I've come to recognize that much of the emotional churn and frustration I've been experiencing of late is due to my having done a lot of "uncovering & discovering." I've been going deeper - into myself, my childhood experiences, and the feelings I began to feel and then immediately stuff back then. From the long view, this is a good thing, albeit painful.

I have begun working in John Bradshaw's "Healing the Shame That Binds You" for the past couple of weeks. I've owned the book for several years, but was just unable to connect with it until now. I still had to strip away several veneers of denial and become more in touch with the reality of my childhood abuses, abandonment, and the deep toxic shame that resulted before I could be ready to reap the benefits that reading and working this book will offer.

That's one of the miraculous mysteries of recovery: how HP won't lead me somewhere until he knows I'm ready. Sometimes I think I'm ready before I really am, and in cases like this book, that means that several years ago I got nothing from reading it and put it down after a couple of chapters. Now, I'm reading a few pages at a time and giving them a chance to percolate for a few days before reading some more, but in doing so I find myself connecting with what Bradshaw is saying - and what I'm thinking and feeling - on a deep basis and with a lot of clarity now.

That's the funny thing about recovery. The journey takes twists and turns and leads us places we never even knew existed sometimes. One of the harmful effects of a chaotic childhood is a desire to have utter predictability - that mey explain in part why we ACs try to control the people, places & things around us. Yet, for recovery to do its work, I'm learning that I have to surrender to its inherent unpredictability. As I think about it, if HP is going to take me someplace I've never been, then I have to choose to buckle up, hang on and...trust.