My Soul Was Captive to Three Addictions Until God Delivered Me

No Longer Lying and Hiding in Shame I Trust God for Recovery

Before I connected with Linda Darin in October 2017 for support after my mom’s death from breast cancer, I thought I had a good life. Although I was 43 years old, I was not mature, responsible, or accountable for my actions, and I couldn’t see how my destructive behaviors negatively impacted all areas of my life. God used the crisis of my mom’s passing to guide me to seek help and honestly look at how I was living. Through Linda’s spiritual and holistic healing and The Darin Method®, I can now accept and admit that I am an addict and have hope to live differently.

Married to my college crush and designing for Ralph Lauren in New York City, I lived the fashion dreams of a small-town Ohio girl but never felt like I truly belonged. Every other week I shopped for new clothes, bags, and shoes or changed my hair, desperate to fit in, never thinking about the consequences of charging for purchases I couldn’t afford. I drank at every social event to ease my anxiety and loosen up enough to have fun. Eventually, I began drinking after work and indulging in junk food to relieve the day’s stress. When that didn’t work, I spent more money on massages and facials to relax. I had dedicated all my time and energy to my career for fifteen years at the expense of my health and relationships, but I was still let go when Ralph Lauren restructured the company. I thought I had reached the lowest point of my life when my mom died from breast cancer just two weeks after beginning a new job, but as I reflect, this was God breaking down my old life to help me find my way to a new life with Him as I transform and grow.

At my annual exam with my primary care doctor a few months later, he saw how overwhelmed I was by my grief as I described all that had happened that year and immediately prescribed Wellbutrin for depression. However, I knew I did not want to stay on medication long-term, so I googled soul healing near me and found Linda Darin. I knew I needed guidance to process my grief, which manifested as a physical feeling of heartbreak, intense pain in my chest and arms, and difficulty concentrating at work. I was coping with the pain by pushing down my sorrow and feelings of profound loss and abandonment, numbing with alcohol, shopping, and food. Eventually, my emotions would explode as an outburst of anger, or I would break down sobbing at inappropriate moments and feel even worse afterward. My life was out of control, and I felt powerless to stop myself from this behavior.

I began seeing Linda every week at her office in Manhattan. I felt the weight of my pain lift through many energy healings, chakra clearings, and sound healings as Linda invited God’s healing energy to release my attachment to the spirit of grief within my body, mind, and soul. In each healing session, I would experience warmth or trembling in different parts of my body, see colors of healing and the violet flame, and leave feeling relaxed with clarity in my mind. In addition, Linda gave me a safe space to cry and process my grief by talking about my feelings and experience of loss. Finally, she provided holistic tools to use at home – journaling my emotions daily, prayer, and yoga positions focused on opening the heart chakra were a few that helped me between our sessions.

I didn’t think that I needed healing beyond processing my grief. However, through Linda’s experience working with addicts, she knew that my difficulty dealing with and understanding my emotions was rooted in a bigger problem. Over time, we discussed all areas of my life and how my childhood directed my present patterns and behaviors through The Darin Method®. Linda would help me become aware of the roots of my addictions to shopping, alcohol, and food in my childhood experiences and family lineage. As we began my healing journey, Linda’s gentleness and patience let each area unfold gradually, allowing me time to admit that I needed help to overcome my emotional, spiritual and physical bondage to these addictions.

We began with my finances and the $85,000 credit card debt I had accumulated through shopping to cover up feelings of inadequacy or ease anxiety and stress from work. I knew I was out of control and tried to create a budget to curb my spending before, but it never lasted more than a month or two. Linda approached my addiction to spending money by focusing on releasing the negative emotions such as fear, scarcity, and shame attached to the energy of money, which directed my behavior. I wrote an autobiography of my relationship with money and saw that I feared both success (making money) and failure (not having enough money). My patterns and beliefs did not allow me to hold onto the money I made through my success in fashion. I spent it all!

Next, we looked at my childhood and how my family dealt with money in The Darin Method®. Through my story, I realized that my family had a pattern of never talking about money, but I always felt an air of tension at home about not having enough money from a very young age. My father grew up in extreme poverty on a farm with nine siblings—the generational curse of his financial hardship embedded in the cells of my body. As I got older, I also began to see the disparity between my family’s and my friend’s family’s clothes and homes, and I felt envy and shame come over me. As a result, I always wanted to run out of my house to be with my friends, where it always seemed there was more of everything; love, fun, and food. This pattern of fear of scarcity, jealousy, and self-judgment in my childhood manifested in adulthood as buying more things to feel secure and fit in with my peers. But it never made me feel whole; I always felt like something was missing, so I would keep spending money.

My soul was captive to the spirits of fear and greed, which controlled my thoughts and behavior toward money. Through Linda’s deliverance ministry and spiritual healing, Linda exposed these dark spirits to the light of God, helping me break my agreements, choose to handle my money responsibly, and face the reality of this debt, a consequence of my shopping addiction. Linda guided me to attend a God-centered financial course to learn how to budget correctly and create a plan to pay off my debt. She also encouraged me to seek a financial advisor who could offer accountability through monthly check-ins reviewing my budget. Lying and hiding are at the root of addiction, and Linda knew I needed to remain transparent about my finances to stay on track. Knowing my spending was under control and seeing progress toward my goals each month gave me peace, confidence, and momentum to continue following my budget. As a result, I’ve paid over $47,000 of my debt in three years and have hope that I will eliminate all my debt!

