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"Somewhere in the sun-washed space between Southern California's hills of sand and the present desolate volcanic sprawl I was crossing, my legs had strengthened, but " invisibly " so had my will. The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I'd felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn't move further. No longer."
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"Slowly, with many lost days, I come back to life."
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Personal Development
"One of the first actions we take at Passages is to ruthlessly scrutinize, always under a doctor's supervision and care, the specific necessity of any mind - altering or mood - altering medications that our clients are taking. As soon as any non essential drugs are out of their systems, the feelings they were trying to suppress usually emerge. When that happens, we can see what symptoms the client was masking with drugs or alcohol."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I found the prospect daunting, but somehow comforting, too, because the counselors insisted it could be done, and, after all, many of them were recovering alcoholics themselves."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I mean, okay, let's say we're all going to get better. Let's just pretend we will. Fine. Where are we going to go after we get better? What are we going to do with all of our newfound healthy behaviors? Back out into the world that screwed us up and screwed us over. This does not sound promising."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nothing has to be funny. Sometimes I just laugh to heal my soul."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There is hope for the alcoholic: God is able to deliver from this as well as any other addiction."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Can you admit on here that you have an affliction for millions of other people to see? Then that is great and a huge step towards your recovery."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The scabs feel like I have a message on my arm. Something that needs to be read, urgently, by someone. It was only years later that I realized the person I had written that message to- the person who wasn't listening- was me. I was the one who should have been staring at that arm, and working out what the red hieroglyphics meant. Had I translated them, I would have realized those red lines read: 'Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don't do things that make you want to hurt yourself. Whatever you do, every day, remember this- then steer away from here."
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Personal Development
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"Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country's Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This walk would be my salvation. It had to be."
Transformation
"Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing-able-to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me-and to save me-but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it."
Empowerment
"But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was."
Truth
"Happy people have everything to give."
Happiness
"My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn't looked toward it. I wasn't lost. I'd always known the way. If I'd only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared."
Destiny
"I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains-I'd mastered a thousand amazing physical feats-physically I'd become undeniably confident and capable-but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature."
Transformation
"I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm.I found my moleskin notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family-two unsent letters-I wrote: I am the director of my life."
Responsibility
"But I couldn't say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didn't know how to tell him we'd been enmeshed for as long as I could remember."
Family
"If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad-if I could say yes and also no, as if it were the law-it would become my law."
Self-Control
"I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves."
Tradition
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