Addiction Recovery: Identifying Feelings

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So you enter into addiction recovery and the promise is that before you know it you will begin to have “feelings” again. It’s not easy dealing with this after going for whatever period of time numbing your feelings and emotions. But you would think after being in recovery since January I would kind of get used to this already!

I have had this feeling that I can’t shake. It’s a feeling of loneliness. If you knew my living situation you would know that this feeling is not due to lack of people being around me. I always have someone around. Not to mention I have a great husband and a five year old son (just turned five yesterday) that I am around.

Maybe loneliness isn’t even the right word to describe how I’m feeling. See I don’t know, like I already have said I have always found a way of anesthetizing myself so that these pesky feelings never felt like they were affecting me. I’ve never really examined my feelings before I only stuffed them away.

So the best way to describe how I’m feeling is loneliness and if it’s not due to me actually being alone then what the fuck is going on. I came to some kind of conclusion on this. I know that for a while in my addiction recovery I was able to connect with what I considered to be a higher power. I even caught myself doing something that resembled praying. All of that kind of gave me a sense of ease. I was feeling connected to something and it was just a great feeling.

Lately, for whatever reason, I have not been feeling that connection to anything. I’m wondering if this is what is causing my sense of loneliness. It seems like for the time being that my spirituality has fizzled out. Why? I have no idea. When? Same thing, I don’t know. I’m actually just realizing it today.

How do you then decide “ok, I’m going to be spiritual again”. I don’t even know how I did it the first time so I can’t try and repeat it to get the same result. I guess I just got to ride this out, be aware of it and hope that something clicks in my brain again.

Sometimes having feelings seems to suck. No longer am I the stone faced girl who doesn’t let anything bother her. I can from time to time, become and emotional wreck. For what reason? None other than having emotions that actually reach my surface.

I guess this is all part of what addiction recovery entails. Not only is it stopping the emotional stuffing but it is then learning how to deal with those feelings and emotions. A feeling is just that, a feeling…some people will say. I hear ya, I do. But when it is you feeling the feeling it becomes kind of difficult to think that way.

I have always been able to empathize with people and truly feel what they were feeling. Somehow that was ok for me to do. But when it comes to me dealing with feelings and emotions that are truly mine, I’m at a loss.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to be functioning emotionally again but I guess I just don’t have this whole thing down pat yet and it kind of throws me for a loop. Every once in a while I get slapped in the face with the realization that I honestly have no idea what the fuck it is I’m doing! Live and learn I guess.

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