Shame! I'm Gonna Live Forever!

If it isn't obvious, I love to take syntactical linguistic meme's and flip them into something cutesy with a subtle turn of the phrase.  It makes me giggle, and is something that I actually like about myself.  There isn't much these days, so I gotta take what I can get, wouldn't you say?  

Shame.  It is my guiding force, my constant friend and the greatest companion to my faithful black dog.  It drives all of my emotional output, be that as limited as it may be, but it also is the loudest voice in my head.  I seem to have had some sort of arrested development in my emotional state, so cliché in children who grew up in homes seeped in addiction and abuse.  It doesn't give me much more than cold comfort, but I have a intellectual sense that that realization will become more crucial as we move further down this road. 

I am deeply ashamed of my behavior, most acutely in the last 3 or so years.  Somewhere between there and here, I ceased being a functional person, and have been somewhat of an abject failure as a father, husband, friend, employee and general person.  I went off the rails.  As I read in this blog and found some comfort, I too stopped drinking/drugs through sheer willpower many, many years ago.  What I didn't do was address any of the core elements that made me so afraid and so ashamed.  Four years ago, almost to this date, I developed a very serious illness.  Out of that illness, I had a hard breakdown.  Out of that breakdown, I entered counseling. Out of that counseling I developed a sense of misdirected entitlement to my own "happiness".  Out of that entitlement, I fell into serial infidelity.  

It was a yucky experience.  I picked the most damaged and disturbed woman for my partners.  I was very obviously trying to fix these women.  To salve my oozing open sores (shame, absence of self-esteem, anger, rage), I picked women who'd see me as their Knight in Shining armor and tell me, over and over how freaking awesome I was.  I would lie and manipulate to "appear" to be exactly that perfect. it was unconscious and uncontrolled, and I am deeply ashamed of that.  It worked, this medication, until the subtle realization that I was getting validation from incredibly compromised sources.  I feel gross for some of the things I've done, mostly in how freaking damaged, way beyond me, these women were.  

In December, I made the decision, tacit as it was, to stop doing this shit.  I'd had enough of the crazy shit I was doing and the fact that I couldn't take the baggage that I had to take to even come close to getting anything from it.  I had subconsciously recreated the drama of my life and it was destroying me.  

My heart is aching at the moment, so I will cut shorter than I intended this post, but suffice to say, it hasn't worked out for me very well in the corresponding month.  My wife, as wonderful as she is, discovered my infidelities and it prompted the broken place I am currently in.  This is my hell, one I created, one I am responsible for, one I need to be accountable for, but it can't be decoupled with the fact that I am deeply damaged from my childhood.  The hopeful side, other than her courageous decision to try to move forward together, is that I have descended as far down the rabbit hole as I am wanting to go, and I am asking for help.  But I am ashamed.  Deeply.