When dreams smack you in the face!!

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I don't like that feeling like my dreams dictate my day. I was dreaming pretty good. I remember a lot of my dreams but sometimes they take a turn into reality I would rather not have to dream about certain things or someone. It bothers me and I would like to forget things in my life I'm not proud of doing. I would rather not remember and move on. Sometimes I'm not so lucky and my wonderful dreams take a turn and memories and situations come pouring out into my dreams and I wake up uneasy. I know they are just dreams but they still bother me. This morning I was dreaming about John and I just want him to get out of my head. I don't want to think about him when I'm awake or when I'm sleeping.

So this song Cheap Trick The Flame has been in my head all day. It's the song I had in my dream this morning and it was like a concert playing on continuous play that wouldn't stop.  Holy, please can this self destruction ever stop in my life. I can control my thoughts when I'm awake but in my dreams...come on now. It just sucks. I don't like when things I can't control affect my life and impacts my life in a negative way especially when John hasn't been apart of my life in 7 years.

I have moved on and maybe I shouldn't be so bothered by one stupid dream and maybe I have some guilt to deal with but it's like something I would rather not have to deal with and just forget it. I want to forget about it. I want to forget about him. I am happy or maybe I'm not but frankly I need too. It's been so long ago and it's in the past. Moving on!!

What really sucks about this situation I love Cheap Trick The Flame and now I just want it out of my head. Dreams suck....I'm so frustrated!! Take care, Peace!!

Alcoholism!!!

It took me to stop drinking alcohol by fracturing my left arm tripping over a bench. That's right, I broke my arm tripping over a bench. That's me!! I was at my husbands work holiday function in January 2003 and had a few drinks and went outside to have a smoke. I didn't see the bench until it was too late with me lying on the cold ground. I was embarrassed and ashamed because I try to keep myself self composed out in public especially when it came to my husbands work related functions. I don't really want to be known as that girl. You know who I'm talking about. That one person who drinks a little too much at parties and makes a complete ass out of themselves well for me I was that girl for that night but at least, there were only a few people outside when I did it but still I humiliated myself. So I quit drinking. I decided in my heart I really can't just have one drink. I wish I could have one drink like a normal person. I didn't need an intervention or a 12 step program to stop drinking. I just made the hard decision to not have that one drink. For me that one drink leads to another and another until I become drunk. Like I used to say "I'm not drunk, I'm just buzzin'". For me it was an excuse thinking I could handle just having one more. When I quit drinking I thought it would hard to be around other people who were drinking but really it didn't bother me. I was an adult and new just because I CHOOSE to not drink doesn't mean they couldn't. I came to realize living dry as I put it made me look closer to my inner self. I really didn't like myself when I drank. I've done things which broke my own inner heart and for along time it ate me up inside. I couldn't forgive myself for what I did when I drank. I love the social part of drinking, going to bars, hanging with my friends and having a good time but it always got overshadowed by the stupid shit I used to do after I was drunk. For me, I was never the serial free love kind of girl or didn't want to be. I just didn't want to give myself to any guy who gave me the slightest attention but you know what? I was that girl who just gave it up when I was over the limit of alcohol and my guard was down, my morals and values were out the door to the point of no return. That's what alcohol did to me. My moral compass got shot after I had too many drinks and I had fun without no consequences. It was what it was. Stupid!!! I also became a serial cheater on my hubby when we weren't married yet. I justified cheating on I was lonely and our relationship was long distance but really I didn't have proper judgement when I was drinking. Nope, no good judgment. I'm not a serial cheater in my heart but I became one. I became someone I didn't want to be. Why would I cheat on someone I loved who I wanted to be with? I don't have the answer because it got clouded by alcohol. If I wasn't an alcoholic back then I wouldn't have cheated and that's fact. I never slept with someone when I was sober and the relationship I had with my husband's best friend wasn't a sexual relationship and yes, I cheated emotionally and sometimes some people find that harder to forgive then just cheating by one night stands of pure lustful sex. Cheating is cheating when you're not fully with your significant other and like I said, my husband forgave me for that. Some of the guys I don't regret sleeping with. Some of them were friends like you would call with benefits, the booty call kind of way. I cared for some of them and it was what it was. Now, most of them I could just forget about. I could pass this time in my life where I was just experimenting but I was in a relationship and it doesn't make it right. I really had two major relationships in my life. The first one I was in for 7.5 years which didn't work out because of abuse and it wasn't that great and my relationship with my hubby. I love my hubby and I'm glad he never gave up on me even when I told him the truth. For me to get better I had to let him know what happened. I couldn't go on being with him based on a lie. I could never heal my heart and be the better person who I believed I wanted to be if I didn't tell him of the cheating. For me, I couldn't be with him knowing I had this secret. A secret of infidelity he should know about before we got married. It took time and I worked my butt off to make him understand I loved him and wanted to be with only him. That's why I believe in my marriage vows so much and I truly believe them and it's why I'm still embarrassed of the things I did when I was drunk. I will never cheat on him. I couldn't, and wouldn't put myself in a situation where their is temptation to do so. That part of my life is over and I understand the ramifications of the consequences of the affects of cheating. I don't ever want to re-live that part of my life again. Now I'm slowly healing my heart, healing that part of my soul I destroyed by drinking. I went into a depression after I came to realize I don't want that life. Why would I allow myself to self destruct like that? Lots of factors on self destruction but one thing I could change was to stop drinking. I had the choice to at least, do that! I really don't want to be that person. Drinking for me only leads to unwanted drama neither I was causing it or someone else. It's really not worth it. Now yes, I have had alcohol since then but it's been more in a controlled environment. My hubby and I drink wine at night together but not in access to the point I can't function. I'm also not drinking to hide and run away from my inner demons anymore. I still believe I'm an alcoholic but at least I know I have a limit and I'm aware I just can't have that one drink!! Take care, Peace!!

