Back in 2015, I took some time off during the weekends to volunteer at a Rehab Clinic on Ibiza to understand more about the behavioral patterns of people dealing with addiction, in whatever shape or form that dominated their lives.
The time I spent with the clients of that clinic was very valuable to me and gave me such a sense of gratitude and definitely inspired me to look at my own habits in my life.
We all respond to unexpected life events intuitively; whether we get sad, angry, shut ourselves off emotionally or completely freeze, we all behave in a certain way that feels comfortable to us to deal with the situation at hand.
As far as my own behavioral pattern goes, I can share with you that I've come to understand that I didn't really cope well with emotions whenever they would come up. I would feel sad or maybe frustrated, but wouldn't show that or even express it to the people around me out of shame and fear for their reaction.
Feeling ashamed to show my real emotions isn't something that is really an issue anymore, because I've learnt the importance of just expressing my feelings in the moment. Whenever I feel sad, scared, frustrated or lost I just say it right away to my husband and get that uncomfortable feeling out of the way. I've learnt to share with him my deepest and most darkest thoughts that would terrify me for so many years, which really helped me to release all the pain and anxiety that I'd been piling up in my body.
What I've come to understand over the years, is that the expression of your issues is VITAL for your own wellbeing and that became very clear to me when I was volunteering in that rehab clinic for a while. The liberation that I could see and experience with their clients to just let all those thoughts and feelings out was so inspiring, that I felt this surely could benefit all of us.
Sometimes we need to express ourselves in order to heal and move forward, but we're not really sure how to do that and need some help with that. This is where I believe many of us could use a little help from their loved ones. The fact that you're speaking out to the people that you trust will give you a sense of release that will slowly start to heal your body from the inside.
The addiction that we've all created to numb our feelings and our emotions is something I believe we could all have a better understanding from in order to cure ourselves. Some of us might think we don't have an addiction, but let me tell you that each and every one of us has some sort of structure in their life that we've created to deal with certain events or react to unpleasant situations.
It might not be so obvious as a drug, alcohol or other type of addiction, but let me tell you that we've all at one point in our life had to deal with some sort of addictive behavior to get rid of.
Shocking to start to become aware of that isn't it?
Truthfully, this is probably the most difficult thing to admit in your life when you want to heal yourself, because you have to admit that you're doing something that isn't really the best for your wellbeing.
To me it seemed no problem to admit that I was addicted to cigarettes for example, but to really embrace the fact that I needed to get rid of it to start to feel better was a step that I was not able to take for a very long time. I really wanted to stop smoking, but somehow I couldn't do it.
I felt the need to smoke every time I would be in a stressful situation and whenever I was around other people smoking and drinking. Slowly I started to understand that I was completely addicted to numbing my anxiety and stress with cigarettes and began to look into my own behavior. Why did I get anxious? Why did I get stressed? Why did I need to smoke to relax myself?
Sure, this sounds so easy when you start to become aware of what you're doing, but when you're in the middle of it, let me tell you this: it completely sucks!
There are signs that you should do things differently, but you just don't want to listen to those, because you feel so much better when you just ignore it. For a while at least...
Ignoring the signs that you need to change your behavior is something we all do and obviously something we should all start to learn how to pick up on and actually make things easier for yourself. But that's the tricky thing with addiction, you sort of get stuck in this cycle of numbing yourself and it becomes very difficult to get out of that.
Sometimes you need to get a big health scare to make you stop doing what you're doing, but I believe this could be avoided as well if you start to educate yourself about your behavior in certain situations...
So how do you do that?
That's a question I've been working on for quite some time now together with my husband and we've created our own method to get rid of the toxic behavior for ourselves.
Soon I'll share more about that with you...