I'm going to ask you to do something that is probably going to be the hardest thing you'll ever have to do in your life. I'm going to ask you to forgive the people in your life that do not deserve your forgiveness. But first, I'm going to give you a little back story so you understand why this is the single most important step you need to take in your path to healing.
In the last post, I spoke about my abusive alcoholic father and my first memory of him punching my mother in the face while she was holding me at age four. Today I'm going to go into a little more detail about some of the kinds of things I had to deal with growing up and how holding onto resentment led to my anxiety, depression and drug addiction.
If you've ever lived with an alcoholic, you know what I mean when I say that living with an alcoholic is like living with someone that has a personality disorder. One minute they could be the nicest person you've ever met, the next minute they're the meanest person in the world. One minute you feel like they love you, the next minute you feel like they hate your guts and wish you were dead.
Growing up, I was deathly afraid of being home alone with my father. He was always drunk and I never knew if he was going to be nice or mean at any given moment. I was afraid to walk near him at times. When I'd walk past him, he'd do things like punch me in the chest and knock the wind out of me. This wasn't just love-taps either. He would hit me like I was a grown man and say things like "I'm just trying to toughen up you up." When I'd cry he would mock me and say things like "you're a little girl, you should wear a skirt to school" and many other vulgar slurs I won't mention here. These types of situations usually led to him and my mother fighting which led to him getting even more violent.
My whole childhood I was either getting hit, made fun of, or listening to my parent's fight. I'm not going to lie and say there were no good times, but traumatic experiences tend to stick in your mind. It also sticks with you into your early adult life. I resented him for everything he put me through and this is what led to my anxiety, depression and eventually drug addiction and making some horrible choices.
People deal with their emotions in different ways. Some lash out and some try to escape. I chose the escape route. I started smoking marijuana at around age 12 and by age 16 I had moved on to narcotic pain medications. In my early to mid-20s, I was doing any drug I could get my hands on to escape reality. Sometimes I would stay clean, but when I was clean, I was a nervous wreck and depressed all the time. The only time I ever felt comfortable in social situations was when I was using drugs.
My drug addiction led to me making many terrible choices. One took away 17 months of my freedom. I went to the hospital and lied complaining of severe back pain. The lie worked. The doctor wrote me a prescription for Percocet and I decided to alter it to try to get more pills before taking it to the pharmacy. The pharmacy spotted the alteration and called the police as I was waiting for it to get filled. I was sentenced to 17 months in county jail and had nowhere to parole out to. I had to stay in there for the entire 17 months. Initially, I was angry, but getting locked up eventually turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.
When I first arrived, all I could feel is anger and rage for everything my father had done to me over the years. How could the man I was supposed to look up to and model myself after treat me like a piece of trash? I had blamed him for everything that was going wrong in my life. Eventually, I realized, this was the line of thinking that got me into this mess to begin with. I had been using all I went through as an excuse for all the stupid things I was doing. Could the root cause of my problems lie within myself? This didn't become apparent until I started going to church.
Going to church is one of the few things you can do to get off the cell block in jail. I figured it couldn't hurt to listen to some positive messages. I'm still no devout Christian but I do believe Christianity teaches some valuable life lessons whether you believe in the spiritual side of it or not.
One sermon hit me hard and changed my life forever. It was about forgiveness. That night, I wrote my father a letter forgiving him for all he had done to me over the years. As soon as I was done writing the letter, it felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
Forgiving him allowed me to take control of my life. The reason I couldn't accept responsibility for my actions was that I had been holding onto all that negative energy for so long which only gave me excuses to do all the stupid things I was doing. It was also one of the main reasons for all my mental issues. I had finally cracked the code that would allow me to start moving in the right direction both mentally and physically.
I was now able to forgive my father as well as myself for all the mistakes I made and the people I hurt. We all make mistakes, but dwelling on them only leads to more problems.
You see, we are not defined by what happens to us and the mistakes we make. It's how we handle it afterward that matters. We can choose to beat ourselves up or we can treat it like a lesson to be learned from. If you treat it like a lesson, you tend to not keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Everything we experience in life should be treated as a lesson and we should use those lessons to improve our lives as well as others.
Hopefully, by hearing my story, you can understand a little better why forgiveness of yourself and others is the first and most important step you must take if you want to live a happy, productive life. Its something we do, not only for others but for ourselves as well. The gift of forgiveness is more beneficial to the one doing the forgiving than the one being forgiven. Hanging on to baggage only allows those who've harmed us to keep harming us. We can not make good decisions in our future dwelling on things that happened in the past. The past is already gone and no matter how we look at it, it can't be changed. So we may as well treat it like a lesson because it's the only thing that will help us make better choices in the future.
Start today by writing out a forgiveness letter for those who have harmed you. I promise, you will feel much better after doing this.
Be great and remember, you alone hold the keys to unlocking your fullest potential.
Thank you for reading.
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