Dr. Liz Blog Spot

February Theme: Hope

This is the beginning of my blogging journey – Today, I am starting my own blog on my own website – not just contributing to someone else’s blog (see links below).

I’m going to blog on a theme each month and make weekly contributions to that theme each month.

For February, I will share about HOPE – and my journey surrounding HOPE.

I believe it is of utmost importance right now, as we are entering a new year, a new political cycle, and a new “age” – the age of Aquarius and the Great Conjunction that many of us witnessed in December!  

But, first, I must start at the beginning – and share with you why HOPE is so important to me, in general….

This is me as a baby – I had ALL the hope in the world!

But then I experienced trauma, abuse, violence and more….and my HOPE was crushed.

By the time I was about 8 years old, I felt that “nobody loved me”…..

I told one of my sister’s this while crying inconsolably.  She convinced me that SHE loved me – even if I couldn’t believe that anyone else in our family of 9 people (2 parents and 6 siblings) did.  She gave me a ray of hope, that I clung to for a number of years.

By the time I was 12 years old, I had experienced my first major loss – the sudden, tragic death of a loved one – my brother was killed in a car accident.

My brother was in a semi-comatose state for 2 months after his car accident, before he passed away. His death shook my faith in a Higher Power and significantly contributed to my current struggle with HOPE and my future diagnosis of “depression”.  Two other significant “major life events” happened to me in the 2 weeks following my brother’s death: I hit puberty, biologically, and I became a teenager, chronologically (turned 13 years old) – both carried emotionally traumatic significance, especially following the loss of my oldest sibling. 

By the time I was 15 years old, I wanted to end my life – I contemplated suicide…..

I mentioned something to my Mom like, “….it won’t matter anymore, because I’m not going to be here much longer….” and she took me to my first counselor.  He gave me lots of tools to help me self-soothe.  He taught me:  meditation techniques, relaxation techniques, positive self-talk, how to ask for “timeout” during a verbal argument to stop escalation, and more.  Of course, at my age, I only grasped bits and pieces of what he taught me, but I clung to those like my life depended upon it, because it DID!  His final gift to me was a note on the back of his business card:  “A gift for Continuance…May you continue to find meaning and contentment in life…”  I wore that card out over the next 27 years, bringing it out of my wallet to read it, meditate upon it, and putting it back.  The hope that I got from this message was that I actually must have found meaning and contentment in my life at some point, in order for me to “continue” to find it, so therefore, maybe my life is worth living?!

I experienced several other “major life events” and traumas over the next 10 years, which ultimately led to me getting involved in unhealthy relationships and developing an addiction to drugs and alcohol.  

So, by the age of 25 years old, I had found the 12-Step Programs of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous – which started to really open the door of HOPE for me again…

I was in the middle of my 1st divorce and nearing the end of completing my Master’s degree when I “hit my bottom”, as they call it in 12-step recovery:  the lowest point you get with your “problem” (whether it be addiction, alcoholism, gambling, etc) where you are finally “sick and tired of feeling sick and tired!”.  I went to my first meeting because I “couldn’t grasp basic concepts of reality” anymore, I hated myself – couldn’t stand being inside my own skin, and basically, felt so low and in so much emotional pain that I was contemplating ending my life again/STILL!  

There’s a quote in one of the 12-Step program’s book:  “What at first seemed a flimsy reed, was the loving and caring hand of God (Higher Power)”, which describes how the program worked for me.  At first it seemed like – REALLY? Is this thing going to work??? And after working through the first four steps the first year, and following all of the suggestions offered by my sponsor(s) and the “predecessors” who walked through the program/process before me, I actually started to see and feel, once again, that glimmer of HOPE. I cried at every meeting I went to for the first entire year – and then some – (and I went to about 4 meetings per week!). I started to feel the pain, confusion, and despair about my life ease up just enough to make me want to “keep coming back” to those rooms for more recovery, help, and fellowship of others like me.  I finally felt “a part of” instead of “apart from” others.

Over the next 14 years, I continued to work the programs of AA and NA, but also realized that I needed Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, CoDA, ACOA and SLAA.  I did some work in each of those programs for short periods of time: attended their meetings, read their literature and used a sponsor – enough to get the help I needed for those different issues.  

However, NA is the program that I ultimately stayed with and which resonated with me the most; likely for two reasons:  #1 – In my experience, addiction – the addict mind/thought process – covers most of the underlying reasons for all of the other issues, #2 – I found a depth of unconditional love in the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous that I never found in 12 years of mostly going to AA. That consistent, unconditional love was EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED to start healing the emotional, mental and spiritual wounds from my childhood…the only problem was…”life goes on” and I was still accumulating new wounds from losses, grief, trauma, and continually getting involved in unhealthy relationships with others who were also wounded and still in the healing process but far from healthy.

