One day, everything changed

At that point in my life, I had spent years believing in pathology

(Adopting a Model of Health in Addiction Treatment Personal Journey 6 Part Series Final Piece)

I was a therapist
An addict in recovery
A person with diagnoses that started when I was around 10 years old, and there had been a lot of them! including multiple sectionings, and psychosis episodes

I genuinely believed I would never be free!

I thought I had a lifelong illness and the best I could hope for was management. By then I already had work, relationships, children, years clean from substances, and what many people would call a successful life. Yet underneath it all was the quiet belief that something was fundamentally wrong with me

Then one day something shifted

Not as a belief
Not as motivation
Not as another coping strategy

It was like waking up from a nightmare I didn’t realise I was inside

Nothing external had changed. I had not become richer, healthier, more successful, or more spiritual

Yet internally everything became quiet

For the first time in my life, there was peace underneath the noise

I remember sitting outside hearing birds singing and realising I had spent most of my life psychologically trapped inside fear, diagnosis, identity, and survival

Over the following months, the identity started dissolving

Not intellectually
Experientially

I could no longer honestly say
‘I am broken’
‘I am an addict’
‘I am mentally ill underneath’

And something even more confronting started happening

I realised I could no longer see clients through the same lens either

Because if I was not fundamentally broken, maybe they weren’t either

That did not mean trauma was not real
Or nervous system dysregulation
Or suffering

It meant the entire foundation through which I understood suffering had changed 

Research in trauma, attachment, and neuroscience increasingly supports the understanding that human beings adapt to overwhelming experiences biologically, psychologically, relationally, and behaviourally

What changed for me was no longer seeing adaptation as evidence of defect

Over the years that followed, I explored somatic work, relational healing, spirituality, nervous system regulation, contemplative practice, and deep self-inquiry

Not to fix myself, but to understand what I already was underneath the adaptation

This is why I keep saying throughout this series that adopting a model of health is not just intellectual

People feel what we actually believe <THIS

If we secretly still see ourselves or others as damaged underneath, the nervous system often senses that long before words do

For me, this is where the model of health truly begins

Not in theory
Inside yourself