True Recovery comes through the true self, our child within.

True Recovery comes through the true self, our child within. The perfect conduit for recovery is an honest person—pure of heart, healed of trauma. For recovery to come through us without distortion, we must not be barricaded by defences or poisoned by resentments from the past. We must become a clear child within.

If we are living not from our child within but from a defended, distorted reality we will fail to recover truly. If, in childhood, we have hidden our true selves from the crippling clutches of our history,familial and ancestral a world that would crush us and we have not healed this, our adult expressions of recovery will be distorted. Until our true self is redeemed, our recovery will be filtered through our child’s murky memories of terror and betrayal and will always have a hidden agenda: a secret, unconscious need for rescue, and when that fails—revenge. We will be incapable of affirming the fullness of life in those we claim to love and we will even doubt our own lovability—and withhold affection from ourselves.

The source of our compromised ability to recover is rooted in the necessary defences that we built in childhood. We built these emotional defences to protect our pure essence from the violations we received from our parents and others. Until we carefully dismantle our defences through our painful grieving process, they will cloud and distort our recovery. If we refuse to heal, our attempts to recover will never be true.

But if we do recover, if we do grieve our past, we will be able to recover, deeply and truly.