When people talk about ‘losing your soul’, most of us don’t know what that means. By the time I was 30 I was addicted to heroin and by the end of my addiction I had the sense I had broken something important, something which up until that point I didn’t know I’d had. The feeling would wake me at 4am; it was a sense of abject horror. My soul was begging me to look, to see the carnage …but when I woke again I would inject myself immediately and continue as if in a dream.
I grew up in a family in which both my parents were emotionally unavailable and we lived in a remote place where there were no other children to play with. Home felt safe but I was in a world of my own, in a fragile bubble which burst easily. The noise and intensity of the playground was too much for me and I withdrew into myself at school, the only place where I saw other people.
I was intensely shy with very low self esteem but I pushed myself out there, desperate to avoid the sense of isolation I felt. In trying to fit in I taught myself to ignore my own feelings and push past them. By the time I was a teenager I was able to ignore my body to the extent that I developed an eating disorder; I couldn’t feel hunger or fatigue and this also had the effect of numbing my emotions. The fact I was eating three hundred calories a day went unnoticed, which reinforced that I didn’t matter.
At 15 I hadn’t developed the most basic interpersonal skills. I remember my first boyfriend pointing out that I never made eye-contact and it was only then I realised it was something you should do. I grew up with a very poor self-image because I believed I was weak or defective. I was overwhelmed, locked in and unable to relate to others. Although I saw myself as a sensitive person I believed that fundamentally everyone experienced the world the same and I thought I struggled because I was defective.
I found that starving myself didn’t get attention but using drugs and drinking got plenty. As soon as I had my first drink at 11 I knew that substances gave me the opportunity to feel like someone else. They numbed me more than withholding food did. I felt comfortable in my own skin.
When I look back on my life now, 2 years into recovery, I can see how I denied my own self and my basic needs at every turn. When you are taught to do that from childhood and continue on into adulthood, change means conscious everyday work. I know now I’m one of the lucky ones, I had a sense of a heart and soul connection which I’d carried through from childhood so I could feel the loss. All that time I spent alone in nature as a little girl had given me that. I knew there was something to return home to.
When you are in active addiction you think that if you are able to stop, life will get easier. The thing is, it gets much harder. Coming home to yourself you are faced with the neglect; there needs to be a total rebuild. For years you’ve been anesthetized and you now have to return to all the feelings you had before but intensified. You’ve become unused to reality and your brain chemistry is haywire; everything you used drugs to avoid comes up to be dealt with tenfold. Not only that but there is trauma and in many people PTSD resulting from things that happened during the addiction.
I decided to write this blog because my own experience made me aware that addiction recovery looks different for empaths and highly sensitive people (HSP’s). After two years clean I still feel exhausted. I found any form of group therapy left me drained and overwhelmed but I pushed myself to do them anyway, denying how I felt. I watched other people embracing life in the local community and moving into jobs or careers while I felt the need to retreat into solitude. I felt like there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t ‘moving on with my life’.
I was so lucky, not only to have access to psychotherapy but to a therapist who was an empath and highly sensitive herself and was able to help me. She taught me to prioritise my inner work over external accomplishment and helped me make sense of my experience. Without her help I never could have given myself the space to heal.
It has been really, really tough but my life has changed in ways I never would have dreamt possible. Today I know I still have a long way to go but I feel my future self ahead in time and I’ve began to believe I’ll change in ways I can’t imagine now. I’ve began to believe there was a reason for all my suffering; that I was broken so that I could be rebuilt for a purpose. I can trust the mystery of life.
I’m writing this blog to share my journey in the hope it will not only help my recovery but be some help to others who are struggling. If what I say resonates with you I would love to hear from you.
May we all be well, happy and reach our highest potential.
An Empath's Recovery Toolkit 