My friend's father is backing out on his promise to take her hiking on Mount Fuji. She went out of her way to renew her passport, expedite it, buy hiking boots, luggage; and he won't even return her phone calls. She ended up telling me that the most disappointing thing was figuring out what her dad was actually like. He was actually mildly immature. She realized he was not perfect.
That hit me like a ton of bricks.
I remembered my epiphany when I realized that my dad wasn't perfect. That he was human and realizing all of the ways he had failed me. It is difficult, because I love my father. He is one of the greatest men in history. But the time comes when you have to get real with yourself and see the truth about your family so that you can see the truth about yourself.
My sister was in her first year of recovery from opiate addiction, and I was trying to start -get this- a year without dating. I had in the beginning of my family confronting my sister's physical addiction come face to face with my own, but could not find it in myself to come clean. Addicted to sex. There's no nice way to pull off the bandaids and cry about that one. You become cold and calculating. Not crying or resembling a woman in any sense. Numb. Numb to the world, to the people you hurt and who hurt you, but oddly numb to LOVE (the ONLY thing you crave). I was broken. So I decided to offer myself to the only thing I had known to work in my life ever.
God. It worked beautifully. Now, after soaking in my self pity over and over again, I am ready to finally cleanse myself to the core and up root the thing that caused this upheaval in the first place, but where did it come from?
Reading a lot of books about addiction showed me that a lot of women get involved in sex addiction because of the lack of healthy attention from their fathers. I thought "No, that's not me! My dad is an amazing man and we get along perfectly." Only through some very painful probing of my heart, seeing what it really meant to be in an unhealthy relationship then after nine months of separation from that guy finally experiencing what love really looks like, I saw that my relationship with my father was a reflection of how I saw men. I am no victim. I have made poor decisions and used bad judgement, but rooted in some of those was a desire to be desired - to be fulfilled and approved as a woman. I was always too afraid of my dad or scared to make my mom jealous to get my dad's attention, so I went to someone else. Then to someone else. And someone else and someone else and so on.
A little girl's hero is her father. I read that in Wild at Heart or Captivating both by John Eldridge. We all mess up, so when we do we effect other people. I just want to make sure now that 310 days from now, it will no longer be the person that I want to marry whom I tear apart with my hurtful, broken, attempts at self preservation. I desire to be whole. Fulfilled outside of a relationship. I want to no longer cry and cry over my parents, my lost love, or my feeling of inadequacy. I want to draw near to the Lord, because He said He would return the favor and He not only keeps His promises, but His presence is a reward in itself.
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