Hiking the Mountain in Flip Flops

By: Diana Sumner

dianasumner33@gmail.com

Diana Sumner is a spiritual and influential voice for those suffering from the effects of addiction and past trauma. As a child, she survived various abuses before plunging into the darkness of alcoholism as an adult. After decades of personal torment, she discovered her wounded inner child and began her healing journey. Today she works with men and women with addiction issues and who have experienced childhood trauma.                                       

 I search fearlessly for the gift, for the purpose of my suffering.

 I have to. I no longer have a choice. There has to be something useful that can come out of the chaos. My pain cannot have been for nothing.

I refuse to let the darkness win, the darkness that for years consumed my soul with its lies and that still lingers today, longing to lure me back into its murky shadows of fractured memories — memories I no longer believe are true, yet still remain and remind me of the time when I felt shattered into a million pieces.

Instead, I will fan the ember, the Divine spark that dwells within me.

This flame is the source of the burning pyre I am building to consume the sadness, fear, and distorted memories my childhood abusers instilled in me.

Its light will illuminate the way for her, my beautiful inner child, until she rises like a phoenix from the ashes of her past and soars effortlessly above the cage in which she has been imprisoned for all these years.

Excerpt 1 from the forthcoming book Hiking the Mountain in Flip Flops

Nine years ago I tried to kill myself.

My soul existed in an excruciating place. I didn’t want to die, but I could no longer live with the mental pain that tortured my mind every single day of my life.

No one would have understood why I would want to end what seemed to everyone to be a beautiful life. I had a dream job, two young children, and a loving husband. What no one knew was that I hid a secret. I was an alcoholic, a blackout drunk who neglected my family and wrapped myself in a blanket of shame and booze. Alcohol was the only thing I craved because it obliterated the suffering which I constantly lived with — suffering which I believed that I deserved. I had spent years seeking help from every possible place: doctors, psychiatrists, therapists. But on that cold January night nine years ago, I was done trying. I was done searching. I was hopeless. I was exhausted, and I was broken into a million pieces.

I tucked my kids into bed, kissed their foreheads, and proceeded to do what I thought was best for them. I took a handful of pills, washed them down with alcohol, and prayed that I would be forgiven by whatever God was out there.

That night, the first of many miracles occurred.

When I woke the next morning, still alive, the enormity of what I had done brought me to my knees. I was finally broken enough to feel the divine spark in my soul that was encouraging me to continue my search to heal. There had to be a reason that I was still alive. I threw myself into a treatment center, started working a 12-step program, and got sober. It was this journey into sobriety that allowed me to find the answer to the war that had raged within me for so many years, and that had ravaged my life.

I had Complex-PTSD.

I wasn’t crazy.

I was just reliving, over and over, the memories and experiences that resulted from the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse I had endured during my childhood.

Getting sober was much easier than the work that I have since needed to do to fearlessly face my past. It has been horrendous, beautiful, awful, tragic, and liberating – all at the same time.

And I wouldn’t change a thing.