The Lost Tree

The crazy thing about addictions is that everybody knows their harmful effects, yet starts and continues the behavior anyways.  It is comparable to jumping off a cliff.  You know that it is going to hurt,  you know that it may kill you, you know that it will require a laborious recovery, and you do it anyways.  Why?  Do you hate yourself?  Do you think that you are stronger than the addiction?  Do you tell yourself that this time will be different?  Are you incapable of seeing past this very moment?  Whatever the reason for starting, all addicts end up at the same grand finale, as a victim of their own behavior.  They now have something else motivating their every action and thought.  The person that they were before is hidden behind the obstinate demands of the addiction.

When talking about abused women, people always say things like; "why doesn't she just leave?" "how could she put her family through that?" why does she always let him back in?" "doesn't she want to be happy?"  Believe me, I ask myself the same questions everyday.  Dysfunctional relationships are as addictive as the most potent drug.  They take over your life.  You become them.  In most cases, you will have been forced to disconnect from every other healthy relationship.  You will have been told so many times that everything is your fault that you begin to believe that you deserve the abuse.  You stop wanting anything better for yourself, believing that you don't deserve it.  You start believing that nobody else will understand you or want you, because you are so bad.  Ultimately you feel like without this dysfunctional relationship, you will be left completely alone in the world.  The longer you stay in a dysfunctional relationship, the harder it is to break away.  The dysfunction encompasses you, making you believe that you are the crazy one.  You doubt your own memory, your own feelings, your own sanity, then you doubt the whole world.  You are lost, you are alone, you are dependent on the only thing you know to be true, your relationship.

After my experience at Christmas, I returned to France knowing the daunting task that lay ahead of me.  This time, I would not forget what happened.  I would not let myself fall back into a blind state of denial.  Realizing what you have to do and carrying it out are two entirely different demons.  The realization hits hard.  You flip flop back and forth between realities so fast that you lose track of where you are.  Part of you wants to go back into denial, because life is simpler there.  It is all you know.  Although it hurt you, it was where you found a sense of belonging.  Without it, you have nothing to hold on to.  Without it, your whole belief system crumbles.  For so long, you listened to the lies and altered your life around them.  How do you start reforming your truth?  Here, I started my long battle between denial and the reality that left me lost and alone in what was starting to feel like a very large world.