As I went through recovery for Complex PTS, which I’m still going through, actually, I changed my relationships.

At one point, I realized in an instant that all of the good things I’d been searching for in life rested in a place where I had made no investments my entire life.

I had made no investments in my relationships with anyone, ever.

I always kept my relationships with others at a safe distance. I was hyper-vigilant about that, and a bunch of other things. I expressed almost no honest vulnerability about myself to others.

I absolutely hated myself and who I thought I was, and I didn’t want others to discover much about me.

I developed that way of being as a child, actually. I have a high ACE score. That’s Adverse Childhood Experiences. It’s an interesting test to take. To me, discovering and understanding my ACE score was important.

What Save A Warrior taught me was that my way of seeing life, and my ability to enjoy it, was being vastly influenced by that ACE score of mine, which was pretty high.

And some of those scores… boy, they had some heat on them.

They altered my perspective of life in such a manner that I had no joy and no peace. I had no idea what those feelings actually were.

Those ACE scores were affecting everything, including my relationships with others.

The truth was, I had no relationships with others.

I had completely spiritually isolated myself and had zero friends in my way of being. To me, friends were always too big of a risk.

I was suicidal in my thinking and thought myself to be insane. I had thought that since I was a child and had collected a certain few of those ACE scores.

What I was unaware of at the time, when I was making the decisions to spiritually isolate myself, was that I wasn’t terminally unique.

A lot of other people were doing that, with the exact same fears.

Perhaps not to the same degree as I had. Perhaps not with the same intensity to avoid deep relationships. But everyone fears intimacy.

I learned that we were all born with this abandonment terror as a natural instinct.

We fear shame, and thus withhold parts of ourselves when we interact with one another.

In my circumstances, because of some thinking processes I developed as a child, I altered the idea of shame.

It’s like I wrote a line of code into my thinking that shame wasn’t something out there somewhere.

At some point, I decided that I was shame, as if that were my identity.

There’s a lot of self-hatred that underlies those thinking processes.

My hatred of myself used to run like background music inside my head that I listened to all day.

Because I had no one to share intimate thoughts with, because I had no friendships, the thoughts inside my head would just ricochet around, becoming more and more distorted.

I came to understand that I learn about myself when I explain myself to others.

The deeper I can express myself to others, the more I understand myself.

My spiritual healing came through my relationships with others.

Very deep relationships, now.

I learned that my enjoyment of this life experience I am having now depends entirely upon my relationships with others and the status of those relationships.

That’s why I write, too.

I like to express myself vulnerably.

That might make others uncomfortable, or they might judge me for doing so.

That’s none of my business.

What others think about me is none of my business.

I’ll just turn the lights up brighter.