Helping Others is What Keeps Us in Recovery
“There are, literally, thousands of people all around the world who need nothing more than to meet someone just like you. To spend your time pretending to be someone else is just as senseless and fear-driven as spending your time speaking to people who don’t understand you. Find your tribe. Let yourself be seen. You are already someone’s hero.” Vironika Tugaleva
Healing comes from within. It usually begins with someone realizing that another person is loving them unconditionally. What is unconditional love? It is love from one person to another without ulterior motives. Unfortunately, we usually experience unconditional love from new people in our lives.
After we learn how to shut off the committee of negative voices in our head, we begin to see how our real self is vulnerable to such attacks from our mind. The mind is best used a the switching station for our thoughts. If it is allowed to dominate and control, it will choose to keep us submissive by negatively. I always say that our mind is out to get us. But, in reality, we simply have to learn how to use the mind and begin relying more on the soul as our guide for our lives.
To help others to learn about themselves, I have chose reparenting as an avenue to help them to not only learn how to parent but also to learn how to be better parents to themselves.
Personal growth is like the grass, as Walt Whitman wrote in his poem about war, “I am the grass, I cover all”. When I was at Guantanamo Bay, from my office I looked down on the air field below me that was unused and covered in wild grasses. And I understood that as a living creature, I was either living or I was dying. Grass doesn’t get to a certain height and then stop growing. As Bob Dylan sang, “ he not busy being born is busy dying”.
One of the greatest gifts we can give to another is an avenue to help them to help others. If you have a negative self-image, you don’t believe that you have anything to give. Teaching others how to parent- which is what reparenting is-teaches them skills to help anyone. As we help others, we learn how to love ourselves.
