My Support Forums - View Single Post - Recovery: "Baggage" and its Positive Aspects

Ygrec23 · 04:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RecoveryInstructor

I think a lot of people fail to realize that "baggage" is the culmination of our life experiences. It's the good, the bad, the things we're proud of, the circumstances wherein we may have stumbled but are still going forward and looking for our own brand of salvation from what has slowed us down in the past. Or even the present. What a person was in the past is not necessarily who they are now, nor does it define who they will be in the future. People do change: we do find better ways to cope and reframe the negative energies that intertwine our souls us into positive ones that help us get the best possible out of life as we can (granted, it isn't always easy, but it most certainly is possible).

Recovery, as I've mentioned, is pretty broad - it can take the form of recovery from substance addiction, mental health challenges, abuse in its myriad forms, a terrible childhood, or any combination thereof. It is, by any definition, not a complete list of what we can recover from. It helps considerably to have love in our lives - be it the support of friends or family; affection from those that care about us; an abundance of slobbery kisses from our dogs; or to some, the beauty and light that our spiritual connection brings us. Love breeds hope; in turn, hope fosters the empowerment to have the courage to make our own choices and strive to make the dreams we have become reality. The culture which we surround ourselves with adds to that: by being in a safe, mutually supportive environment wherein we are allowed to make those mistakes repeatedly until we learn what that lesson has taught us. The freedom to fail and try again, when needed, is a crucial portion of Recovery. There can be many aspects to what helps a person become all they were meant to be; each of us can open up our toolboxes of what we've personally learned in our Recovery, thus sharing our own experiences and insight; however the steps that person takes is a unique journey for each individual to discover.

Those of us who have been through Peer Employment Training to become Peer Supporters have taken what many people consider as "baggage" and used it (or are in the process of using it) for something greater than themselves - giving back and sharing in the hope that other people can recover also.

I know this because I've been through the system and I'm working toward helping others find discover themselves in a positive, empowering way. I've changed careers toward pursuing a degree in Social Work (LCSW preferably) and am working at an organization that sincerely promotes Recovery in all its forms. I've found that everything in life, the people I've met, the things I see, what I've tripped over and where I've excelled, is a learning experience. I may not know what it meant at that particular moment, but I will learn from it.

All the best,
K

Yes, YES!!! You are OH! SO right!!! And said it so WELL!!! I can't WAIT to read it in your blog! Please send me your blog URL so I can read it!!! Sorry for all the exclamation points but they're quite honest and true to my feelings. There is NOTHING you've said that I can disagree with and SO MUCH that I agree with 125%.

I'm STILL in the process of recovery, which I believe is a lifetime task. But things look SO DIFFERENT from where I am now compared to, say, forty years ago. There are those who've had insight relatively early on, whether in their teens or twenties. Insight to use to build upon and climb up out of the dank, dark dungeons our problems have kept us in. And then there are those, like me, who have spent ENTIRE LIVES in those dungeons. Only to begin to crawl out when their time is almost up. It's STILL worth the effort!

I have passed almost my entire life in the mental condition of an animal, impossible to contact because of an entire lack of ability to comprehend inter-human connection, inter-reaction, what they sometimes call "intersubjectivity." You have NO idea how strange the world and people look when seen from this animal-like point of view of complete incomprehension. It was as if the normal circumstances of everyday life and people were translated into the most obscure abstract expressionist paintings. No meaning, no interpretation, just incomprehensible blobs of color and shape. The experience of my mother and my father as an infant led me to place myself in complete solitary confinement from the age of one or two at the latest.

I've had T's over and over try to reach me, try to somehow penetrate beneath the twenty feet of reinforced concrete that protected my totally frozen, petrified, terrified self that had never learned to talk, to exchange, to communicate. And only now, only now am I ready to emerge and learn, at the age of 65. I don't believe I've ever come across anything like an adequate description of what I've been through, and I read a huge amount. So while similar things MUST have happened to other people, I've never been able to find their old age memoirs or even someone else's (therapist, psychiatrist, whatever) observations on such cases. If you know of any, please, PLEASE let me know of them. You may well have read of individuals who have been kept without human contact throughout their childhood and adolescense, so they do not even have language. I wonder about their mental, emotional states and what it was like being them. Superficially I have language, an excellent command of language, but beneath that superficiality was something totally dark, totally inhuman, not even rising to Kafkaesque proportions.

Thank you for your post. Thank you for what you have said. I really, really look forward to reading your entire blog. Take care.