The Sober Witch Life: Sunshine’s Guide to a Mystical Recovery Season 2 Episode 14 The Role of Support in Recovery

Good morning, my dear friends, and welcome back to the sober witch life. Sunshine, mystical guide to a magical recovery. Or, I don’t know what I have it on. I’ve contemplated all sorts of names. I’m excited to have you back here. I’m going to tell you I have for the last number of weeks, I think we’ve been, for at least the last four weeks, been diving into the witch’s 13 steps to recovery, right? And we’re going to continue that today. But if you are here in this one, I just want to remind you to go back. You might want to go back a couple of episodes and listen, we’re going to start out today as we do it, always with a little bit of story time. 

It has been quite a while, quite a while, since I have felt lonely, but I remember feeling this emotion and denying that. I felt it right back when I was still in active addiction. The reality was, if I look back at it, I had a lot of friends that I could drink with, and we would have a good time, and we would laugh, and we had a lot of fun. I am not negating any of the fun or the memories or anything of that nature that I had plenty of attention from the opposite sex. I had men that were willing to, k”eep me warm”, so to speak. I even had a handful of ladies that I could practice magic with, right at once upon a time for a couple of years, there I was, you could say I was kind of part of a coven, but those friends that I was talking about, we literally would just get together to drink. Like any occasion that we had, there was usually alcohol involved, and we celebrated a lot of drinking. I mean, I have memories that pop up still in my Facebook feed and, I mean, there’s a lot of conversation and talk about, oh, I can’t wait to go out and drinking. Oh, look at this. Or, you know, messages back and forth. So to speak with these friends, and I adore and love these friends very, very much, right?  But the reality is, when we step into the path of recovery, it’s very likely that every aspect of our life will change. It’s weird, not trying to go back to what we once were, and therefore, a lot of aspects of our life are meant to change. Those guys, they had no desire to love and respect me. Their desire was much more in the lust filled, passion filled sense, they didn’t want to get to know me. They didn’t want to console me in the middle of the night when I had a, you know, was triggered with something, and had a full blown kind of, repressed would have done that, right?

And those ladies, the ladies that I kind of gathered with, from a covenant perspective. They love drama. They love to gossip. And when I attempted to try to bring some level of consistency to our magic, literally, trying to focus on bringing the magic to the forefront, I was called out for wanting to, take over the Coven, which I didn’t. I wanted to help it. I wanted to give it something special. I wanted us all to have something that we could look forward to. Because my path of recovery, is tied into my own magic, my own practices, my own witchcraft. And one of the witches within that group felt threatened, and got the rest of them on board about it, and they confronted me all together, kind of like I was on a trial. Like it was very uncomfortable, it was very weird. I was very kind of shocked in that regard, and it soured the taste in my mouth for a really long time around covens. Like I was like, No, not me. Only solitary.

And at that particular point I was about eight months into my recovery, and it became very aware that I needed to walk away from the this group of individuals. Even though they may not have been that group of individuals that I actively drank with., so to speak. They were very much so active in their own kind of drama or chaos.

And I do believe many of us when we are surrounding ourselves with drama and chaos, if we’re not addicted to some kind of substance like alcohol, we are addicted to some form of codependency. We’re truly not sovereign in our own being. This girl herself felt threatened, and I remember very distinctively in that conversation, she used this really kind of manipulative tactic where she expressed that she had had a dream that a year from now, nothing was the way that she’d ever remembered it. It horrified her, and she woke up and recognized it wasn’t a dream. It was really a nightmare. And this was all because I had started to put together ritual for us to engage in every Sabbath. All over the pagan holidays, and it was really wild.

And so I walked away from them with a really, heavy heart. I was very sad. I was very upset, but that just wasn’t my tribe. That’s the reality. And why I am sharing this all with you here today is because step five in the witch’s path of recovery states that you have to accept you can’t do this journey alone. Like, if you want to be a solitary witch and practice your own ritual and magic on your own, that’s cool. I’m all about that. You can be as eclectic as fuck and do your own magic too, but when it comes to the healing portion of your recovery journey, you have to accept that you cannot do this journey alone, carrying the burden of our own shadows by ourselves, never having some other individual that has been in that journey to kind of, you know, go back and forth with, to learn from, to explore from, to understand their perspective.

Other folks in recovery become a safe place to start to flex your boundaries, practice your boundaries, all of that kind of lovely work, I will literally read it to you. Step five, I accept that I can no longer carry the burden of my own wrongdoings alone, right? I cannot carry all of this stuff that may have been in my past, all of these things, all of all of the hurt that I may have done to myself or to others. I can’t do that alone. It is through connection and belonging that I will release that burden, because you will realize that you are no longer alone. The reality is, the disease of addiction loves to try to isolate us. It loves to make us believe that we’re uniquely broken, like nobody’s going to get it right, nobody’s going to understand it. And my God, is it good at it? It is so good at it. This is why people will lash out. They will get angry, they will get upset, right? All of these kinds of things, and it’s very much so, because that a disease of addiction is trying to isolate us just so that it controls and owns us and only us. It’s not the case though. You are not uniquely broken. I don’t even think you’re broken. You’re just a human being having a human experience and realizing how difficult, hard and challenging the world the human experience can be. And the truth is, if we go back and as a witch, you had psychic abilities. You’re overly sensitive. It is. There’s probably a high probability that you use substance or your addiction to numb some of that overwhelming nature of your senses, not even to mention the trauma. Not even to mention the fact that as we step into these new lies from a past life, we are often such powerful, magical beings that we choose to step into very difficult life.

So we may have gone through sexual abuse, we might have gone through emotional abuse, physical abuse, right? We may have been abandoned, like literally abandoned, because deep down, our soul knows that we have everything within us in order to kind of overcome it, to work within those shadows and to bring them into the light and to integrate them. I will emphasize this though this step five, you do not have to do it alone. You don’t have to, and it’s not even a matter of like making the choice I am telling you that step five is accepting that you are no longer meant to do it alone. There’s a community that is out there. If that’s my community, amazing, lovely, please, I would welcome you in with a big, gigantic, warm hug. You can feel all of the loving warmth of of my sunshine. I would love to give that to you, if it is not my community. Find one. Find one locally. Find one online. Find one virtually. Find a group of individuals that respect you for your beliefs and understands that you are on the road to recovery, that you’re going to make mistakes, that you’re going to set, boundaries that you’re you know, make sure to do that. You are not meant to do this journey alone. And it is through accepting that we release the burden of a lot of our path past.

That being said, My dear friends, I do hope that this resonates with you. If you have any questions or concerns about it, or if you are feeling that argument inside of you, please know that is the disease talking, not spirit above much. Love from me to all of you, until next time.