Learning to Grieve Saved My Soul!
Why I Wasn’t Healing My Grief (And How Linda Helped Me)
My life was spiraling out of control when I first met Linda Darin. My mother had passed away five months before after a three-year fight with breast cancer. I believed she was in remission, so her death was a shock only weeks after we learned her cancer had returned, attacking her whole body. I had so much pain and sorrow from her loss, regretting that I left her at the hospital for work responsibilities and did not get to say goodbye one last time. I stuffed all my emotions down to get through my days and pretended I was not suffering. Ignoring my feelings, I fell into a depression, isolated myself, and couldn’t focus on my design work. Seeing my distress at a routine appointment, my doctor prescribed an antidepressant, but I knew I needed more help. A conversation with my former youth pastor at my mother’s services stuck with me – he asked about my walk with God. I had turned away from my faith in college, but now I decided to seek spiritual counseling for grief.
Meeting Linda for the first time in her New York City office, I bawled as I talked about my experience of my mother’s death and feelings of deep sorrow and emptiness. I allowed myself to feel my emotions here with Linda but shut them down again as soon as I walked out the door. Each week we ended the session with energy and sound healing to remove the negative energy from my body attached to dark emotions stuck in my soul from holding onto the pain of my loss. As I lay on the massage table, sounds from the tuning forks and bells vibrated through my body with warmth. Linda brought God’s healing power to release me from the bondage to these negative entities, and often my arms and legs jerked as they left. I felt lighter, calmer, and could think more clearly afterward. It was such a welcome relief from the chaos in my mind! Linda encouraged me to self-care by journaling my feelings daily to identify and connect to my emotions instead of ignoring them and waiting for our next session. If I became overwhelmed by my feelings, I’d go for a walk, do yoga stretches and breathing exercises, or take an Epsom salt bath with candles to relax and help me sleep through the night.
With Linda’s intuitive counsel, she could see that I had a troubled relationship with my mother, but it took time going through The Darin Method® for me to uncover the truth of my childhood. I believed I had an idyllic country upbringing, but I realized this was a lie as we went deeper into my soul. My family never discussed our problems (an unkempt home, financial struggles, and depression), even with each other. We had an unspoken understanding that we hid them from the outside world. I learned the pattern of lying and hid my shame and feelings of unworthiness from feeling rejected by my mom. I had to grieve the absence of a loving relationship with her and accept that my whole family (including myself) suffered from mental illness, anxiety, and depression and acted like addicts, which made it impossible to connect. As a part of my healing journey, Linda guided me to find a church community in my neighborhood, reconnect to God and my faith and not isolate myself. My dad and I spoke on the phone often, and whenever I visited him in Ohio, we would look at old photos of my mom as a young woman and mother, laughing about memories he shared of her. Six years later, meeting weekly with Linda for counseling and energy healing, my tears and sorrow have lessened. I can let go of the dream of the love I wish my mom and I had for each other, accept her for her emotional limitations, admit my role in our complicated relationship, and move forward with my life. The gift of experiencing grief over her loss opened the door for me to return to faith and trust in God through Linda’s spiritual mentorship.
As I shared more about my life and marriage with Linda in our sessions, we discussed my unhappiness about not having children and concerns about my husband’s alcohol addiction. With her experience in addiction counseling, she educated me about the illness and helped me confront him, expressing my fear and shame about his public drunkenness. Through The Darin Method®, Linda helped me see how toxic our relationship was with me enabling his drinking, allowing him to minimize it, and then acting like a victim when I had decided to marry this man! After much meditation and prayer, God told me to “get out” of my marriage. Still, it took me months of grieving with tears and processing because I desperately wanted to stay married, believing marriage gave me validation as a woman. However, once I took action to follow God’s direction, everything flowed smoothly. My family and church community rallied around me to offer support as I packed, moved, and needed a temporary place to stay. My emotions were all over the map when I left my husband after twenty years of marriage. I was relieved to be away from his drinking and the fights about it, but it was tough to transition from being a couple to single, and I felt lonely. The change in my lifestyle gave me so much time for self-care, and I started exercising more, eating healthy, and making time to be quiet and alone with God crying out in my pain and sorrow to Him. In the energy healing and chakra balancing sessions, invoking the divine healing energy, Linda broke my bondage to the clusters of bitterness and anger towards my husband for taking the opportunity to have children from me and the jealousy I felt toward women who were married with families. As a result, I felt God’s love and could see his protection as he helped me escape my marriage – God knew what was best for me! I am so grateful for the women in my church who invited me to bible studies, walks by the waterfront, and nights sitting around the fire pit talking and playing games. I was not alone after all!
