Celebrate Recovery Testimony

The title of the following was in my Blogger archives without the actual document. I recovered it from Word and attempted to post it in its original spot but it appeared here. It's most likely from about 2009. Celebrate Recovery Testimony I am a believer in Jesus Christ who struggles with codependency and anger. Once upon a time, I was Daddy’s little girl. I was very happy with my mommy and my daddy and my little brother – until my parents got a divorce. I was 11 when my dad immediately after the divorce married another lady with two children. Nothing would ever be the same. My brother and I continued to live with our mom six blocks away from Dad and his new family. Even though we saw him there three times a week, we did not live there. Those other kids lived there. I grew up feeling cheated; that I was not indispensable or even necessary. I felt that those other kids got the better clothes and the better presents. They also got my dad, day in and day out, to wait for to come home from work, to see off to work, to sit down to breakfast and dinner with, to wake up to every day and to hug and kiss goodnight every night. For the rest of my life I would feel that I would have to work extra hard to establish my worth, to prove myself, to make myself lovable. I am grateful for the early years of my life in an intact family. However, my father’s absence from my home left a void in my life that could not be filled. God really upset my apple cart, and, as someone once told me, the “princess fell off her throne.” I used to love to sing to God even before I had heard the gospel, but then I thought, “How could God love me and allow this to happen?” I felt abandoned, betrayed, and rejected. Not only did Daddy leave, but he left me to take care of my mother who had attempted suicide and been hospitalized for two months when I was five, and, after the divorce became an alcoholic. Alcohol changed my mother into someone I despised. My mother was a beautiful and gifted person, an actress and an artist who taught me to appreciate all kinds of music, the arts, reading and education. And she had a wonderful sense of humor. Because of all that I got lessons in ballet, acting and piano. But she never overcame life’s challenges, apparently beginning even before she lost my father, and as alcohol took her down, I made myself miserable because I could not change her. Today, she cannot walk, use the bathroom, swallow or speak, and I still struggle with grief for all the beauty and talent I feel she wasted and anger with her because she turned to alcohol when life’s challenges became too difficult for her. I worried about her all the time and was frustrated because I wanted to help her but I never could. And when I got so I could not help myself, I blamed her for that, too. Mom would have men friends over, and I would walk up and down the hall, looking to see if they were still there. It would make me so mad to see them drinking alcohol. I needed her to be there for me, but she could not. All my life, I wanted her to be happy. I even wanted to become rich and famous so I could buy her a house and help her go to England. I never got rich and famous, and she never got to go to England. I realize now it was not my responsibility, but I took it on for a long time. I could not go to sleep until the men were gone, and I would stay up until they left. When I would press her to tell me why she didn’t get rid of them sooner, she would say she didn’t want to hurt their feelings. But she didn’t mind hurting mine. She was always telling me I was “hostile” and “aggressive.” If I told her what I thought of her behavior, she would tell me I was “projecting.” My mother had a lot of therapy but she never got better. Instead of killing herself outright, it seemed like she chose instead to kill herself slowly with alcohol. My mother also had women friends she would drink with, especially a Mrs. Ogle, whose house she would go to during the summer when school was out. I remember lots of people coming over to party with my mother. Once I even had a crush on one of my mother’s boyfriends. Finally, when I was 17, she met and married my stepfather, Jerry. He was an alcoholic too, and neither of them went to A.A. My mother’s drinking became an obsession with me. Every time she would do it, we would argue. I was gone most of the time she was married to Jerry. They had my little sister and my little brother, and Mom’s alcoholism progressed throughout their childhood. The quality of my life depended on the quality of my mother’s. I could not think about my life; all I could think about was hers. She didn’t help, seeking my counsel when she was having marital problems with her second husband. In the fourth grade, the year my parents got divorced, I had a boyfriend, Gary Patch, as in to patch my heart. We made Valentines together at school, rode the city bus together downtown to see movies and went to his house for cookies and milk afterwards. We were still boyfriend and girlfriend in junior high, and used to go to dances at the neighborhood congregational church. I called Gary when I got back from a trip to Colorado with my dad, and he told me he had danced with Sherry Bean. But I heard him say he had taken her to the dance I felt betrayed, abandoned and rejected, and I could not forgive him for what he had done to me. His being all mine was very important to my sense of who I was. I was so mad I didn’t speak to him for years. Later on he told me