I am my own strength!!

I was asked recently about being in an abusive relationship and they wanted to know why I stayed for so long. I was 15 when I met the guy. He was 4 years older, my parents hated him and I wanted to get another boy jealous is why I pursued this relationship plus I wanted a high school boyfriend. Ha Ha and I don't think I ever found out if I made the other guy jealous or not. If I did he never told me about it and no one told me if he was so really, that was a lost cause. So funny trying to make another boy jealous and so high school. :) You don't go into a relationship with someone thinking it will turn abusive but over time it became one. I saw the signs right from the beginning but I ignored them. Some of the signs: I wanted to hang out with my friends he would get angry with me because I wasn't spending time with him. He would tell me he hated my friends and I shouldn't hang out with so and so because of this reason. Silly, looking back I had so many chances of just walking away. I figured I needed to understand this part of my life journey. There was a reason I went down this path in my life. The relationship didn't get physical until years into the relationship but in the beginning it was more verbal. I went into one abusive relationship to another. I was trying to escape my parents abuse and walked right into another. My faith was sealed and the only thing my mother taught me was to not give up on the one's I loved even though if that relationship was toxic. When we first started dating it was fun, we got along great but then he started making me choose between him and my friends to the point I was kind of isolated from my friends because this sounds so cheap I wanted to make him happy so I stopped hanging out with my best friends. It was great for him but shitty for me and at the time I was so clueless because I wanted to make him happy but when you're looking at the situation from the outside it was so easy to judge but when you're smacked in the middle stuck it was so much harder to just walk away. It's the pull on the heart strings and he knew just what to say to make me coming back for more. I really wanted this relationship to work and the problem with love you seem like a failure if you don't at least try to make it work. Thanks mom but I realized not every relationship is worth saving. The longer the relationship went the harder it is to just walk away and say not anymore. I tried so many times to just walk away and I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready like more scared to fail then anything. It's hard to get the courage to just pack your bags into the scary world on your own. I wasn't ready to fly on my own two feet. I was to dependent on him financially so I was drilled to think. I had no money of my own and if I got money it went straight to him. I didn't think I could make it on my own and when you start to believe the bullshit it makes it that much harder to think you can do it on your own. The pulling back and forth, the screaming, the name calling and it's just a bunch of chaos you can't seem to escape. I was lucky to have a great best friend and her family because I don't know if I could have left when I did. They showed me how I was worth having a good life without all the pain and being hurt on a regular basis. I don't think my best friend really believed me when I called her and told her I finally left him for good because it took me two long hard years to just say I'm not going to take this life anymore. I was always saying I'm going to leave but never did. I think I was becoming a broken record. I'm going to leave him, I'm going to leave him, I'm not happy I'm going to leave him after awhile it just gets faded into background noise. I needed to prove to myself I could stand on my own two feet and follow my dreams then someone else. That's all it was I was following his dreams and what he wanted and who cared what I wanted. Looking back now there were many factor's why I stayed for so long. I was running away from a bad abusive home, I wanted attention and someone to love me, I wanted to finally feel special and I wanted hope. Hope was the one reason why I stayed the most. I say hope because I was searching for a better life. I knew my parents couldn't give me the safety and security I needed and the hope I could find better. That dream shattered the night he beat me up for the first time. It wasn't about hope anymore but survival. I know my family and friends were telling me he wasn't a nice guy but I needed to make that choice for myself and all those times I felt defected it didn't help having people tell me I told you so and as stubborn as I am I just wanted to prove to them more I can make this relationship work. Really, I truly wanted this relationship to work because I loved him. With all the cheating on both our sides in the end their wasn't anything else to fight for. The relationship wasn't worth fighting for anymore. I was at the end of my rope. This relationship lasted for 7 1/2 years. Do I have regrets? Sure I do and I feel guilty for putting my family and friends through the pain of seeing me in a relationship like that. I regret not trusting them more knowing they were only looking out for me and I didn't want to listen. I regret walking away from great friendships and missing out on getting to know my sisters more. So yes, I have regrets but this may sound weird I do not regret being with him. It's not one of those situations where I wish I could go back for a due over because it may have changed my life journey and I like where I am today. I truly believe in my heart I needed to experience this life journey. It has made me stronger, more understanding of other peoples lives, I have more compassion and the love for life. Do I still love him? Sure I still love him but not the same way I love my husband and children. He's still apart of my history and I wish him the best and we may not be friends anymore but I don't hate him. I have forgiven him along time ago. I have moved on. The one thing about our relationship is we did have a lot of great times together and that's what I miss the most are the good times and the trips we went on. We sure had some wild times and that's what I want to remember than those times which were painful and dark. I walked away a better person and that's what I want to remember as well. No regrets and yes, my children will know about my history. My hubby and I made a promise before we got married we would never keep secrets in our family and that includes our children. When they are at an appropriate age I will disclose my history and we will talk about it. We're all human and I want my children to know their mother made mistakes but this is what I learned and did about it. Life is hard at times but I also want them to know I picked myself up and moved forward one step at a time. Take care, Peace!!!

