Welcome to Inner Work, a spiritual growth podcast.

I'm your host, Josephine Hartman.

I'm an intuitive healer and certified Akashik Records reader and teacher,

driven by the purpose of helping others become more powerful by reconnecting to the healer within.

To explore my work or connect with me, you can visit josephinehardman.com.

If you feel called to support the podcast, please leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts.

I so appreciate your presence here, and I'm honored to serve as a guide or companion on your path for a little while.

Now, on to the episode.

Addictions always originate in pain, whether that pain is felt openly or hidden in the unconscious.

When you reach for a substance or anything outside of yourself to relieve that

pain, you are reaching for that substance as an emotional anesthetic, as an antidote to a frightful

feeling of emptiness, as a tonic against fatigue, boredom, alienation, and a sense of personal inadequacy, as a stress reliever, and even as a

social lubricant. I wanted to open this episode of Trigger with these words from the book,

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Dr. Gabor Matei, because he so powerfully captures what it means to have an addiction,

to be caught in the vicious cycle of that addiction, and to continually reach for something

outside of ourselves to feel whole, or to avoid certain feelings, to relieve anxiety,

to escape boredom or a lack of purpose in our lives,

or for many other wildly different and varied reasons that are unique to each of us and our

backgrounds and experiences. I am recording this episode from my own personal perspective and experience with addiction,

which for me has been an addiction to food and more specifically to sugar.

So an important disclaimer at this point.

I am not saying anything in this episode from the perspective or expertise of a nutritionist

...