Exposing My Hidden Alcohol Addiction Allowed God to Heal Me

Only With the Power of God Could My Bondage to Alcohol Break

I have worked with Linda, my energy medicine practitioner, for over five years in her office and virtual sessions, healing from childhood trauma. Still, as my process unfolded, my hidden alcohol addiction became exposed. Linda had assisted me several years ago in getting my son help for his drug addiction. I watched how God worked through Linda that day. I met Linda in her office and watched God move through her. As she called addiction rehabilitation centers, The Holy Spirit guided her to a Christain teen program in Georgia. This program saved my son’s life! Little did I know that my son’s addiction and my work with Linda for soul trauma healing would open the door to discovering my addiction.

This year, 2022, I began the Darin Method® going through my story from 10-15 years and looking at patterns and beliefs that continued in my adult life. Through Linda’s intuitive counsel, she helped me recognize and begin to deal with the grief of losing my relationship with my brother due to his drug addiction and mental illness that I never dealt with thirty years ago. I learned to block out what I felt by dissociating and wanting to run away from reality which later led me to drink alcohol as an adult to escape my pain. Through intuitive counseling and soul-healing sessions, I began to process and move through the pain of my grief. I began to feel more clarity and a sense of inner peace that I did not know before.

At 11 years old, I had a close relationship with my brother, but that changed after we moved to a different town, and he got in with the wrong crowd and became addicted to smoking pot. My mother worked part-time, became sick, and was in and out of the hospital after the move. My dad was always working. I began to fit in at my new school until I got a new haircut when I turned 12. My girlfriend turned my other new friends against me because she thought I was trying to steal her boyfriend. Not knowing too many kids, I was traumatized by the experience of feeling rejected, alone, and isolated. By middle school, I became embarrassed by my brother’s drug use. With my father never around, my brother doing drugs, and my mother emotionally unavailable, I felt abandoned by my family. I believed I couldn’t trust anyone; I was all alone.

My trust issues and low self-esteem led to me hiding, constantly comparing, wanting to be perfect, and trying to pretend to fit in. In adulthood, I was jealous of others having more than me, whether it was a bigger house, a close-knit family, or more friends. These patterns led me to want to compete at times and pretend to be someone I wasn’t, dressing or acting a certain way, acting like I had it all together. The Darin Method® helped me link patterns and beliefs rooted in rejection, fear, shame, and jealousy. As a result, I couldn’t get too close to others, protecting myself and adapting to whom I hung out with to be liked and not feel left out.

Through Linda’s spiritual guidance, I learned that evil spirits become entrenched in the soul due to the unrepented sin of dark emotions and behaviors. The exposure of rejection, fear, shame, and jealousy releasing through confession, repentance, and accepting God’s forgiveness. My open wounds were hosts for these evil spirits to come into my soul. As a result, I feel more centered, lighter, and grounded in my body.

My parents temporarily separated during my first year of high school, and my father moved out. During that time, my brother had a mental breakdown and disappeared for three days. The police found him in another state and admitted him to a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia. My dad moved back because we couldn’t manage my brother’s erratic behaviors. I felt lost in the chaos.

My parents didn’t want anyone to know about my brother’s illness, so we kept it secret, acting like nothing was wrong. As a result, we never learned to cope with his illness, process how we felt, or receive professional help.

My brother was shot and died before I entered college. I was devastated but could not feel and process his death, and funeral, and missing him from my life. I began doing this grief process when I met Linda at age 56 years old.

When I got to college, I began binge drinking with my friends to numb my pain. I had trouble dealing with my brother’s loss when I met my husband the year after my brother died. We often socialized at bars or parties and drank alcohol with our friends. My husband and I didn’t know how to connect because we hid our feelings and dissociated. We often mirrored each other, covering our shame and inadequacy with humor or sarcasm.

I developed social anxiety from all the lying and hiding. My fear was rooted in shame, embarrassment, and rejection. My inability to cope led me to want to reach for a drink when I was out with others at social gatherings, especially around strangers. Through Linda’s counsel, I learned to identify and process my emotions, journaling them daily and releasing them through confession and repentance. Through Spiritual healing sessions, I removed negative energy from my body attached to my dark feelings of fear, shame, and rejection, leaving me with more clarity, less anxiety, and a heavy weight off of my body.

The more I stuffed my emotions in my marriage, the angrier I felt, leading to a victim mentality causing me to complain and lash out. Everything felt like a trauma to me, and I learned to get attention by having people feel sorry for me coming to my rescue. Being a victim, I could manipulate, shift blame and not take accountability. My anger became a default response whenever I felt the slightest stress. Through the Darin Method®, I understood this pattern developed when I felt overwhelmed as a child, didn’t know how to regulate my emotions, and would have a temper tantrum. Learning my habits and behaviors as a child still was being acted out as an adult. I had the power now to change!

Through self-care tools, Linda introduced me to breathing exercises, tapping, and finding pleasure using my five senses. I learned to approach my situations from a calmer state, feeling less overwhelmed. Through Linda’s counsel, I learned to take responsibility for my actions and accept conditions that were not in my control. I could use my anger as a compass to act on what needed to be done rather than using it to lash out at others.

When I reached middle age, my husband and some friends began making wine as a hobby, and I started drinking regularly. An occasional glass of wine with dinner became a daily habit. I not only had wine with dinner but had a glass if I had a stressful day or when friends came over.

