Putting Down the Cursed Treasure

(Trigger Warning – ED)

Advanced Bitchifesto No. 1:   Advanced Bitches go to any lengths to recover from addiction, codependency and dysfunctional patterns.

The reason the first thing we must do to become our true selves is we have to put down our substance.  This is absolutely terrible news, because our substances are our medicine and allies.  For instance,

• I literally used to lay out a bunch of food on the coffee table for an all-day binge fest and the different foods were all my buddies who had come to comfort me and help me get through the day.
• My codependency/fawn response was like a loving aunt who gave me the secret recipe of how to get people to like and accept me. She also gave me my invisibility cloak of how to act like I’m living, but I’m basically running a simulation of my life because it’s impossible to be codependent and fully alive.
• Sarcasm (one of my go-to dysfunctional patterns) was like a big brother who came to my rescue. He hid my barbs in funny and helped me feel powerful and better than the one I was cutting with my words (the root word from sarcasm means “flesh cutting.”) Same.

Our addictions, codependency/fawn response and dysfunctional patterns are like the cursed treasures inside of Bellatrix Lestrange’s vault. When touched they multiply and burn you, they crowd your life with painful consequences and make you miserable and at some point, they fill the entire vault and there is no more room for you, the ones you love or your dreams.  Addictions, codependency and dysfunctional patterns take over your entire life and there is little or no room to heal we fear that we won’t have our treasure of self-medication and that makes us feel unsafe.  We need that room to heal because we need to replace the cursed treasures with tools, insights, support, and our magical quest of finding out who we really are without our addiction, codependency/fawn response and dysfunctional patterns.

Being an Advanced Bitch is choosing the hero or heroine’s path.  We want more from life and ourselves. We want to stop feeling sad and miserable all the time (the consequences of holding on to cursed treasure).  So we choose to empty the vault of the things that did save our life at one time and now only bring into the vault the things that will make us whole.  

This is a courageous act that most people are unable to do and even those who choose that path, a lot of them will not make it because it’s brutally difficult.  But then there’s us.  We will never stop doing our Advanced Personal Growth Work no matter what it takes or how bad it hurts or what we’ll have to lose in the process.  Because we know when we set aside the cursed treasure, we make room for magic.

Magical Assignment:

What’s the next cursed thing/behavior/substance that you must put aside for magic?