Who do you talk to when you are disturbed? I learned as I got older to shut down—keep my inner disturbances to myself. I think that comes from not receiving reactions from others that I hoped or expected, ya know? Eventually, I just stopped talking about the real difficult stuff and drank over it instead. I became so self-centered on my own pain that I couldn’t see anyone else’s. I couldn’t be the friend, employee, sister, daughter, mother, or dog-mommy I needed to be.

Recently I was disturbed…out of balance. I was falling back to my old behaviors of isolating and not talking about what was bothering me. Finally, I pinned myself up against a wall (not really – that would be weird) and forced myself to call my sponsor before I did anything else. Her and I talked for ½ hour. After the call, the disturbance was lifted. Just like that. Why did I wait so long to call her?

Thanks for asking—I’ll tell you why. It was because calling her was going to be emotionally painful. I was avoiding bringing the problem to the surface and talking about how I felt. The further I stuffed it down, the more isolated I became. The only way to set that yucky stuff free is to pull it out of that “dark place” inside me, look at it, talk about it, and then hand it over.

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