Suddenly I can feel a stranger’s eyes stare up at me, distracted from their spaghetti dinners, and ready to take in a far more entertaining scene. My precious five-year old daughter is having a tantrum of nuclear proportion and refusing to leave the table. Her tiny body suddenly has super human strength and she practically suctions herself to the chair, making it impossible to remove her crazed self without taking the chair with her.
I can detect that all the innocent bystanders to our increasingly volatile scene have now become parenting experts, narrating my every move as if they were watching an Olympic event. "Here we have Lauren, five years of experienced parenting, still a rookie. Shows some promise, but after a long day at work, low glucose levels and a heavy reliance of bribing, may finally meet her match here tonight at the Spaghetti Factory.”
After a struggle to safely strap her into the car seat, through heavy sobs she whimpered, “I don’t want to feel this way, I just don’t know how to stop feeling this way.” The veracity of her statement caused me immediate pause and I all I could say was, “yea, I can understand that buddy.”
The truth is most people in recovery must confront the problem of “I don’t want to feel this way, I just don’t know how to stop feeling this way.” In active addiction, the answer to that conundrum is simple- get drunk or get high. Most addicts become experts in emotional anesthetizing. The problem is that the substance “solution” is short lived, intensifies and prolongs emotional suffering, and keeps us from experiencing positive emotions as well. Brene Brown put it best, “We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
When we finally arrived home, my anger about having to leave a half-eaten plate of toasted raviolis (what a St. Louis thing to write) had subsided, and I wrapped my exhausted girl in the softest blanket I could find and held her until she finally fell asleep. I tried to take care of her in the same way I know we as adults need to take care of ourselves sometimes, especially in recovery.
You can feel negative emotions, they won’t last forever and you are capable of finding new ways to cope. Finally allowing yourself to experience your emotions without numbing them, or running from them, will be one of the most challenging and wonderful things you will learn to do for yourself in sobriety.
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