Due to hormonal decline, I couldn’t drink as much as I used to, and the alcohol affected my sleep and mood. I soon became reliant on alcohol to cope, sometimes drinking alone because it was so readily available. I tended to have less control and felt more compelled to drink when I was with my friends on the weekends, often being sick in bed the next day, especially after a party. I vowed to stop drinking every time I got ill but went back to drinking as soon as I felt better. The more I drank, the alcohol ate away at my soul, fueling my anger, jealousy, and insecurity and making me more depressed. Through the Darin Method®, I understood that the root of my depression was loneliness and isolation. Through Linda’s intuitive counseling, I learned I came into the bondage of anxiety, depression, and addiction. I worked on changing patterns, beliefs, daily prayer, confession, and repentance through Linda’s deliverance ministry. Addiction recovery has been a process of education, counseling, and deliverance to be honest and truthful.

Although I had worked with Linda for several years, I had never mentioned my drinking. My lying had become a habitual way of life. I was programmed to keep family addictions and mental illness a secret from childhood. As a result, I became captive to the bondage of lying, hiding, and victim mentality with agreements to shame, fear, and rejection.

In 2022, that all changed, and I exposed my addiction through Linda’s intuitive gifts. I was in denial, defended, minimized, and angry when confronted. I didn’t want to believe I had an alcohol addiction and thought I had my drinking under control. I learned with Linda’s spiritual guidance that sometimes certain spirits can cluster together, become entrenched, and take root in a person’s life. My pattern of lying hid my addiction. With Linda’s gift of deliverance, she could help loosen up the origins of these entangled evil spirits to release slowly. Although the evil spirits were casting, I had to choose not to lie and hide or drink. Removing these spirits was a great gift, but I had to take responsibility and accountability to change patterns and behaviors.

I admitted my addiction so God could enter my soul. However, I was still leaving the door open to temptation and giving permission and persistence to the spirit of addiction to operate in my life if I continued to drink on occasion. I finally surrendered by admitting and accepting that I had an alcohol addiction and chose to stop drinking alcohol altogether. I didn’t want to risk losing control again in a moment of weakness.

Linda provided me with an addiction module packet of educational materials and tools to complete. After that, I processed at my own pace.

Alcoholism is a disease of lying, hiding, and secrets. Not dealing with emotions and denial is one of the significant symptoms of the disease. Part of my denial was minimizing, blaming, and displacing my anger onto others when confronted. Alcohol affects the mind, the physical body, and spirituality. My alcohol addiction decimated my soul and affected my personality, causing harm to myself and hurting my family. I learned that bringing all the darkness to the light was the only way out. After reflecting, it was profound to me that although I was in therapy with Christian Faith Healing, I continued to lie and hide. I hid in the role I played of being a victim and with my defense mechanisms of denial, humor, suppression, repression, and passive aggression. I discovered how I became powerless and lost control under the influence of alcohol and hurt others. I saw how I numbed out for so many years.

With the 12 steps outlined, I wasn’t ashamed to hide my addiction anymore and could admit it to another person. I spoke honestly to my parents about my addiction, no longer hiding, and took responsibility for how I mistreated them, asking them for forgiveness. I understand alcoholism is a lifelong disease, and I must take it one day at a time and let go.

I believed that through confession, repentance, and a conscious decision not to respond to the temptation to act in my old patterns of lying, hiding, manipulating, and drinking, only with the power of God could my bondages break. God healed me. Spending time with my parents allowed me to hear their stories and understand their traumas, shame, and pain growing up in a family of alcoholics, by talking honestly with my parents without blaming and learning from our mistakes allowed us to forgive. I now have a better relationship with them, having more compassion and no more resentment.

Alcoholism is a family disease, and although my parents and husband weren’t alcoholics, they had the personality of one. All four of my grandparents were alcoholics. We judged ourselves and others harshly, not knowing how to love, and we each felt a sense of emptiness filled with alcohol, drugs, sex, or shopping. We developed codependency patterns of behavior in which we each took on a specific role and acted out based on unspoken rules that kept us from freely expressing ourselves and talking about our problems. This false sense of protection kept us isolated, lonely, and feeling insecure. Although we each played a different role, we shared the same feelings.

What was most powerful for me to learn was to see life as a learning experience and have no regrets. To see mirrors in others in me and focus on myself, not trying to change others but accepting them and myself for who we are. That my relationships weren’t going to be perfect, but that’s ok. Whatever I perceive will be what I achieve. My old ways must die so I can give birth to change and grow.

I can view myself differently now and have hope. I’m accepting and less judgmental. I’m learning to love myself in a new way. I now know my emotions, can speak the truth, and have a better connection with myself. My mood is lighter, and my mind is more transparent than before my recovery. I connect to God now through prayer, worship, and reading the bible; it’s a new relationship!

As part of my recovery, I’m aware of the warning signs that can trigger relapse and have a plan in place that I can refer to daily, which includes a spiritual, holistic therapist and an Experiencing God group to which I can reach out for support. I’m so grateful for having the opportunity to work with Linda as my spiritual, holistic healer. By going through my life story, and my brother’s illness and death, I discovered the roots of my addiction and how it tied in with my grief that I never processed. I give God the glory for all his work through Linda’s spiritual gifts to help expose it all and assist me in my healing and forgiveness.