he never understood why. I never let him explain, and we never talked about it. I didn’t want to know. I just did not want to get hurt again. But I hurt both myself and him. This decision affected the rest of both our lives. When I was a sophomore in high school, I dated a guy who boasted about alI his sexual conquests and decided I should become one of them. One night he came over when my mother was not there and took me into my bedroom and satisfied himself with me. Although he did not actually rape me, I was very ashamed and was crying. He said I would not get pregnant if I would go use the bathroom. The next day at school some boys were talking as though he had told them he had had added me to his collection. Then he actually called my mother and talk to her about me. I never saw him again and when I heard he had been killed in a motorcycle accident, I was happy. I could not forgive him for what he had done to me. I started drinking alcohol in high school and liked the way it made me feel. And between high school and college one boyfriend finally got me to give in to his sexual demands. After that it seemed like it was expected in all relationships. In college, I started smoking marijuana and taking LSD, speed, downers and eventually cocaine, mixing them all with alcohol. One summer I met a drug dealer in Lawrence and decided to follow him to Buffalo, but when I got there, he was selling insurance, so I started drawing portraits in a tobacco shop in the mall. There, I met a man who introduced me to an easier way to make money. I thought with enough scotch in me that might be tolerable, but I found out it was not, so, instead, I got a job as a go-go dancer. One night I was raped by two men I did not know whom I had agreed to let take me home after I had been drinking a lot of alcohol. One of them held a gun to my head when I tried to open a window to escape. I actually don’t know how I survived that night, but I grabbed my purse and ran down the street until I met a taxi driver. I explained to the taxi driver what had happened and how I had no money to pay him because the men who raped me had taken my money. He understood, but my boyfriend did not. He slapped me when I got home at 2:00 a.m. I also left my boyfriend immediately after that and came back to Kansas. I went to graduate school at KU the year after I graduated with a degree in education and had taught 7th grade Spanish in Kansas City for a year. I was having an affair with a student and went to Mexico with him. I dumped the boyfriend and started hanging out with some Americans who were selling marijuana. Long story short, I got arrested with them in Mexico City. I spent six days in the women’s prison in Cuernavaca, was deported and flew back on a plane with a guy who was handcuffed by the FBI as soon as we deplaned. I played music in a band in Wyoming and I don’t know why, but the band members would never let me join them when they were using heroin. I did have a heroin addict boyfriend for awhile, but I believe the reason I did not use heroin was because God was protecting me. In 1972, when I was 26, I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I had been living in Denver, where I had moved to get away from Topeka and make my dreams come true. I didn’t know quite what they were, but one thing was for sure, they would not come true in Topeka. One day at a wedding party in the mountains, I almost died from an overdose of PCP. The night I accepted the Lord, the former heroin addict and Jesus Freak who took me to church decided to try to make out heavily with me afterwards, so I threw him out along with my belief in born again Christianity. I never saw this person again. I could not forgive him for what he had done to me. When I was playing in a band in Cheyenne, Wyoming, I met my first husband while drinking and smoking pot. I lived with him for four months and then married him because he said he would leave me if I did not marry him. The thought of this scared me to death; I don’t know why. I could get a man; I played in a band. But I married him because I felt like I could not live without him. Pretty soon I got tired of him running up my phone bill talking about moneymaking “deals” that never materialized, and was unfaithful to him while our band was on the road. I then divorced him on the grounds that I though he was “violent” because he put his fist through the wall during one of our arguments. I decided to go to Nashville in 1978 with a guy who lived there and was in Topeka selling a guitar. My ex-husband had gone there and I could not resist getting in touch with him. I left the guitar man and tried to get back together with my ex-husband, but it did not work. I played with a band on the road for five months and then went to Costa Mesa, California, to play in a cocktail lounge in a Holiday Inn. In California, I met some Christians at the pool. I took them to church one night, and they asked me if I wanted to pray to accept Jesus. At first I said no, but when they asked if they could pray for me, I let them. At that moment, “heaven came down and glory filled my soul.” After that, my life began to change. I stayed in California four months until the Lord brought me back to Topeka to start straightening things out between my mother and me. That is actually still an ongoing process. I had been walking with the Lord for six years when I met my second husband who turned out to be an alcoholic. I knew I could not live with an alcoholic so that did not