WEEKLY MEDITATION
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
-Helen Schucman
Addictions often act as a surrogate if the natural process of attachment and love is not properly in place. If we have had to unknowingly build emotional protection around our vulnerable selves during childhood, addictions will often arise to make up for this deficit as we mature and develop. So recovery must act as a process through which we learn to navigate healthy loving. This can take some time and may need to take a back seat to the initial process of finding our way to abstinence. But if our addictions did play this role, then removing them makes it all the more vital that we address and correct this deficit. The emotional irony, or course, is that while our addictions attempt to solve this problem, they simultaneously keep us further locked away from healthy loving. Addictions, themselves, keep us from being able to participate properly in the relationships around us, and certainly impede our ability to create newer, healthier ones. But, luckily, learning to remove the barriers keeping us from love—including our addictions themselves—actually makes the underlying need for their existence obsolete.
