely and scared. When he got divorced my mother tried to divide us from our father; Whispers of something inappropriate possibly happening with my father’s behavior, whispers that, given the light of adulthood were never substantiated. When my ex started with the false accusations—I had to get really honest. I had, on some level, been expecting them for a long time. I was afraid of my ex well before I admitted I was. I ignored the red flags for years.
With the accusations came my moment to decide what was going to happen next. Was I going to succumb to it—fall apart, potentially lose my child or go in a different direction? I believe that had I still been dealing with the lineage of alcoholism in my family gathering the resources to change the course of my child’s life would have been much harder, if not impossible. I stand on the shoulders of someone who in his own way went beyond where the generations before were leading him and provided me the opportunity to do the same. I’d like to think my child will be able to go further still, but even if they don’t they are starting from, and passing down something much better than any generation before them.
So… if you’re in the type of situation that brought you to read something like this in the first place: who’s shoulders are you going to put the weight of this on if not your own? If you don’t have a direct personal reference in your life, you have never before had speed of communication of the Internet and unprecedented access to finding people that can help.
Who is going to help expose the lies of feeling powerless… and alone… and unable to change things… if not you?
If not you, then who?