Page 254 of The Monster and the Masochist

We blame ourselves. I didn’t just blame myself for the event itself, but I also blamed myself for being unable to control my need to drink whenever the flashbacks started to return.

But… Did you know that unresolved trauma is one of the biggest clinically proven reasons people develop substance abuse disorders?

Because I sure as fuck didn’t.

I just thought I was a shitty person with no self-control. (See? See how mean our brains can be if left unchecked in an isolated vacuum?)

Once I started working closely with my therapist to heal this disordered thinking and came to truly believe and understand that what had happened to me wasn’t my fault, I was finally able to make real progress.

Because that’s the hard part, isn’t it?

Believing it.

Everyone always says, ‘It’s not your fault.’

But until you believe that those are just empty words.

And that’s what therapy did for me.

It helped me crawl out of the self-deprecating vacuum of my own mind and learn how to identify disordered thinking so I could correct these thoughts in real time. My therapist helped me believe that it wasn’t my fault.

And guess what?

Slowly, that deep, compulsive need to drink went away.

Because, I wasn’t drinking for the love of it.

I was drinking because I was in pain.

Once I was able to deal with the root cause of the pain, the rest of my issues became much easier to manage.

I haven’t touched alcohol in a very long time and I can honestly say I don’t miss it at all. I only ever drank when I was miserable, so it’s not like I’m sitting here pining for the ‘good old days,’ where I was all fucked up.

And I know I’m making this all sound so simple and easy, but in reality, it took a year of weekly therapy sessions to get to this point. And before that, it took me seventeen years to even trust a therapist enough to talk to them about this.

There were days where she had to basically coerce me into talking about my actual trauma, because even in our sessions that I was paying for, my instinct was to avoid talking about it.

I had to push myself to open up, and it sucked ass.

It was not fun.

I cried a lot.

There were a lot of backslides.

There were times I wanted to give up.

But, slowly, I was able to crawl out of that fucking hole, and I can honestly say… I’m pretty sure I’m out of it for good now.

I’ll never go back to blaming myself for what those fucking losers did to me.

I hate them.

But I refuse to let them win.

Instead of allowing them to ruin my life, I’m taking that awful, brutal event, and turning it into art – art like this book you’re reading right now – and it’s my hope that both my story and Theo’s story helps the people out there who need it.

Because I know there are a lot of us.