Question from a reader:

“How can I use my spirituality and new awareness to help heal my addiction and the friction it caused with the relationships in my life? Especially that of my ex husband who is the father of my two young children.

 

I know my mistakes and see the excuses I was making up for myself and I’ve tried to improve and repair his outlook on me but it’s just not going well. I am trying to be more positive, understanding, and compassionate but I miss my babies and want my ex and I to be able to co-parent together for our kids’ sake.”

Quite literally, spirituality is meant to provide us with a multitude of tools to heal ourselves and your lives and our world.

It all begins with ourselves by healing our trauma. We can’t heal our trauma until we become self-aware enough to recognize the beliefs, habits, patterns, and coping mechanisms we created to survive that trauma. Our “programming” as some would call it.

That trauma is inflicted in a multitude of ways:

Generational Trauma (a.k.a. Ancestral Karma): This is trauma inflicted upon us by our parents, who learned it from their parents, and so on and so forth. Healing this trauma means you no longer pass it down to the next generation in your family lineage.

Societal Trauma: We live in a society and culture which traumatizes us in innumerable ways. If you’re Black, living in a racist power structure is traumatizing. If you’re a woman, living in a patriarchal society is traumatizing. Hell, even if you’re a man, living in a patriarchal society is traumatizing, because patriarchy forces men to deny parts of themselves that are deemed “too feminine.” Religious abuse, which is closely tied to patriarchy, traumatizes people spiritually through fear of eternal damnation, and so on and so forth.

And the generational trauma is often a combination of these societal traumas mixed with other generational “curses” like familial sexual abuse, spousal abuse (a symptom of patriarchy),  codependency, etc.

Addiction is merely another symptom of a deeply rooted trauma. So start asking yourself where your trauma lies and how far back it goes? Enlist the help of an addiction counselor to help you recognize the ways you are using your addiction to cope with that trauma. Enlist the help of a trauma-informed therapist to help you work on the trauma itself.

At the most basic level, the only person you have any control over is yourself. So start there. You have to realize that you are not responsible for other people’s actions and emotions–only your own. In the grand scheme of things, you cannot change your ex or his perception of you. You can only heal yourself and hope, that with changed behavior will come changed perceptions.

I know that’s difficult especially when your children are involved, but the only way to truly be able to heal your relationship is to heal yourself.

No amount of attempting to improve his outlook is going to be effective, you can only be the person you are trying to convince him that you are and show him. He may accept this, he may not, and that’s something that you have to be prepared for, but by putting in the work for your own sake (and not just for the sake of your kids), then there’s a positive outcome regardless.

Thanks for being here,

Ash

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