Process Addictions

It’s only time when it’s time and today was my time. I have spent the last few weeks coming to terms with the contradictions I have kept alive in my body. The double binds that promise freedom only to open into a trap door to hell. Not only have I been coming to terms with that, I have also come face to face with my collusion in my own misery. Addiction never meant anything to me, until I realized what a process addiction is. A pattern played out again and again in different contexts each time so that it feels brand new. A new provocation, a new fight, a new decision and a new action. Each one felt righteous, and well, correct. And why wouldn’t it? To a a nervous system steeped in good/bad/right/wrong, correct and incorrect are not a far stretch. But correct according to what? According to the processes I was addicted to playing out in my life. Processes that drained life, but felt very lively in the moment. Processes that ultimately diminished and eroded my own integrity, boundaries and respect for mySelf. There is so much there, so much that it’s overlooked. Like looking at a mountain range from a distance, you would miss the complexity and nuance of the journey. So much to excavate, the process, the process, the process. In the moment I see it, it has become a new process. What I grasp in my physical reality as set and fixed is just a culmination of several processes and process addictions that have hardened from energy into matter based on my say so. I did that. Over and over and over again. And in the process of my process addictions, I convinced myself there was no other way.

Until today. I saw through it today, through a process addiction that was beginning to loosen its grip on my life because I started to really look at what that process was holding for me. What burden I had given it as a child to carry when I couldn’t anymore. Holding it for as long as I needed, and until I was ready to look at it, name it, claim it and set it free. Strange to think the addiction was looking for freedom from me, when my whole life I have wished for something to come and save me from it. A process addiction that created a continuous loop of chaos, suffering and victimization that became the foundation of my life. A process addiction born out of the strategies and victimization of a frightened child, in a house of horrors, looking for safety among the adults that circled children like a pack of predators. And it’s been exhausting because I was never willing to look, to take full ownership of what I was creating, to really look at my life as a metaphor and say: those strategies were not and are not me. Running, hiding, lying, those are not me. Those were a very specific response to a very specific environment at a very specific time in my life.

And there has been nothing to do in the face of these massive realizations but breathe. Quantum TLC the moment I’m in and sit in awe of the holographic nature of our universe. That I can breathe now for the 4 year old who held her breath, is freedom for us both. That breath carries life and life is inherently creative is a gentle call to awaken into my creator self. And this life is organic, and it’s mine to choose, so what I’m left with is that it is time to engage a new process. One in which signal leads and not habit. One where not knowing is equally as valid as knowing. One where I hold the grief of my life and the beauty of my life as equally valid, and part of the whole.