Feeling Guilty from my Past!

These feelings come back to Haunt me when something changes in my life. It can be anything that triggers these thoughts and feelings. I live with guilt and most of the time I can go months and even years of where I don't think about things that I have done in my life which has caused my heart to feel guilty. Typically these thoughts come back when I get anxiety when sub-conscious feelings of being abandoned from my childhood happen. My hubby is going into a huge work project and will be working long hours and I believe this is why I have these feelings because I think I'm going to be abandoned. I know it sounds silly but I live my life in fear and deal with it on a regular basis of the insecurities I brought into my life by doing stupid destructive stuff. From my 4 years of therapy I've learned over time when things like this happen I can deal with it and not let things like this over run my life. I will explain more a little bit later what happened for me to feel guilty but I want to explain why I get like this first before I go into further deal why they just pop into my life once in a while. During my young adult life more in my early twenties I couldn't handle life. I was in a struggle trying to figure out my life and most of the trauma I had was destructive not only to myself but to the people I seriously hurt along the way. It's a part of my past I'm ashamed of and not only did I not like myself as a person I was pushing everyone away who wanted to help me. I believed I wasn't worth saving or to be loved and appreciated for who I was. It was a push and pull life where I was losing a game I didn't even start. It's like everything I went through as a teenager caught up with me and I was living my life running from all the pain and the feeling of not worth being born. I felt like I was fighting a war within myself of good and evil. It was a sad existence until years later I realized I wasn't taking responsibility for my life. I was choosing to hurt myself emotionally, physically and mentally. The child abuse I endured while I was a prisoner in my parents home affected me and once I left home all those feelings followed me. My parents abuse stopped only a little and then I started abusing myself. I didn't know how to stop and it was the only way I knew how to live. So in this time I was doing harmful things to myself like having sex with strangers, drinking my problems away and thinking this is what being an adult is all about experimenting with danger. This whole time I'm not taking the real responsibility for my actions and life but blaming everyone else for my sad sorry life. It's my parents fault for abusing me, my sisters for abandoning me, people leaving my life who in turned said they loved me. Each time I did something I wasn't proud of or new in my heart was not me, the girl in my heart, a little piece of me died to the point I didn't know who I really was. I was on the destructive path of doom and I didn't know how I could get off this crazy train I was living. I did things just so I could at least feel something. I wanted to feel alive and the only way I could feel something was to feel pain. I became a shell of my former life and when I looked into the mirror I didn't know who was looking back at me. This person wasn't me and it was someone I didn't like. I didn't know how to change who I was or where to start. This process took me years to figure out and I most likely will have to deal with some of these issues for the rest of my life like today for an example. Here called my rock bottom is an entry I wrote back in September when the tide of my life changed. It wasn't long ago but these struggles are my past and even though I don't live in my past anymore things can trigger things I thought I dealt with but apparently haven't so this entry is my therapy session. I figured out being abandoned is my issue today! I had a dream this morning which when I woke up really bothered me. It was a dream about an old friend of my husbands who I had a relationship with in real life(not physical). It was more with sexual conversions over the phone and over the Internet. JS and I liked to flirt with each other and after awhile it got more intense to the point I'm sure it would have ended up being a physical sexual relationship. I'm glad it didn't end up like this. We had opportunities where we could have hooked up but didn't. When I moved to Portland from Halifax our flirtatious fling got more involved and went to the next level. We weren't just chatting on the phone or chatting over the Internet anymore. JS could