Take Your Power Back from the Beast You Created

“… I leaned into my longing.

I felt the sadness and emptiness in my soul

that came from years of buying into the story

that I am not good enough,

something I’d been trying to avoid for a long time.”

Chris Michaels, The Power of You

In The Power of You, Chris Michaels refers to the belief of “I’m not good enough” as being like a beast in the center of your being. Anyone who has ever suffered from addictive behaviors is familiar with this beast.

It’s the Beast of inherent shame and there’s no feeling on earth as bad. Many of us have tried desperately to tame this beast through our addictive acting-out. We may have used alcohol, drugs, sugar, shopping, people, gambling, sex or many other self-destructive forms of behavior to quiet the beast. All of them failed time and again—and they always will fail.

Addiction is a means of running from the Beast. We never conquer anything we run from. Once we start running, we never stop because the beast is always one step behind—or ahead—of us. There’s only one true way to conquer the Beast: by facing it.

Like Michaels says, we need to lean into the Beast. We need to feel the sadness and emptiness in our souls. We need to feel the disappointment and the sense of loss, as well as the regrets for having spent so much of our lives running from a beast that we created.

Yes, we created the Beast. It may not have been our idea originally. Someone else may have originally told us that we weren’t good enough, but we CHOSE to believe it. We chose to repeat it to ourselves and we chose to own it. Then we chose to start running from it and we attempted to drown it in every way possible—aside from facing it.

Once we face the Beast, we can choose to disown it. We can choose to stop believing the lie that we aren’t good enough. We can start believing we are good enough while we heal all of the pain that believing we weren’t good enough caused us.

This is how we take our power back from the Beast.