Today's Light | Believe Bigger

Chaos was normal thing for me...

I believed stress was normal. I believed relationships falling apart was normal. I believed carrying everybody else's weight while ignoring my own pain was normal. When you grow up in trauma, your nervous system gets wired to survive, not to dream. You don't spend your childhood believing you'll do great things. You spend it trying to make it to tomorrow.

That's the shitty up thing about childhood trauma. It doesn't just hurt you then. It quietly teaches you what you think you deserve later.

If you grow up around addiction, abuse, abandonment, screaming, manipulation, or instability, somewhere deep inside you can begin to believe that's all life has for you. You don't chase peace because you've never seen it. You don't expect healthy relationships because you've never experienced them. You don't believe success belongs to people like you because nobody ever showed you that it could.

I carried that belief system into adulthood.

When I got sober in 2021, I wasn't standing on top of a mountain. I was standing in the middle of the wreckage. I had lost a lot. Financially, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. I remember sitting alone looking around wondering how the hell I was going to rebuild my life. I remember feeling embarrassed. I remember feeling like maybe I had missed my opportunity. Maybe this was just who I was. Maybe broken was my permanent address.

Part of me didn't think I deserved anything better.

In 1990, after years of practicing medicine and reviewing Van Gogh’s case history via his hundreds of letters, Arenberg published a paper in JAMA diagnosing Van Gogh as suffering not from epilepsy, as the artist’s physician claimed a century earlier, but from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that can cause vertigo, of which Van Gogh complained, and tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. Ménière’s, to Arenberg, could better explain Van Gogh’s decision to slice off his ear. After retiring, in 2017, Arenberg recommitted himself to studying Van Gogh and became convinced that art historians had made an even more alarming mistake: Van Gogh had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered.

Read the article for free on Air Mail, a lively digital read for the world citizen, with stories both foreign and domestic that you won’t find anywhere else, written by some of the world’s finest journalists.

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Trauma teaches you to settle. It teaches you to expect disappointment before you ever experience hope. It tells you not to dream too big because you'll probably fail anyway. It tells you not to trust people because they'll leave. It tells you not to love yourself because nobody else did.

The problem is that those voices sound a lot like truth after enough years.

But recovery started teaching me something different.

I started realizing that healing isn't just about stopping destructive behaviors. It isn't just about putting down the drink, working through the trauma, or sitting in therapy. Healing is learning that you deserve things you never received. Peace. Safety. Love. Stability. Purpose. Joy.

You have to learn to believe bigger.

I didn't get sober just for me. I got sober because my daughters deserved a father who was present. They deserved someone who showed up. Someone who remembered things. Someone who answered the phone. Someone who sat in the stands. Someone who could actually feel life instead of constantly trying to escape it.

A few days ago, I watched my daughter graduate high school. A young woman who has fought through an IEP since elementary school. A young woman who worked her ass off every single year and is now heading to college to become a pre-med student.

There was a time I wasn't sure I'd even be around for these moments.

There was a time my life looked nothing like this.

The beautiful thing about recovery is that you eventually realize your children aren't just watching what you accomplish. They're watching what you believe about yourself. If I continue believing I deserve failure, they'll see that. If I believe I deserve growth, healing, purpose, and peace, they'll see that too.

The life you're building is often limited by the life you think you're worthy of.

Some of you still believe you deserve toxic relationships because that's what you grew up with. Some of you believe you'll always struggle financially because that's all you've ever known. Some of you believe you'll always be anxious, depressed, addicted, angry, broken, or stuck.

But those beliefs were handed to you by wounded people!

They don't have to become your future.

You attract the life you believe you deserve because your beliefs determine your choices, your boundaries, your habits, and your standards. If you believe you're worth healing, you'll do the work. If you believe you're worth peace, you'll protect it. If you believe you're worth more, you'll stop settling for less.

Believe bigger!

Not because it's easy. Not because life suddenly becomes fair. But because the child inside you who learned survival deserves to finally meet the adult who chose healing.

Today I'm sober. I'm present. I'm watching my daughters grow up. I'm building things that help other people heal. None of it happened because I had all the answers. It happened because somewhere along the way I stopped believing I deserved to stay broken.

You don't have to earn your worth.

You just have to stop believing the lies that trauma taught you about it.

Stay in the fight.

Jeff

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