Encouraged by my changed behavior with money, I was open to Linda’s suggestion that I look at how I used alcohol as another way to avoid and stuff down my emotions. Over the next year, I took steps to drink less and less but did not fully accept my addiction to alcohol until I completed the alcohol assessment questionnaire. I was astounded by how frequently and heavily I drank in college and how often I was drinking now. For the first time, I truly believed I was an addict; I had been in denial. I regularly drank wine with meals at restaurants or home and indulged in champagne to celebrate everything, even the weekend. I ordered pitchers of frozen margaritas when out with my girlfriends or coworkers. I even found a yoga studio that offered weekend classes followed by a wine and cheese social!

Linda was shocked that I found a yoga studio that served alcohol.

Through The Darin Method®, I saw that alcohol was a crutch to cover up my fear of rejection, rooted in the feelings of not feeling loved by or connected to my mom as a child. As a result, I began a pattern of performing, believing I needed to be the star to be accepted and receive love as praise. This feeling of being rejected by girls and women continued in adolescence. My closest friend chose the new girl over me in middle school, and I never grieved the rejection and loss of our relationship until The Darin Method® revealed this unresolved trauma in my soul. As a result, I drank to ease my social anxiety and fear of being accepted so I could put on a show of being carefree and having fun. Linda helped me understand that my alcohol consumption opened me to deeper infiltration by the clusters of spirits from my feelings of fear, rejection, and unworthiness. In conjunction with sound healing and deliverance sessions with Linda to release the negative energies, I confessed and repented daily to continue breaking my agreements with these dark emotions. Finally, Linda encouraged me to stop drinking altogether through the power of God’s strength within me. I was amazed at how powerful God was in changing my behavior!

Linda provided valuable information on addiction, alcoholism, the 12 steps, recovery, and family member’s coping strategies. For example, while no one in my family drank when I was growing up, my parents, brothers, and I acted out the roles as if there was alcohol in our home, creating chaos and drama. We did this to deal with our painful feelings, which we never discussed or learned to process. Instead, we would focus on our achievements and intellectual abilities as a defense mechanism while ignoring our emotions. I broke through the pattern of not talking about our problems when I shared the truth of my alcoholism with my father this year and openly told him how much I drank over the years and that I was getting help to overcome it. It was liberating not to have to hide this from him any longer!

When Covid required me to work from home again in 2022, my issues with food and overeating came to the forefront. I was utterly overwhelmed by the stress and loneliness of being confined to my studio apartment daily and began to feel depressed. I could fulfill any food craving at any time through delivery apps, so I ate to soothe my emotions, started gaining weight, and felt shame and self-hatred for my behavior. I tried to hide this from Linda and deny I had a problem, but she saw the physical changes in our zoom sessions and confronted me. Finally, I admitted I was out of control with food. She helped me identify tools I could turn to instead of eating: journaling to name and release my feelings, confessing and repenting every day to God for abusing my body, praying for supernatural self-control, surrendering my will to God, and going for daily walks in the park.

Linda also suggested I attend Overeaters Anonymous meetings for food addiction. I appreciated that they connected healing and freedom from addictive food behaviors through God, honesty, maturity, accountability, and responsibility in the 12 steps. Unfortunately, members at the online meetings were so dark and filled with their demons of addiction that they negatively impacted me, often making me feel worse after a session, completely drained of energy. I recognized they were dumping their problems on the group, acting like victims, and did not want to change. I saw that I had a choice to go this route, remain a victim of my addiction, or keep going deeper into the roots of my patterns and behaviors with Linda to be freed. I believed I should not feel emotional pain or discomfort because my father told me this as a child – he wanted me always to be happy. I developed a pattern of using shopping, alcohol, and, finally, food to soothe and dissociate from any strong emotion. As I went deeper into my pain, the light surfaced, and I felt lighter and lighter. As a result, I decided OA was not a place for me to heal and truly transform. My trust and faith in God’s healing power through Linda to remove negative energy gave me confidence in this decision.

I had been attending the Experiencing God Gathering with Linda on Saturday mornings for a year and learned how to develop a deeper personal relationship with God. I spent time in gratitude, praising God for the blessings in my life, confessing and repenting, and praying and meditating on the Bible. Beginning my days with quiet time, talking to God, and clearing out my fear, jealousy, anxiety, guilt, and shame helps me behave in alignment with my goal of freedom from addictions to money, alcohol, and food. Of course, I am not perfect, but accepting and admitting my mistakes every day to God and in weekly sessions with Linda keeps me from remaining in bondage to these dark emotions, so I can decide to live my life following God’s guidance. The weekly Energy Healing, Chakra Balancing, Sound Healing, and Linda’s deliverance ministry to release many of the clusters of evil spirits have been a life preserver. These healing modalities keep my mind clear and my heart open to forgiveness, and I feel much lighter and more connected to God.

I have peace and clarity in my mind, body, and soul now that I have admitted and accepted my addictions to shopping, alcohol, and food. I know that addiction is a disease that I will have my entire life, but I have the courage and strength to trust in God to keep moving forward in my recovery, no longer lying and hiding in shame. I can accept the consequences of my addictions without guilt and see the blessings of awareness and acceptance to choose to change my behavior. I am so grateful that God used the tragedy of my mom’s death to guide me to find Linda Darin for spiritual healing from this trauma and her Christian faith healing to conquer addiction.