Month: May 2013

A Healing Happy Mother’s Day Wish To A Great Mother

Yesterday was Mother’s Day and it’s a holiday that I have had a tendency to gloss over until recently. Just over eight years ago, my mother tragically died from a drunken binge that ended with her falling down the stairs and snapping her neck. She had just turned the age of 61.

For the longest time I was very angry about my her death. Ironically, I was just as angry about her life, especially the last few years of it. And I was extremely angry as well about how she treated me especially when she had been drinking. After her death, I played the avoidance game with my feelings about her passing. When the first mother’s day rolled around a few months later, I was extremely active in my sex and love addictions. While I might have often initially played the sympathy card to try to get something I wanted from those I knew, I wasn’t really trying to grieve nor do I remember crying much. There was a part of me that wanted to remain numb to it all.

I spent most of the next six years following her death engaging in the same toxic behaviors and continuing to avoid at all costs having to deal with the suppressed anger and rage surrounding my relationship with her. Every year another Mother’s Day would pass and I acted like I didn’t care. A few years ago though, I started having to face the pain I had shoved deep down about her. In some ways I think my body forced me to face it as the emotional side of me was too shut down. I believe that the trauma from her began to manifest itself instead in my physical body with chronic pain.

Through therapy, prayer, meditation and more, I worked hard to open up and heal all those wounds I had endured from her alcoholism and sicknesses. Today I’m not angry anymore about my mother in any way, shape, or form. Instead, I am beginning to remember the good things, and the good times, that I did spend with her throughout my life. They were always there but the anger kept me from seeing them.

In some sense, this entry is dedicated to my mother who I loved dearly. I know she did the best she could to raise me and I know she loved me as best as she was able to. While there are many memories I try to forget now as I don’t want to live in my painful past, I do want to reflect on some things I remember that I loved most about my mother.

Mom, if you can read this, wherever you are, I want you to know I love you and I miss you. I hope you had a good Mother’s Day this year and are able to see how far I’ve come in my life because of so many of the things you taught me for the better. I know you did the best you could to take care of me, and I know you raised me with the best of intentions. I honor you for that. While you had your faults, so did I. I forgive you for them and ask for your forgiveness for my own. And I look forward to the day that I see you again. I want you to know how much I miss doing things with you. Here are just some of them Mom.

I miss playing cards with you.

I miss watching movies and talking about their plots with you.

I miss going out to dinner to new restaurants with you.

I miss traveling and sightseeing to interesting places with you.

I miss sitting and taking walks on the beach with you.

I miss having ice cream sundaes and cones with you.

I miss your famous Chicken Marsala.

I miss calling and talking to you about the things we were both doing in life.

I miss getting a hug from you.

I miss hearing you play the guitar and the piano.

I miss making you laugh and hearing your laughter.

but most of all…

I just miss you.

Mom, Happy Mother’s Day. You are the best mother I could have ever had and I’m grateful to God for having me be your son. I love you.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Would You Go Out On A Date With Someone Like You???

I hear people all the time question themselves on why they’re single. I hear others often ask themselves why they continue to date the same type of person over and over again. I even hear those that complain and find fault with every single person they go out with.

The common factor in all of those situations is the person doing the questioning. And at varying points in my life, I have lived as all of them. At times in the past I know I was  labeled a drama queen as I walked around with a ‘woe is me’ attitude when I felt everyone else had someone special to spend their lives with and I had no one. Often one might have heard me complain about someone I was dating regularly and how much that person was using me or abusing me in some fashion. There were even periods of time I went through when I found myself dating one person after another week after week and seeing something glaringly wrong with each of them. What I never realized in all of those cases was that I had some serious housecleaning I needed to do before I could ever meet that type of person I really wanted to be with. Until then, I continued to only attract those to me that were reminders of who I was inside and what I hadn’t faced.

I’ve been watching my roommate go through this a lot lately. I see him going out on date after date after date and not really being happy with any of the people he meets or vice versa. I’ve seen him want those that don’t want him and not want those that do want him. I’ve seen him sad and feeling lonely and in all of it, I’ve seen a mirror for myself on how I used to be. And when I used to live that way, the truth was, deep down I wasn’t happy with me. I wouldn’t have admitted that openly back then because I wasn’t aware of it. I wasn’t aware that I didn’t like me. I wasn’t aware that I was a seriously insecure individual. I wasn’t aware that there were many parts of my makeup that I despised. And I wasn’t aware that I had become the spitting image of the bad parts of my parents.

