What does it mean to emotionally heal? It means that you know what you are thinking or doing that causes fear, anxiety, depression, guilt, fear, anger, jealousy, and so on, and how to learn from and heal these painful feelings. It means that you no longer turn to addictions to avoid loneliness, heartache, heartbreak, sorrow or grief because you know how to manage and release these painful feelings. It means that you do not feel like a victim of others’ choices and instead operate from a place of personal power, taking loving care of yourself rather than being reactive. It means that you are able to manifest the gifts you have been given and spend your time in what brings you joy. It means that you know how to fill yourself with love and share love with others rather than trying to get love and approval from others.

How Does Healing Occur?

Over 35 years ago I discovered an essential piece of the puzzle: that we each have only one to two intents at any given moment – to protect against pain and responsibility for it, or to open to learning from our pain and take responsibility for it. In other words – to learn from pain or to run from pain with our various addictions.

I discovered the next vital piece almost 25 years ago, after working as a traditional psychotherapist for 17 years and not being happy with the results. I discovered that there is no true healing without a connection with a personal source of spiritual guidance. The mind cannot heal itself.

Many people in our world are spiritually off-course, having become convinced that they cannot access Spirit directly – that they have to do it through a priest or a minister to get to God. We cannot manage the pain of life – lose of loved ones, rejection, abuse, violations, loss of limb, illness – without a direct experience of Spirit, without the compassion, wisdom and strength that comes only from Spirit. When we do not know how to have this direction connection, then our only choice is to run from pain.

Are you love or approval addicted?

• Do you often feel empty inside if you are not in a relationship?
• Do you often feel empty inside even if you are in a relationship but your partner is not paying attention to you?
• Do you get anxious when a person you are dating does not contact you when you expect them to?
• Do you get anxious when your partner goes out of town?
• Do you tend to ruminate/obsess about what your partner or someone you are dating is thinking or doing?
• Do you get angry when someone is not saying or doing what you believe they would say or do if they cared about you?

People turn to addictions when they are not taking responsibility for filling themselves with the love they need. Love and approval addiction is like any other addiction: you are using something external – in this case another’s attention to you – to fill the emptiness that is the result of your own self-abandonment.

Most of us learned to abandon ourselves, with various addictions, as we were growing up because:

• We had no role models of how to take loving care of ourselves.
• We could not handle the big feelings of loneliness and heartbreak that are often a part of childhood.
• We did not receive the nurturing we needed to handle the heartache, heartbreak, and loneliness of childhood.

When your parents or other caregivers were upset or unhappy, what did they do? Did you see them doing an inner process to discover the inner source of their upset and shift their thinking and behavior to make themselves happy? Did you see them comforting themselves with deep caring and compassion when life’s challenges were causing them loneliness and heartbreak?

Or, did you see them: