It’s Angel Warrior 1Thousand here; I’m sorry, I know It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I truly hope all the Angels out there reading this are doing well.
To be completely transparent, I lost all motivation and was stagnant in my recovery process for a few weeks. This is a normal part of the recovery process, however, and getting back to a motivated state is important, which I have now found myself slowly doing day by day in the last week. On February 7th I will hit my 90’s day sober mark!
Although this is a huge milestone for me, it has also been a part of the reason for my loss of motivation; I felt as though I had come so far, yet had nowhere else to go.
I truly had to dig deep to find the real feelings underlying what was causing this lack of motivation; I had to process so much information in a short period of time that my brain felt both numb and overloaded. When I decided to journal my feelings one night, I was able to piece together the ultimate source of my sheer lack of anything other than sad songs, junk food, and sleep: I was grieving.
I was grieving SO MANY things that I had given up and or lost from the life I had lived during my days of active use, and during the relationship in which I was abused mentally, emotionally, and physically, and I was also grieving the losses that had occurred during the period of time I spent being human trafficked. I was grieving the loss of family and friends. Those people who, no matter what I do, just will not accept an apology from me for the things I did during my active use; these people are lost in my life, and I am of course going to miss them and grieve the loss of our relationships. People I had to let go of due to the relationship not being healthy for my recovery, no matter how much I care about them, I have to let them go because my sobriety depends on my mental state being as healthy as I can keep it always; unfortunately, some relationships, are built to sink.
Within the grieving process, there are 5 stages: denial; anger; bargaining; depression; and, acceptance. During grieving we may go through any or all of these stages in any length to any degree, and unfortunately, sometimes we can hit acceptance, but then come full circle around back to denial again, however, the grieving process is a very important part of healing in trauma for both our mental health and our physical health. We need to go through these stages in order to process the trauma we have experienced in a manner that our brains can deal with the unexpected that is now our truth.
Some of the ways I deal with the grieving process without “using” are: journalling or writing poetry; spending time with my dog; doing Step Work from my NA/AA fellowships;
Practicing self-care (I am doing a blog dedicated to self-care coming up!); getting some extra rest; giving an extra hand to someone in need….what are some healthy ways that you deal with grieving or depression or “feeling blue”? Drop me a line in the comments 🙂
Whatever it is that we do, we must find healthy ways to deal with our grieving in order to process it and move on.
My last piece of advice: Spend time with friends that you have made that are new and healthy!! Laugh and laugh and laugh!! Laughter truly is one of the best medicines.:)
Until Next Time My Warriors:
Always Got Your Back,
Angel Warrior 1Thousand
(Note: This blog post was delayed in posting and Angel has already celebrated the 90-day sober mark!)
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