When you are overcoming addiction with Gods help, He will eventually take you back to the emotional hurts that have damaged you and that have been fueling your need to medicate this old unhealed pain with various addictions. We must finally face the truth that what certain people did in the past was in fact wrong and we will feel real anger for the first time concerning what they did to us. This is all for the purpose of bringing that old pain to the surface so that true forgiveness and healing can finally come, and the need to cover the pain with addiction will be eliminated. But we must allow God to bring us through our old pain, and not camp out on it and get even more bitter toward our old abusers and thus develop a victim mentality syndrome (i. e. We are just a helpless victims in a sea of abusers and we should be pitied, and then we blame everything bad in our life on what people did to us in the past and just stay stuck there).

Many times as people with addiction problems, the people who have hurt us the most in life are our parents. There has usually been a chain of dysfunction in most families of those who practice addiction that just gets passed down from generation to generation. There are many people who have had good parents, but unfortunately many addicts have had parents who were either addicts, or who were raised by addicts (your grandparents). We must understand that our parents are a product of their parents, and so they can only give us what was given to them, which was usually not very much, and not very good. In a very dysfunctional way, most parents unknowingly just give their kids the same damaging junk that they received. Our goal in facing the past must be to forgive and heal, and not to punish our parents for what they did wrong to us. We may have to detach from our parents if they are still unhealthy, or if they are just creating stress that is fueling our addiction problem, but we must strive to allow the Lord to bring us to a place of forgiving our parents for all the hurtful things they may have done to us.

I would encourage you today, to begin to pray every day for those who have abused you in the past, and also when any angry thought rises up inside you toward them, because it will not only help them, but it will slowly create a healing and sense of compassion in you toward them. If we just stay angry, then we may just try to punish our abusers and just end up making things worse in the end. Allow the Lord to take you all the way through your anger and to set new healthy boundaries with people where you no longer accept abusive treatment that is not His will. Sometimes we will suffer in life for Christs sake, but sometimes we will just run into abusive people that we must say no to their abusive agenda. We must also remember how we have harmed many people in our lives, and how God and others have forgiven us so many times. God has shown great mercy toward us, and we must show mercy toward others. So allow the Lord to take you all the way through your old pain to a place of true healing and forgiveness. You will be so glad when you are finally free of all that old pain, and you will no longer have to carry that load of past hurt that has been fueling your old addiction problems.