The best way to predict your future is to create it.

I have been in the business of creating my life for many years now. Growing up I had the image of course of a family- husband-kids. I also imagined being a doctor like my daddy. I didn't know that I had such relationship hunger that by the time I was in high school, I was falling in love. I don't know about you, but when Dopamine hits my brain, I like it. 

I think my first addiction was attention. I lived for it. I tell this story because no one tells you growing up that you need to take care of your emotional body, or it will take you to places you never dreamed you would go. We learn the food pyramid, we learn to exercise and care for the physical body. We learn church to take care of the Spiritual body. But, no one tells us how to care for the emotional body.  

Children are emotional, that's what they do, they feel loudly, and parents spend many years controlling and teaching control of this human body, molding it into an 'appropriate' state. Emotional wounds can be invisible. But then they show up as depression, anxiety, addiction and a host of other clusters of symptoms. 

We use up our resilience factors, and then we don't know what to do next. Very few of us humans want to ask for help. But it is the single most powerful word you can use when your emotional body is hurting, and you don't know how to make it stop. Drugs and alcohol, process addictions will quiet those whispers for a time, but all the pain will come back. 

Addiction is known as a Firefighter in the Internal Family Systems model of therapy. It's got a really important job, and that is to protect those wounded parts from your past known as exiles from feeling any pain. 

In this model that I use, you do not have to stop using/acting out to start treatment.  Taking away the thing that's protecting you, albeit in a misdirected way, causes a lot of problems. Anxiety and depression are abundant in the world today. 

Stress and problems will always be there but there is research that shows how to calm the nervous system down so that you can live in your window of tolerance.