What were/are your signs of self-healing?

self-care
#1

It hit me this morning, that I am well on my route to self-love, self-fulfillment, and self-healing. For years, I was the one that “held the family together”. I put myself on the backburner while taking care of my newborn son (now toddler), addict husband, work, house, yadda yadda yadda. As you all know, this take an immense amount of energy and if anything wobbles the psudo-balance, everything could fall apart.

Back to this morning, I was baking a loaf of sourdough (I know right, how do I have the time? Oh right, I started taking care of myself and my interests have priority again), and I started experimenting!!! That means, that I feel safe enough to wobble that balance. And Boom! I realize that I am healing!

Please share your stories and how you recognized self-healing within yourself.

#2

So nice @Awlee090 I love this thread thank you for sharing!

I can think of a lot of examples. Here are a few that came to mind first:

  1. Recognizing the emotional reactivity to a situation that in the past would have been a problem and now just highlights that we’re moving forward and I get to reprogram that anxiety. How far we’ve come!
  2. Not catching a slip, having him own up to it, and not freaking out. Just asking - how can I support you through this, what do you need?
  3. Discovering and pursuing my dreams relentlessly. Once he got back on even keel it was like I couldn’t stop with my desires, those which had effortlessly subsided for care of this loved one then, now only gave me more energy and passion for what I want and the drive to follow those intuitions.

Love to hear from everyone else here!

#3

I love this question and have thought a bit about this. I love how your realization @Awlee090 was about something totally unrelated to your loved ones addiction. It can be hard for me to separate it out like that so it was a nice reminder that as we heal, we show up differently in all aspects of our life.
Something I’ve noticed is that I’m much more comfortable expressing my worries and anxieties openly. I didn’t realize how seldom I shared these things with others-- my partner because he often didn’t have the capacity to be there-- and others for reasons still unknown to me, but I imagine they tie in to how I worked so hard to deal with things on my own for so long. I’ve found that I’ve become more comfortable letting people see that side of me, processing it out loud, and moving forward. As I accept that piece of me, I’m letting others do the same. And along those lines, once I started talking about my husbands acceptance of treatment, I found myself wanting to overshare and tell everyone everything. Like I’d opened the floodgates and it became hard to determine who needed to know what. As I’m healing, I’m able to decide who I really want to share with and why. I don’t have the urge to tell my dentist that my husband’s in recovery, but I can have intentional conversations with it about people that truly matter.

Thanks for posting <3

#4

I see signs of self-healing when I pause before I take on another project, or offer to problem solve for someone. What I previously saw as “helping” was often only perceived as such by me. To the other people it was controlling and unrequested butting in. This is in all my relationships, so I know the change is in me and my increasing self-care. I used to measure my worthiness by how much I helped other people but I see that is a worn out record, with skips.