My name is Molly and I'm currently in counseling.
Yes, it sounds like I'm a member of AA but I tried 25 different ways of saying it that seemed wordy, or dishonest or just plan weird. So I just said it. Straight.
Since my parent's divorce 10 years ago I have been in counseling on and off, I'm not ashamed of it. In fact, I doubt I would've survived without it. However, since my high school graduation I haven't seen one. I thought I was done with it, over it.
Until I began to self destruct last spring. I can't say for sure what caused it, only that God intended it to happen when it did. I began to see a counselor again, twice weekly. She is vastly different from any other counselor I've had. She tells what you need to hear not what you want to hear. She asks things off you, hard and painful things. After seeing me once, she had me pegged. The idea that I wasn't angry was far from the truth, in reality I had buried it so deeply that it grew roots and was burrowing its way into other parts of my life. It was planting seeds.
At the very heart of it all, the core of the tree, the anger was cultivated by resentment toward my father. After my parents divorce, my parents changed, which is to be expected but ideally without consequence. Mine came with consequence. I gained somewhere around 50 pounds in the immediate years following the divorce, my father used this as a root of his own.
I began to hear things like, "Molly I'll buy you new golf clubs if you'll lose some weight, if you'd lose some weight you wouldn't get so many sinus infections." The examples are endless, the instances countless. But that's irrelevant. Yes, my father caused me pain, so did my stepmother and my mother. But what I did with it was what mattered. My past, my pain became my out, my excuse for anything and everything. After all, it WAS what made me who I am, it WAS what defined me.
Pretty soon, my anger wasn't related to my father or the divorce at all. It was related to whoever or whatever wronged me that week, day or hour. I had turned into my brother, blaming anything and everything on anyone but myself. Yet, honestly, I had no one to blame but myself. I had created it, made it what it was and it was affecting every part of my life. I got used to getting yelled at by my father and I got used to transferring this into expectations toward others. I got angry when people didn't do what I expected of them just like my father would with me. Who am I kidding this still happens. I say all of this to say that this became "normal" to me, I accepted it that way.
It was "my normal." But that doesn't mean it was ok or acceptable because frankly it wasn't. It didn't reflect my commitment to Christ and it didn't reflect the standards I'd set for myself.
This is what I've been tackling twice a week at 2:00 pm.
Turning my normal, into a better normal. A normal that allows my father to be my father, but doesn't allow his anger to turn into my anger and our dysfunction to cause greater dysfunction but that allows me to look at him as the loving, caring father that he is and allows me to be the loving, caring person that I am.
