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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, my dad - I adored him - was an alcoholic.  Drank to blunt how unhappy he was with our lives.  He had good reasons...my mom was a hoarder and depressed, we had little money, they didn't get along, and he wa so ashamed of our home that he went from being a social butterfly to basically having no friends at all.

He drank to tolerate the intolerable.

And it was pretty intolerable for us, too.  I developed so many escaping coping mechanisms, mostly food.  I learned to blunt my pain.  I developed lots of strength to survive the shame and loneliness.  The wrong kind of strong.

He didn't teach me to change the intolerable.  He taught me to blur my feelings, block them out, and stay stuck in misery.

Do you want that to be what your kids learn from you?

You can take the pain.  Take the loneliness.  Feel how frustrated and angry you are.   FEEL it and you will change it.  Stop tolerating the intolerable.[/quote]

Wow, this is so beautifully stated.

That is how I finally came out of a bad (in my case abusive) relationship. I let myself feel, and I mean really feel, what was happening. I noticed how my body (especially my gut) reacted when my now-ex did this or that. This was after a long round of counseling and small and usually unsustained changes that made me think we were making progress, but without any underlying changes. I decided that life was too short to continue living that way, and that it would be even shorter if I continued to live with that level of unacknowledged distress. The key for me that helped me get in touch with my feelings was doing a lot of self reflection, spending time out in nature, finding something to do that felt really purposeful and gave me strength, reaching out to talk with friends, and listening to deeply emotive musical compositions that moved me, literally and figuratively.[/quote]

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