Which brings me to the place where I LOST ALL HOPE – at the age of 39, with seemingly everything to live for: 14 years clean and sober, I owned a single family home 3 blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, my first and only child was healthy, happy, and almost 3 years old, and I was married to his father, my 3rd marriage (“the charm”)…

About the time of our 3rd wedding anniversary, we’d been together for almost 5 years by then, and shortly after our son’s 2nd birthday, my husband started talking about wanting to be “on his own”, speculating that he went straight from his parents’ home to my home, marriage and a kid, which he was now starting to say was his reason for being irresponsible as a parent and a partner (lying to me about everything, including our son’s care and money).  

So, when I call his bluff and say, “If you think you need that to be a better person, I will try to support that.”

He says, “So what if I have a roommate?”

And I say, “Well, first of all, I’M your roommate right now – and you’re talking about needing to be on your own!  Sooo, what?, like Billy?” (a male friend of ours)

And he says, “No, like a female”

We spent the next 6 months in marriage counseling, which I agreed to because it was the ONLY WAY that he would agree to see anybody (in other words, he refused to go on his own, for himself), whereas, I had received literally several years of counseling by that point in my life.

Our last session became that because the counselor asked us if there was any hope for our marriage – I said, “Yes, there’s always hope!”, he said, “No”.  So, the counselor said she could not continue marriage counseling if even one of us had no hope for our marriage. But she did offer to continue seeing my husband for his issues that came up in those last few sessions.

He declined. Two weeks later, on a cool October evening in 2005, I found him hanging from the rafters in our garage. I administered CPR, however, he was not revivable.  

That was the day that my whole life changed irrevocably:  not only had I lost ALL hope, but I hated my life (without him in it), I didn’t want to live it anymore (but I knew I had to for my son’s sake), and I realized that I hated hope.  I felt that hope was a cruel thing to “inflict” upon someone, because at some point, those hopes were destined to be shattered to pieces, just like the heart that holds onto hope.

From that terrible day, it took me 10 years of searching, reading, talking with others, trying dozens of different things/healing strategies to help me get on the other side of the grief, pain and unrelenting sadness that I felt for his loss – the loss of the rest of his life (he was only 27 years old, he had his whole life ahead of him!); for my son’s loss – he would have to grow up without his father; and for my loss – of my love, my husband, my partner, the father of my child – we were left all alone.

Furthermore, my late husband’s family turned this tragedy into a living nightmare by their denial and inability to accept the horrific truth of the matter. They completely dropped out of my and my son’s lives.  They went around our town, telling everyone that we knew, including our AA friends, the members of our religious community, the police, the coroner, that I killed my husband, their son.  They told the police that they suspected “foul play” and asked them to re-interview me and re-examine the scene (our home), they asked the coroner to perform an autopsy, which was against our religion and not necessary because I and my neighbors all were witness to how he died.  They even contacted our State’s Attorney’s office to have me investigated so that I could be found “responsible” for their son’s death.  This last act of inhumanity by my in-laws caused me to lose my job with our State Dept. of Health, and black-listed me from working in the SE region of the US in my field.

Six months later, I was offered a job half way across the country (Midwest/South Central US), where my son and I knew exactly 1 person.  My choice was to take that job and move away from my home for the last 10 years, the only home my son knew, from all of our support system, and from my in-laws family (although they were only minimally speaking with/visiting their grandson at the time, anyway) – OR – stay there, raise my son on the widow’s death benefit, (which would be very difficult), and take the chance of him growing up among rumors and whispers propagated by his grandparents, that his mom killed his dad????  So, it wasn’t much of a choice….I pretty much had to leave in order to give my son a better life and a fresh start…Dare I hope?

That move, my in-laws never making amends with us, and each of the 5 moves over the next 10 years, made it more difficult for me to work through the grief, loss, and resentments I was harboring towards my husband and his family for abandoning us, especially their grandson, nephew, etc, at the time of our greatest need.  Also, resentment towards my previous employer, the State, for terminating my employment, illegally (it was found to be an illegal termination by the State’s Commission on Human Relations).

Finally, by January of 2016, a little over 10 years after my husband’s suicide, I STILL hated my life and I wasn’t really LIVING it – I was still “suffering” through it, and I still ”hated hope”:

By this point, I had tried at least 50 different healing strategies for the approximately 35 different traumas that I had experienced throughout my life. So, I tried yet another Eastern healing strategy – this one was implementing a few Feng Shui practices in my home to remove sadness, increase happiness/positivity and good luck in your home.  Literally, the following morning after making these few, simple changes, I woke up feeling that the weight of grief, sadness and hatred of my life had lifted and now, maybe, just maybe, I feel OK about my life, and I might actually be interested in starting to live it!  BEST OF ALL, I finally felt a sliver of hope, which I didn’t hate, and which I didn’t feel was going to make my world fall to pieces again some day because of it.

I was beginning to Launch My Life!!!!

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