Not My Fault, Still My Responsibility
For most of my life, I lived in a victim mentality. I felt that life wasn't fair and that bad things kept on happening to me. Not only did I feel this, but I lived as if it were true. I embodied it in my everyday living and because I felt that bad things kept happening to me, it didn't matter what I did as they would just continue to happen anyways. This, I learned later, is called learned helplessness.
I have been miserable since I was a little kid. I would constantly get in trouble for the ways that I would express my emotions, express my anger. I was misunderstood by so many. I didn't even understand myself. I didn't know where all this anger came from and didn't know what to do with all of it.
After enduring all these struggles through my childhood, my mom died unexpectedly to add to it all. That was my breaking point.
One of the reasons I didn't believe that God existed was because if He did, then how could He allow all of these horrible things to happen in my life.
As life went on, I took no responsibility for my actions. I continued to blame them on the circumstances of my life. I thought, of course I am smoking a lot of weed and I'm going to get black out drunk every weekend, my mom died and I've been miserable my whole life. I thought this was normal way to cope. Since what happened to me was not my fault, I figured that it wasn't my responsibility to make any changes in my life, to heal myself. I was going to therapy for a long time, but I went expecting the act of showing up to change things. I never put work in on myself in between sessions, I never changed any of my behaviours, I never did anything differently.
As time went on, these behaviours, these maladaptive coping mechanisms continued to get worse. I slowly started to realize that without putting any action in, this miracle of just feeling better was not going to happen. I kept trying to trade drug for drug, trying to find ways to feel better. The difference that I experienced when I introduced the compulsive use of cocaine into my life is that I couldn't stop for the life of me. I couldn't trade it for anything else. Even if I tried to replaced it with alcohol, it would always come back. I would get 2 days sober then relapse, then 4 days sober then relapse. It was a constant cycle.
This was the beginning of the end because it seemed there was no way out of the hooks that it had on me. My way clearly wasn't working.
My first real introduction into the idea of taking responsibility was when someone said to me that I basically had two choices. I could either go to treatment and deal with my problems that I was facing or I could continue to be plagued by them for the rest of my life. Not only was that my first introduction to responsibility, but it was the first time that I ever truly considered going to rehab. Up to this point, I had always been so against it. No, I'm not that bad. No, I don't need treatment. No, I can stop whenever I want. Those were the lies that I would tell myself that would keep me sick.
After 3 months of back and forth, trying to first graduate school and see if I could quit on my own, I finally went to treatment. This was not before I failed a class, had multiple episodes of psychosis and had many scares that my nose would collapse. Finally though, I made it.
It was in treatment that a fellow client said something so profound that the minute she said it, I knew it would stick with me for the rest of my life. She said "While it is true what happened to us was not our fault, it is our responsibility to fix it."
Immediately I blurted out, "That's not fair." Someone else replied, "Of course it's not fair, life isn't fair. But that's the reality of the situation." It was in that moment that I realized that just because it's not fair that my mom died and what I dealt with when I was younger, it didn't mean that someone was going to heal these wounds for me. It was me that had to do the healing. It was me that had to show up for myself. It was me that had to do things differently.
It was then that I realized that I was either going to take responsibility for my life or I was going to die.
Not only was no one else going to fix it, but no one could. My dad tried to fix it, my therapists, my girlfriend. All to no avail.
This was my battle to fight. This was my trauma to overcome.
Today, the things that happen in my life are on me to work through. I have a lot of support that stands by me when I need it. People to talk to, people to give me advice, people to hear me, people to see me. But in the end of the day, the support that I receive only goes so far. I learned through this experience and others that in order for change to be brought about in my life, I need to take action.
