Grief Trauma and Addictions

16-09-2023 • 22 mins

Energy awareness is rising to the collective consciousness and hopefully it will lead to an understanding of how energy impacts our lives, choices, and physical and emotional realities. Now you hear terms like energy frequency, vibration, high vibes, resonance, and alignment all of the time but this is relatively new. For a long time those of us who talked about energy (me since 2003) would get an eye roll or a shoulder shrug.

People didn’t want to think or talk about it because until we really reached a peak level of 5D integration, our primary energy movement and awareness was emotional. But with 5D we have a much larger energy spectrum to work with and we are operating at a level far above emotions although our emotions are how we process energy so they are involved too.

What happens when we cannot balance our emotional energy with our grief, trauma, and pain and our spiritual energy connection is out of whack? We turn to addictions to fill in the energy gaps and we can be addicted to anything – it is not an issue that only involves addictive substances like drugs or alcohol, we can be addicted to our own emotions too, as well as people, energies, things, outcomes, and our own guilt, shame, and grief. Addictions describe anything that we have no control over, that we have surrendered our will to. If you have addictions you know that they are in control, they are in charge, and they dictate how you will live your life. We really are powerless in the face of our addictions when we do not understand or know how to manage this energy pattern and habit.

I once knew someone who was addicted to shopping. She spent thousands of dollars on clothes, shoes, and jewelry on her daily shopping trips and this was before the days of the internet. When she maxed out her credit cards, she got new ones under different names. She had a secret post office box where her mail was sent so her husband didn’t see the credit card bills.

Her closets were full of new, unworn clothes with tags, and she still bought more. She was driving her family to bankruptcy but she could not stop. Budgeting was not an option, she would buy expensive jewelry, designer clothes, and anything that caught her fancy. Once I went shopping with her and there was a sale on a new brand of shapewear. There were 10 packages in the bin and she bought all 10. I asked her why she didn’t buy one or two packages and she just looked at me, slightly embarrassed. She knew what I meant but she could not answer me. One or two wasn’t enough, she had to have them all. And the next day she would buy more because the grief void filled by today’s shopping spree would be empty tomorrow.

In those days she was called a ‘shopaholic’ someone who was addicted to shopping. What drove her behavior was a deep, driving need for attention, to feel special, loved, and valued. Shopping was the only thing that made her happy and buying herself things filled in the emotional black hole created by parents who did not pay attention to her, meet her needs, and who ignored her.

Any addiction is a powerful drive to engage in behaviors we do not understand or cannot control but it is the combination of an emotional need together with an energetic trauma that we are grieving which creates an opening for addictive behavior.

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Created, narrated, and produced by Jennifer Hoffman.

Artwork by Jennifer Hoffman.

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