Paths of Healing & Breaking Cycles
Considering my own form of survivors' guilt
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
~Marianne Williamson
My therapist today suggested something to me that really made me stop and reflect. She led me into a thought/questioning myself, to consider that perhaps my failure to write and finish my memoir and also my drinking was a form of survivors’ guilt.
In that, I am not allowing myself to move forward, to achieve dreams and to succeed because everyone’s dead.
I am not angry at my relatives and I also don’t feel regretful or like I did anything wrong to prevent their deaths—
At least I didn’t think so.
I still largely agree with that, but also—there is this.
Perhaps I do stop myself and self-sabotage and have unfinished goals because if I do, then I’ve also halted myself, my progress, my life.
Perhaps I am mirroring their actions and demises, in some way. Trying to connect myself with them, and by association, perhaps I also have survivors’ guilt.
It would make sense, I mean.
I have stopped my progress, to points, and self-sabotaged, stagnated, at other points.
My therapist posited this and asked me—
I guess it now depends on, which part of me is the strongest? Which part I am going to allow to succeed now?
My life commitment is about breaking cycles and patterns. In healing.
This, apparently, is another one that I am meant to overcome.
On this never-ending, exhausting, forever continuous, path of healing that I am on.
