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For a long time, I thought addiction was the problem.
I believed that if I could just stop using, everything would fall into place.
But the truth is—addiction wasn’t the root. It was the result.
I started to realize this when I was around 23, sitting in therapy during my second or third attempt at getting clean. As I began to unpack the weight I’d been carrying—trauma, grief, family patterns—I started seeing how those layers shaped my choices. But it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I truly understood the depth of it all: the way shame, loss, generational wounds, and nervous system dysregulation create the conditions in which addiction thrives.
This post isn’t just about drugs or alcohol—it’s about what lies beneath.
It’s about compassion, deeper truth, and the sacred return to self.
For a long time, I didn’t believe I was using to escape anything. I told myself I was just surviving, just getting by. But once I had some distance from active addiction and began learning about coping mechanisms, trauma, and healing, I saw it clearly: substances weren’t my downfall—they were my shield.
Addiction is often a survival response to pain we never had the tools or permission to process.
And sometimes, that pain is invisible.
You don’t need a textbook trauma to end up caught in the cycle.
You just need to be human, carrying unmet needs, buried grief, or a nervous system that never learned how to feel safe.
“The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain?” ~ Dr. Gabor Maté
When I began to look at my life through a spiritual lens, I saw it even more clearly:
Addiction didn’t begin with me—and it won’t end with me either.
Through sacred ceremony, plant medicine, and deep introspection, I came to understand addiction not just as a personal wound—but as the manifestation of ancestral pain. These imprints live in our bodies. In our nervous systems. In the stories passed down without words.
What’s been inherited can also be healed—but only when we choose to see it.
And that’s when everything changed.
When I stopped asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and started asking, “What happened to me—and what needs love here?”
For me, plant medicine cracked something open. It brought up grief I didn’t have language for. Trauma I had normalized. Wounds I had inherited and never acknowledged. But healing didn’t come from the visions alone. It came in the integration—the journaling, the stillness, the prayers, the community, the willingness to stay with myself after the storm passed.
[element_embed id=”4155227″]And I want to say this—especially if you’re still in it:
Healing is not linear.
Some days you’ll be standing in your power.
Other days you’ll feel like you’re crawling through the dark.
But every step is sacred. Every breath is a miracle. And you are not broken.
Healing is not about fixing—it’s about remembering.
Remembering who you were before the pain. Before the programming. Before the shame.
It’s a return to your Self. To your Spirit. To your wholeness.
And while I have deep respect for 12-step programs, I also believe we need to reframe how we speak about recovery. I never resonated with introducing myself as an addict. Words carry energy. What we call ourselves, we breathe life into. For me, choosing to identify with healing instead of addiction became the catalyst for deeper transformation.
Because we are not our wounds.
We are not our mistakes.
We are not our darkest moments.
We are the ones who made it through.
Look at how many people in recovery become healers, leaders, lightworkers.
The fire of rock bottom forges something sacred.
There is always a seed of rising in the ashes.
You are not too far gone.
You are not beyond hope.
You are the medicine.
You are the miracle.
If anything in this spoke to your heart, I invite you to share, to reach out, or to sit with the parts of yourself that are still learning how to be soft again.
Because whether your story includes addiction or not—we are all recovering from something.
And everything that asks to be healed…is asking to come home.
~
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