work out very well. We were going to go to Nashville but he went ahead with his little dog and our car. After he left, he went back with an old girlfriend who moved there to follow him after she found out we had broken up. He had dated her before he met me and we had all played together in the worship team at church. She had gotten kicked off the worship team for having an affair with the woman who led the worship but now she was going after my ex-husband. I had gone to church services in the Louisiana State Penitentiary with some church friends, and after my husband left and I had gone back to Topeka, one of my friends gave one of the inmates my phone number. I fell in love with him on the phone when he started calling me collect. I wanted to be with him because he could not go out on me because he was locked up. I also wanted to take care of him when he got out of prison. He wanted to marry me sight unseen but I thought I should at least go back to Louisiana and met him face to face. So I did. After 10 months, God showed me the relationship was unhealthy and told me to get out, so I did. But it wasn’t easy. My pastor in Baton Rouge showed me a book called Codependent No More by Melody Beattie and asked me if I had ever read it. I said no, but when I read it, I saw myself in the book over and over. I saw that I was just as hooked on this guy as an alcoholic is to alcohol or a drug addict is to drugs. I could not stop writing him. I couldn’t call him and he didn’t try to call me, but in letters I wrote and wrote about how he could behave and how maybe we could get back together after he had learned how to behave appropriately. I knew I had to quit cold turkey. I just had to stop. So I did, and also started going to Codependents Anonymous and Al-Anon. I decided to leave Louisiana before March of 1990 when he would be getting out. I moved to Oklahoma with my roommate in Baton Rouge and we both started going to Overcomers’ Outreach and started a group in Stillwater. After graduate school in Oklahoma and Tennessee I moved to Kentucky and taught for two years, then to southeast Missouri and taught for five years, I worked as a reporter for one year, and then God brought me back to Kansas again. Once back in Kansas, I discovered Celebrate Recovery. I started coming to Celebrate Recovery in Topeka in March of 2009, almost 10 years after leaving the boyfriend in the penitentiary. I just saw the sign on the church and decided to check it out. I started to realize I was still hung up on my first husband. I had seen him in 2008, and every time I saw him, although we had been broken up for 30 years, I felt like I just could never love anyone else. So, since I was alone all the time, I just thought about him all the time. God’s going to let us get back together, I kept thinking, but nothing ever changed, and, once again, I realized the relationship with him, if you could call it that, was unhealthy, and I needed to face reality about it. I was pretty much hooked on Celebrate Recovery after the first time, and a year later started singing with Mike and Brenda. Since I started coming to CR nearly three years ago, I have stopped calling my first husband. I let God work on a family member I was having a conflict with without going crazy because she would not talk to me, and have not had any more conflicts with that family member. I have resisted the temptation to tell everyone they should be in recovery and instead just try to follow the Holy Spirit in my relationships with other family members. I have become less judgmental, and I forgive easier. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, as recorded in 2 Corinthians 5:17-21, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” The old me was someone who thought what was most important in life was to be a musician or a writer or an artist and perform for people. Now I still want to be a musician and a writer, but what I want most of all is to know God and to make Him known. That is the biggest difference I have discovered. Whatever I do, I want to do it for God. I want him to be pleased and I want him to be glorified. I still struggle with sin but sin does not control me as much as it did before. Christ has given me power to overcome sin and every day I can make it through one more day because of His presence in my life. I don’t know how many lives I may be touching. I hope a lot, but only God knows. The main thing for me now is to stay close to him, to let him heal me, and to become more and more free from the power of sin. I also want to somehow make a difference to whomever God has intended for me to affect for the Kingdom of God. That’s what I want to do with whatever time God lets me live here on earth. I have forgiven my parents for ruining my life. I forgave the Jesus Freak who tried to take advantage after church that night. I forgave Gary Patch for dancing with Sherry Bean when I was in Colorado. I forgave the guy who wanted to add me to his sexual conquests in high school. I have forgiven the people who did not renew my contract in and Missouri and I am learning to trust God to be my source. The Lord is healing my broken heart and is teaching me who my real Father is. I am on my recovery and on trying to live for Jesus every day in every way that I can. I am grateful for Celebrate Recovery for teaching me to accept myself, love others and share with them the good news about Jesus and how he can make life worth living one day at a time. Thanks for letting me share.