I recently had the opportunity to move to a new apartment in Westchester County, a beautiful area on the water where I never imagined I could afford to live. I had no idea something so wonderful would bring feelings of grief. I jumped at the chance to move but started to panic when I procrastinated and ran out of time to pack and prepare. I couldn’t understand my grief and resistance to a change that I knew was good! In The Darin Method®, there was a pattern of moving every few months in the first five years of my life due to my father’s work, which created a belief that I was not safe or secure in my home. Moving as an adult brought up all these childhood emotions of fear of change, inducing panic, and I became frozen. Linda guided me to develop a new belief in embracing change as an exciting experience. She released my attachment to the spirit of fear from my childhood that had me reacting with confusion and panic through energy healing and her gifts of deliverance. Instead of being afraid of newness, I could find joy in simple things like new scented candles, the large windows bringing light and air into my apartment, and living in a quiet neighborhood two blocks from a harbor beach and park where I take daily walks by the water. I began to let go of my attachment to the twenty-five years I spent in New Jersey with my husband and saw that God opened the door for me to find a new life in a new town where I could explore and make new memories.
I lost my job as a fashion designer during the Covid pandemic when my company closed, and it brought up such strong emotions for me, as this was my third job loss in five years. I had blamed my bosses for each one, never considering my role in their decisions. Linda and I wrote my autobiography of work, and I saw the most significant loss from a major American fashion house after 16 years, which I had never grieved. As a college student in Ohio, I dreamed of making it as a fashion designer in New York City, and here I thought I had made it living my dream! I was a design director over an entire department, making six figures with bonuses and stock options. But as I moved into management, I did not have the skills to deal with different personalities and started to indulge in drinking, shopping, and eating to cover up my feelings of inadequacy. I was also angry that my friends continued to get promotions, and I was not. My coworkers encouraged me to drink when we went out together and expected that I could spend money at expensive boutiques as they did. Still, I recklessly charged everything to my credit cards. I hid my three addictions, drinking, shopping, and eating, behind a veneer of success. Then, when I got fired, I was embarrassed, ashamed, and isolated, not wanting to tell my family or connect with any of my old friends from work. I couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to eat, and barely took care of my hygiene for weeks. I was unmotivated and put off looking for new work for months because I could not grieve my loss.
Going through the addiction module with Linda, focusing on myself instead of my husband, was eye-opening! I could not believe how much I drank from college into adulthood in New York. Alcohol was an emotional crutch that ruined my life! I lost friends, I lost my marriage, and I lost jobs because of my addictions. I decided to stop immediately – I have not had a drink since January 2021. I took control of my finances after I left my husband, joining a bible based financial program that taught me how to budget and plan to live within my means instead of on credit cards. I’ve since paid off $40,000 of my debt! During the Covid lockdowns, working from home for two years, I turned to food to ease the pain of isolation. I didn’t want to admit it, but Linda confronted me when she saw me gaining weight quickly. Again, I felt hopeless against my urges and addiction, hated myself for it, and hated the exposure, but I knew that transparency and authenticity were my only way out. I finally told the truth, and she helped me embrace God’s love, release my shame, and learn the importance of building a relationship with God through her Experiencing God group on Saturday mornings.
I came to Linda for grief counseling, but I see now that God guided me to her to heal my mind, body, and soul in all areas of my life. Grieving the loss of my mother, the loss of jobs, the changes of divorce and moving, the absence of love and connection with my mom and husband, and the absence of prospects and finances in job loss take time, patience, and persistence to get to the soul prosperity of new life. Grief is a lot of dark emotions, and as an addict, I would rather be numb and not have to deal with my feelings, so grieving has been very difficult for me to move through. Linda’s intuitive counseling, learning self-care, The Darin Method® with deliverance ministry, and a personal relationship with God helped me transition out of grief. I have hope for a life filled with love for God, myself, and others. I hope to build a strong character and find fulfillment in new work, and take time to enjoy living, laughing, and feeling all my emotions, one day at a time.