Anesthetizing the pain

"the numbing effect"

Photo by Sérgio Alves Santos on Unsplash

For the last eight plus years, I have gone through on-again, off-again bouts of abusing alcohol, using it as a coping mechanism, to numb myself.

I’ve used it to anesthetize myself against the pain of the loss and tragedies of my family members, to cope with the trauma of what my body and mind experienced and could not integrate, process, and moved on from. I have used wine to help me sleep when my mind would not turn off and I was anxious. I have turned to the bottle when I felt lone, abandoned, and when I had despair.

It was not wise. I knew that.

After all, I come from a long line of alcoholics and I grew up with this understanding. I’ve been warned since a girl that alcoholism is a family disease. That I would be drawn to the bottle, and I saw it modeled for me, and was foretold that I would even be drawn to others who were from dysfunctional family backgrounds and families with addiction problems.

I knew this. Yet, did it anyway.

I did it because sometimes the pain felt so immense, I felt that I would crack. I felt so scarred and wounded and abnormal and traumatized, I needed to not feel that way for just a few hours.

Though I did not/do not believe in repression of grief and heartache, the depths of my sorrow felt so suffocating, strangling, so bottomless, so terrifying—that this was my family’s legacy, my life story influenced so many active and passive suicides—I felt that I couldn’t bear, I couldn’t take anymore of the sharp pain.

It made matters worse, of course, As the answers are never found at the bottom of the bottle.

I made my body dependent on alcohol at points, enduring the side effects when I withdrew from the substance.

I caused my cortisol levels to further rise, dramatically, after over-indulging in alcohol. Which, of course, messed with medications and exacerbated the problems with anxiety and sleep problems.

I went into therapy at the end of 2023, and my therapist asked some probing questions, which I answered, and externally processed, which is how I put it all together, and realized—

I identify with sleep problems and also with numbing out with alcohol and reruns of television—

Just as my parents did.

I confessed to my therapist that I worried that I was becoming my parents.

She helped me to understand that I don’t need to relive their unhealthy tendencies to have a relationship with them, now that they are gone. It is amazing, and downright frightening how often these patterns emerged, how we do this, without even realizing it sometimes—

We either flock to unhealthy relationships that cause us to rehash how we grew up and unhealthy childhoods and family relationships, or inhabit them/display them ourselves, as ways of working through unfinished business.

At the same time, we discussed all the ways in which I am not like my family members, how I make different choices. I go to therapy. I exercise. I write. That I can and should own my own identity that is not my family, that is uniquely Danielle. This doesn’t diminish that it has been hell, but I am healing and committed to living differently than they have. And different than some of my choices within the past eight years.

This may seem obvious to some readers that I am not them, and yet, part of embodied trauma is the shame; the wounds and the aftermath of suicide is the stigma—that these are your kin, your blood relatives. I am associated with them, even if I don’t like it or wish that I weren’t, or at least—that they had made different choices.

I forgive myself my abuse of alcohol, that I turned to unhealthy ways to survive. I repressed with alcohol to finish my doctorate, to care for my mother, to find a job, I put it all on the back burner, and I did finish it, but now—

It no longer serves me.

I am finished with my doctorate and in a tenure-track position. I have health care. I am solvent and autonomous and financially independent. I have insurance and I go to therapy and exercise and, so—

I’m done numbing out.

I am feeling all the feels. I am addressing the residual grief and trauma, the scars and the wounds, that occasionally seize me, paralyze me, and cause big fat tears to drip down my face and cry, and shake, sob and wail, sometimes years and years after the fact.

Such is my journey through complex grief, complex-PTSD, where my body and brain could not process it all, since so much happened in such a short period of time.

And, as we all know, numbing out doesn’t really treat the infection, only temporarily cancels the pain and alleviates the symptoms. But, much like a bacterial or viral infection, the underlying reason, of what drove you to that is there, festering, like an open wound.

I confessed to my therapist that I had had to move forward and repress to survive and get things done for so long that I was afraid of feeling everything.

She guided me through an exercise in feeling it all.

I had to sit with the emotion and feeling in my body. Talk about them. Feel them. Imagine them. Answer questions about then.

And then, what I feared, happened.

I cracked. My tears came from seemingly nowhere. Erupted from me and I bawled. Deeply, Intensely. I wailed that my family members had abandoned me, which is how I felt at that moment.

Then, ironically, I didn’t feel worse. I didn’t break entirely and render myself incapacitated. On the contrary, I felt lighter.

That is one of the greatest lessons I am taking with me in 2024, the power of somatic healing. The power of feeling it and letting it go, believing that it will.

Because even the most heart-wrenching heartache, no matter how much it hurt, even if it is the worst feeling, and however much it breaks your heart open, shatters you into fragments in the moment—

It won’t last.

Because the truth is that they are still emotions. And emotions are fleeting.

Even the hard ones, like the hardest loss and tragedy grief. They do subside.

They will ebb and flow on, if we allow them to do so.

I feel the hard to let them go. To let them go on. I don’t anesthetize because I have to be able to feel the bad to feel all the good too.