Handling the Hurt

I can handle hurt.
Everyone can handle hurt.

There are hospitals filled with people handling hurt. There are bathroom floors littered with people feeling, enduring and processing hurt.

I remember the first time Danny hurt me with sex addiction. I even remember the second time. But the third time? I don't remember a third time.
My self preservation had kicked in.

It was a fool me once, fool me twice scenario.
The first time, I was mad at him.
The second time, I was mad at myself.
The third time I started busting my flat butt to make sure he would never hurt me again. Meaning? I did everything in my power to control him.
If I could just keep him from pornography, I wouldn't hurt anymore.

My need for control had nothing to do with DANNY and everything to do with my intense, overpowering fear that I would feel pain again.

I didn't know it, but I was on a hospital bed continually being infected while trying to simply bounce back from the last infliction of pain.

Losing battle.
Losing, losing battle.
Loss is truly prevalent in sex addiction.

I grappled for years on that figurative hospital bed. I fought and fought and fought to control the infection injections.
I tried policing Danny, giving more of myself  sexually than I was comfortable with being more everything... Skinny, interesting, hot...

And I lost myself, my bloom, my youth, my self integrity.
I lost sight of beams in my own eye, and I lived to find motes among my family, especially with Danny.
Not because Danny isn't good enough.
But because I couldn't handle anymore hurt.
I could not.

I knew deep down that I was about to break, and I was desperate to prevent it. I tried to prevent more hurt, more pain by lining up everything around me to be more gentle, more posh, more accommodating.

I didn't understand how to set or carry out boundaries.
I didn't know that it IS within my power to help myself feel safe, to get myself off the hospital bed o' pain.

Boundaries.

Speaking up and saying I wasn't safe,
I couldn't handle more pain.
I could protect myself from addiction by walking away from it.

I tried SO hard to wrangle addiction like a baby calf, waiting to be branded... Control it, muscle and master it, best it, beat it, and then sell it off for petty cash.
Well, almost like a baby calf...

All I was doing was engaging it.

It was never about Danny hurting me.
I can handle hurt.
Right now, it's about learning to get off the table and let the squirming calf loose while I walk away to somewhere safe, use my tools, and find peace with God.

Fear makes me crazy.
God makes me Alicia.