Are you like the old me?  Give up the smokes and take up nicorettes or other drugs or alcohol or binge eating. Do you go from one addiction to the other? Of course you try and try and try again to give up and eventually you succeed! Hooray! But guess what – you find a new addiction and the whole cycle begins again.

My most scary addiction was gambling – “ scary” because no one knew about my gambling except me. I became invisible. I would disappear for hours in a day and would return home again only to feel a deep sense of guilt.  But I had it all under control (so I thought!).  I would cook the evening meal in the morning so I had the day free to gamble at my leisure.  I became super human with all my mundane activities when all I had on my mind were the bells and ringing of that poker machine.  I could create a meal and I didn’t really care what it was as long as I had all the ingredients to make it quickly. I was numb from feeling the creativity of cooking, I was numb and couldn’t feel love for my family I was numb from feeling love for myself. It was all so surreal. I felt alone and disconnected.

If only someone had told me back then, that I needed to begin to like myself to have respect and treat myself with compassion, I would have had a different attitude.  My need to gamble would have melted away.   I would have gained the strength I needed to feel good about myself, rather than feeling needy for a life where I was never going to be the winner.

Whether it's gambling, smoking, drugs, sex or food…. It really doesn’t matter.  What does matter is it all boils down to you not being in love with YOU. It is a loss of self pride and dignity.

Ever heard the phrase, emotional eating?  Well “emotional” applies to every addiction. The emotion is what’s driving the addiction. The emotion behind a story from your past. We don’t want to let go of the sadness, the grief, the resentment or the anger.

There is an emptiness inside us that needs to be filled. We have a choice to fill our emptiness with an addiction or fill it with a greater love and acceptance of ourselves.
If we want to deeply appreciate who we are right now we have to be willing to accept responsibility, dump the story and move forward with our lives. We can then move beyond our addictions to free and light as the need for a crutch outside of ourselves diminishes.

All it takes is a little soul searching to remind us that we don’t need addictions. They really exist to alert us of a need to change. What we think we really need, we already have – it’s just a matter of reconnecting within to find the courage and conviction to create who we want to be in the face of adversity.


Enjoy your Day,
Koti



 


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