The result was that I either found fault in everyone I met, or I played the sad card around everyone that had someone, or I just continued to go hook up and be promiscuous telling myself that’s all that I deserved. All any of that did was further reinforce my sadness, negativity, and self-hatred. And the truth was, I wouldn’t have ever wanted to date someone like myself. Why would I have? I hated myself then and I didn’t like many of my own qualities and traits.

I’m a firm believer today that if anyone wants to have a life long lasting relationship, they first need to make sure they’ve healed themselves enough from all their past pain and traumas. Second, they need to make sure they’ve become much happier with their lives because of that healing. And third, they need to make sure that they absolutely, positively, and without a doubt, are really beginning to learn how to love who they are inside and out and would want to go out on a date with someone that had similar qualities as themselves. Until I reached a certain level in all of that, I continued to date people that were just like the toxic sides of my parents. I continued to date people who did nothing more than bring pain and hardship into my life. I continued to date people who ignored most of my own wants, needs, and desires. I continued to date people who always abandoned me. And I continued to always end up being single.

In the past few years, I have sought hard to heal within by first working on turning my entire will over to the care of God. The more I have turned my entire will over to the care of God, the more I’ve been guided to face those dark corners of my life that I was so very afraid to face. Through facing those dark corners of my life that I had always been so very afraid to face, I began to find the strength to make many difficult changes which helped me to like myself a whole heck of lot more. Through making those difficult changes and learning to like myself a whole heck of a lot more, a door finally opened in my life to allow a special person in. Through the door that finally opened allowing a special person in, came a partner who has loved me unconditionally and has done so since the first day we met…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

A Date With Me…

In about four weeks, I’ll be turning 41. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I’ve lived on this Earth for 14,975 days. What’s even harder is the realization that over fifty percent of them were nothing but a blur of me chasing and living in multiple addictions. I missed out a lot on living life because in each of those addictions, I was doing nothing but hiding from it.

My life today is thankfully quite different. Just yesterday I went to the movies on my own, which is something that for the longest time I wouldn’t do. There’s a theater locally that many people had been raving about and told me I should go check it out. So I decided to go see The Great Gatsby which had just opened that day there. While I enjoyed the movie’s 3D effects and the plush comfy recliner seat I sat in, I found the film to run a little long and be somewhat slow at times. But this isn’t the reason for me writing this blog entry.

Doing anything alone was pretty impossible for me not too long ago. Besides movies, there are so many things that I never could quite get myself to go do on my own throughout most of my life. Rarely if ever would I go out to dinner, take a drive, sit in a park, lay on a beach, or hike on a trail by myself. Why? Because I hated being with me and I didn’t like my own company. The reality was that I just didn’t like myself and the last person I wanted to spend time with alone was me.

One of the first ways I began to counteract this resistance to spending time with just me was through meditation. Sitting still in silence and just allowing the crazy thoughts to go around my head proved to be extremely difficult at first. But eventually, I was able to go on and complete a 10 day silent retreat where I did nothing but meditate, walk, eat, and sleep completely alone and in total silence. It was worth it because when the retreat was over, I wanted to spend a lot of time with just me and God. Sadly, somewhere along the way though, I fell back into my addictions and obsessions, became severely co-dependent on others, and completely forgot how good it felt to just take a day or even a few hours and spend them alone.

With the limiting disabilities that I have been enduring now for the past three years, life has come around full circle from those days I once enjoyed spending alone. Ironically, I now prefer my own company more than not. Having these disabilities temporarily in my life has been a blessing in disguise. They have forced me to revisit a relationship that I left many years ago which was a relationship with myself. On many days, I’m in too much pain to do anything but sit in the house and work on a puzzle or lay out in the sun and read a book or magazine. What’s funny is that a bunch of years ago I would have dreaded the idea of doing one of those things for a complete day. Now, I cherish a day like that.

There’s a simple truth in why I like doing things with just me today. I like me. I like who I’m becoming more and more everyday. I like how I’m living my life because I feel more more pure than any other time that I’ve ever been alive. And I like the changes that God has been doing within me since I decided to let go of my own self-will and follow God’s instead. I can finally look myself in the mirror today without disgust and instead can say that I truly love myself. Even better, I do things regularly now alone because of that growing love. That’s a far cry from a life where I once couldn’t even function without having to have someone by my side all the time.

The bottom line with all of this is that the life I lived in addictions did nothing more than drive me away from getting to know and love myself. Today, I like taking myself out on dates alone because I love that person I’m going out with. But even more importantly, I love who God is having me become and the more I become that, the more I seem to like spending time with just me.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson