ADDICTIONS | OUR FEATURED TOPIC Addictions & Healing the Time Line The Recovery of Soul in the 21st Century The EDGE Interview with Cathryn Taylor by Tim Miejan Cathryn Taylor specializes in multidimensional healing, assisting individuals in changing their addictive behaviors, healing their childhood pains and decoding the language of their soul. "My model successfully responds to the three distinct layer of body, mind and soul," she says, "and it is designed to teach individuals how to systematically work with the seven steps of mastery in adulthood. These steps are based on one's experiences while progressing through the seven stages of childhood development, which in turn had their origin in the seven layers of consciousness evident in the history of one's soul." Licensed as a marriage and family therapist and certified in chemical dependency in the state of California, Taylor is now licensed in Minnesota as an alcohol and drug counselor and works at Stafford Chemical Dependency Center in Chaska. Her private practice in the Twin Cities and San Rafael, Calif., includes individual and group-intensive multidimensional healing workshops to help people heal their wounds. "When applied to one's inner work," Taylor says, "this is a process that can lead to a state of mastery and reconnection between the personality and Soul, between the adapted self and the True Self. Simply put, it is an approach that provides the tools necessary to make one's life work." Author of The Inner Child Workbook: What To Do With Your Past When It Just Won't Go Away, Taylor reflected on the nature of addiction in the 21st century in an interview with The EDGE. The following are her thoughts on topics central to the theme of addiction. On the first stage of recovery: I perceive the early days of AA as the first stage of recovery when the focus was on identifying alcoholism as a disease and on arresting the behavior that kept the disease active.... The fellowship and community that developed from that endeavor alone created one of the most successful spiritual movements to date. It still meets the needs of the newcomer confronting their addiction. On the inner child: By the 1980s, enough people had arrested their behavior and the next wave evolved. This wave was referred to as Second Stage Recovery and the focus expanded to include working with the origin of the addictive behavior --the whole inner child trend. I began watching the whole movement of the adult child of alcoholics in the 1980s. People began to look at their behavior from the new perspective of connecting it back to their childhood. Addictive acting out was a way some of us dealt with the tension of unresolved childhood issues, and somewhere along that process, some people activated the physiological dependency of addictive disease. The addictive acting out served a function for people. As all of this childhood material was given permission to come to the surface, our addictive behavior was a way to discharge the tension of that as people learned how to cope with it. On the Multidimensional factor: What followed was the third stage, which I relate to as the multidimensional wave. Now, after decades of arresting addictive behavior and exploring the wounds of one's childhood, we have evolved to this next level. The mass consciousness has been saturated with enough awareness of the impact of the past -- a significant number of people have established a program that supports emotional health, in the form of AA or their own therapy -- that we evolved to a place where the veil is being lifted and we now have the option to explore the purpose of addiction from the perspective of our soul. On True Recovery: I believe true recovery is having the ability to sustain each of these levels at one time -- shifting between the needs and issues that emerge within us on a day-to-day basis...so that if the stress of our daily living triggers the old cues to addictively act out, we can fall back on our first-stage recovery tools. If an issue from the past erupts, we have the tools to process the unresolved pain, and when the "light is right," we have the capacity and courage to explore the issues from the perspective of the soul. It is circular in nature and fluid in process. On soul memory: Now, in the new millennium, I am seeing a resurgence of addictive acting out behavior. I think what has happened is, a lot of us have done an incredible amount of inner work in alignment with our spiritual work. I think now we are seeing a resurgence of that same kind of acting out, but it has to do with the tension of our soul's issues, rather than our childhood. It has to do with the multidimensional memory, whether it is conscious or unconscious. From very early on, when I was working with adolescents in the early '80s, I started confronting the addictive patterns of families. It didn't take me long to equate addictive behavior and acting out with grief and a disconnection from our real self, which I later translated as a disconnection from our spiritual self. A lot of people are dealing with soul memory, but they don't have a name for it, just as people in the '80s were dealing with the unconscious pain of incest and addiction. It wasn't labeled or identified. Through identification, people were able to pinpoint that, "Yes, this happened to me." We took our personalities through that layer of it, and now we are confronted with the same task on a soul level. On how that plays out in lives today: People experience this in different ways. Some come to it from a physical route, the recovery process, where they hit their bottom because their addiction is giving them a lot of trouble and they end up in a 12-step program. Other people come to it from the psychological route. They may have already crossed that bridge through their own psychological or spiritual work with personal empowerment or the human potential movement. Those in recovery had to start looking at their childhood issues and how to integrate that spirituality and stay sober or abstain from their addictive behavior. People coming in from the psychological route had to start looking at how they were being physically addictive, behaviorally or through the disease. They also had to find a way to integrate that psychological awareness into their spiritual aspirations. People who followed the spiritual path found it was no longer satisfying to withdraw from society. We no longer had the luxury to move to the mountains or India and get out of the day-to-day world. We had to find a way to come in and hold that vibration in the state of flux in the day-to-day world. On the value of AA and 12-step programs today: I feel what anchors us are 12-step programs. I feel 12-steps today are like what the 10 Commandments were in the past. If we look at 12-steps as a way to make our lives work, it's got everything we need to practice a spiritually accountable life. "Let go and let God" does not mean to sit back and let God. It means to take the action. Or as the director of my agency says, "Make the effort and let go of the outcome." That's all within a 12-step program. Maybe it's just because I'm back working in treatment again, but seeing 12-step programs in action again is like going back home to that house you grew up in. It's there to give comfort. The principles never change and they're very effective. They reach anybody and everybody. Twelve-step programs are the base and I see the ceiling being lifted as far as where we all can go. My move to Minnesota from California has been very interesting. I'm currently working my way back into providing primary treatment, and it's fascinating because the support for the person in recovery has been so constant over the years. A co-worker mentioned a book the other day in which the author believed Alcoholics Anonymous was one of the most spiritually profound movements that has existed, because it just stays in the grassroots and keeps moving forward. It's never changing. I sit in these groups and I see how these people help each other -- in a life and death context. From an individual picture, I think we're all there. Theirs is just more graphic. They can't mess around with substances without grave consequences. It's an honor for me to revisit that whole world and watch how they respond to each other with such fellowship. Those who are coming to treatment now are doing so because they have to come if they want to change their lives. The key for them is to make a connection with their Higher Power so they can give up their addictive behavior. And once they go through the eye of that storm, then they can look at the bigger picture. Anybody can stay sober, but developing a recovering lifestyle is a true gift. I think it holds promise for all of us who are willing to look through that lens. We don't all have to go through the route of addiction, but each of us has to find our own life-or-death issue that will call us into our divine destiny. On identifying the cause for our addiction: It's important to identify the context for why you are responding the way you are that activates your behavior, then you have the opportunity to go back in time to who you were in childhood or who you were in a past lifetime where those aspects, whom I call soul siblings, are stuck. When we find those stuck points in our soul's journey, it's like discovering a knot that's tied. Where a knot is tied, the light cannot be brought in and it cannot hold the spiritual energy. That knot also is a distraction that keeps us on a treadmill of spinning in a pattern we cannot escape. Then we see a given situation from the eyes of our soul sibling or inner child. I envision that who we are in current time has now obtained enough spiritual maturity and can hold a certain spiritual vibration to go back and make contact with the inner child or the past lifetime where we may have been persecuted for our spiritual beliefs and find who that is. I envision that we systematically bring those parts of us back into a cylinder of light. On lifetime core issues: What I've witnessed is that most people have two or three core issues. Those issues are made known to us first by our adult patterns. What in our adult lives are giving us problems? And when you're engaged in the tension of that problem, how old do you feel? I believe our soul charted these core issues and our childhood was aimed at assisting us in confronting those issues. There's free choice. I don't always hold the belief that we charted everything that happened to us in childhood. I've seen cases in which that was not the situation. But in general, we can look for the soul's purpose in creating a given situation. Once we go back and rescue that inner child and bring him or her into the light, then we introduce that part to what I call the healing team. On having old, healed issues return: It is common to go through life and feel that issue is resolved -- and then something will trigger it again. That's when I see people coming back in to me saying, "I thought I dealt with that issue." For those people I have seen, it is very helpful to then ask: "Where in time does this reaction make sense?" Then we invite the person's healing team and it escorts the person most often back to a past life where an aspect of the soul is stuck. We then intervene by rescuing that aspect of the soul and bring it back into the light. It is a means of soul retrieval. This is a process of integrating what has been lost back into the light. And in the final pieces of work I encourage people to do is the injunction: "Ask your healing team now to take this thread through all dimensions of time and consciousness, and bring forth into present time, into your cylinder of light, all those aspects of personality and soul who have been impacted -- past, present and future -- with this core." And then they begin standing in a center of wholeness. On the effect of increasing frequencies of energy: With each unraveling within ourselves, we're able to electromagnetically increase the frequency of energy we are able to hold. That fits in with Gregg Braden's work on the electromagnetic shift. Most people I talk with now feel a little bit off base. It feels crazy out there. My experience is that things have just accelerated so much. As the earth's magnetic field accelerates, then our systems cannot tolerate anything that exists at a frequency less than that of the earth. Like a washing machine, those things just spin out. And those things trigger us, one after another, with no intermissions. We have to deal with them, one after another. I think there is going to be an end to it, but right now we're having to learn how to process things on our feet right now. That's why the brief coaching and short-term therapy is working. We don't have time to psychoanalyze anymore. We have to shoot from the hip. I don't think therapy or coaching or learning how to process is a luxury anymore. I think it's a necessity to survive. Those who don't are medicating themselves more through addictions, or they're medicating more with doctors who give them anti-depressants. And these people are being buffered and shut off from their natural vitality. On the reason for old addictions returning: It seems the more light and spiritual I became -- every time I came back and settled in my day-to-day life after a soul retrieval journey, for example -- and I'd immediately feel addictive, like I want to go to the Mall for some retail therapy or act out in my old addictive ways. I couldn't figure it out until I realized that it is my body's way of saying, "I don't know how to integrate this new vibration that you just pulled in from these other realms -- and this is how I'm dealing with the tension." From an inner child perspective, I'd say we are in the young adolescent phase. The task of the 12- to 15-year-old adolescent in our spiritual evolvement is getting comfortable with discomfort. Learning how to shift from self-consciousness to self-confidence. It's like a spiritual hormone is being released in our bodies and we're growing faster than we know how to integrate. One of the prescriptions for adolescents at that age is to get a coach. So there's the whole birth of personal coaches. I think it's just great. Cathryn Taylor will appear on KDWA 1460 AM at 11 a.m. September 14 with radio host Marin Peterson. Cathryn offers her fall group intensives soon. Call for dates. Individual five to 10-hour intensives also are available. Call (952) 837-6165. For more information, please visit http://multidimensionality.faithweb.com Tim Miejan is editor of The EDGE. Contact him at (651) 578-8969 or e-mail editor@edgenews.com Copyright © 2001 Tim Miejan SEPT 2001