What’s Your Addiction?

It’s easy to point a finger at a junkie on a street corner and condemn him or her for a lifetime of bad choices.

Addiction can sometimes be very obvious.

• The friend who can’t hold his alcohol.

• A family member addicted to sleep medication.

• Someone who needs opiate drugs to dull the pain.

Addiction also looks like a shopping habit, a workaholic, or a sugar binge.

Addiction can be startlingly hard to overcome. Our addictions fill a need for something in our lives that we aren’t getting from anywhere else. To understand the problem, we need to look at the context that triggered the addiction in the first place.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. -Matthew 7:3-5

Before we judge others, maybe it’s time to address our own addictions, and take an honest look at how our life choices are affecting the people around us. The Emotion Code can help with this. By addressing our emotional baggage, we are able to let go and forgive ourselves. Book a session with Dawn today!

Book an Emotion Code Session!

“…painful early experiences program both the neurophysiology of addiction and the distressing psychological states that addiction promises to relieve. …it’s not what happened in our past that creates our present misery, but the way we have allowed past events to define how we see and experience ourselves in the present. A person can survive being beaten, but cannot remain psychologically intact if he convinces himself he is by nature blameworthy, or because the world by its very nature is cruel. The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma, or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past”. - Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, page 370

Bottom Line?  The Emotion Code is a way to bring subconscious fears, beliefs, and emotions to our conscious attention without the need for psychoanalysis. In other words, you don’t have to relive the experiences over and over in a counselor’s office. By acknowledging them and intentionally releasing them, you can make space in your brain for a more positive outlook on your future.

Want to Learn More? Gabor Mate’s book In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts makes a convincing argument that we all have addictions in our lives. Acknowledging them is the first step toward healing.