come over and visit us and when he would leave the next time we chatted over the Internet we would tell each other what we wanted to do to each other but couldn't. The reason: the husband. It was just a crazy game we did to see how far we could take it with no one suspecting a thing and for me it was how far can I get JS to go and what is he willing to do. JS and my online chats got pretty intense at times and even though I was using my husbands computer I'm sure if he really wanted to know what our chats were about I'm sure he had ways. I wasn't computer savvy at the time and when the husband and I had our talks he never said he read any of them. When I met the hubby for the first time JS and him were roommates. The week I visited the hubby for the first time we all hung out. In the beginning this relationship with JS was a friendship and nothing more. The dream this morning was about JS and I having a sexual encounter and the hubby walked in on us. In real life the hubby didn't catch us in the act but later I did tell him about all that went on between JS and myself. It's nothing I'm proud of and it's a shameful situation I had to face and deal with. My relationship with JS wasn't about sex or having feelings for the guy but more of a game. He was the guy of the moment and what makes it worse for me I knew getting involved with JS would only hurt my hubby and I did it any way. JS was my husbands friend and I manipulated the situation for my own gain. It was the whole feeling I'm going to hurt you first before you hurt me scenario. It didn't work really like that. JS and my relationship kind of ended like how it began. We were supposed to hook up together one night when the hubby and his roommate at the time went on a motorcycle ride and I had the house to myself. We had it all set up and he was going to come over but we both kind of realized what the hell we were about to do and that's it. I think the reality sank in and it wasn't a game anymore for the both of us and taking it to the top wasn't something we both wanted. He didn't come over that night and we stopped communicating with each other. He stayed away for months. Looking back now, I still wonder why on earth my hubby stayed with me because I wasn't a very nice person. I was very good at turning around situations and blaming other people for the decisions I made. I was full aware what I was doing which to me right now makes me feel guilty as all hell. I know it happened years ago and my husband and I worked through this and we had nights of talking about what I did and why I did it. We both moved on and were at a point in our relationship to move forward together. Dreams like this morning creep back when I feel my insecurities come flowing back. I can't help it when it happens but I do know I have the tools I learned in therapy can get me to face these insecurities and understand where they are coming from. Life can throw you a curve ball and understand that situations can spiral out of control if you allow yourself to let them. So my fear is being abandoned by my husband and my insecurities which drives me with fear. I don't think JS being in my dream was anything sexual but my own guilt manifesting in my own dream. It was like my brain showing me I need to work out my fear of this change coming into my life. My husband isn't abandoning me but I do have these feelings deep down. I have to acknowledge how I'm feeling and work through them. My fear is what drives me to do stupid stuff by implanting thought into my head like how dare my hubby is working long hours and not spending time with me so I'm going to get back at him for hurting me in this way. Who can I use to kick him where it hurts. I don't want to even go there. My dream this morning was letting me know, look you need to deal with this fear and this scenario can happen if you allow yourself to be run over by your insecurities and abandonment issues. So I'm dealing with them. I acknowledge they do exist and I'm looking at the big picture and I'll be okay. It's just my fear. It's one day at a time and this big project my hubby is doing will not last forever. I'm just working my program and living with hope and I'm just reflecting where I came from with new beginnings for the future. I'm in control and if I want to be destructive then I'm the stupid idiot. Life is happy and good for me in this moment so why the hell do I want to ever go back in the past and repeat all that chaos? Then I haven't learned a thing and what a shame that would be. Take care, Peace!!!! It's your life and do what you please but take responsibility for it.