Are You Missing from Your Life?

“Remember, if you think something is missing in your life, it’s probably you.”

Robert Holden, Shift Happens

In his book The True Source of Healing, Tenzin Wangyal says “Recognizing depletion is the first step in soul retrieval—you need to know what is missing before you can retrieve it.” Most everyone who enters into a recovery program knows that there is something missing from their soul and from their life. We’ve known this, at least subconsciously, for many, many years. The problem for so many of us is that we never bothered to try and figure out what was really missing, and so we were never able to retrieve it.

We mistakenly thought love from outside ourselves was missing, so we searched high and low for someone outside of ourselves to love us. We tried to squeeze love out of parents and other family members—the love we believed we deserved but never received. We bent over backwards to please them and to be their perfect little angel. When that failed to work, we sought out love from friends, and as we got older, from lovers. We also bent over backwards to please them and we learned to be great caretakers in order to earn the love we so anxiously wanted. But we eventually failed every time to secure from others what we believed was missing from our lives and souls.

When we grew frustrated trying to find the missing link inside of other people, we turned to things and events to try and secure what we felt we had lost inside of us. Many of us tried feverishly to fix our broken insides with alcohol, drugs, shopping and eating. Some of us decided if we traveled the world, we’d find the Holy Grail that was missing from our souls. Still others of us jumped head-on into working 24 hours a day, or finding some way to constantly busy ourselves with noise and activities as a means of filling up that terrible empty hole in our souls.

Nothing worked—until we realized that the depletion we were trying to retrieve was us. We were what was missing from our own lives. We were the missing piece of our soul that we had long ago rejected and left behind. We gave ourselves away the day we believed we weren’t good enough to be loved for ourselves—the day we began to believe we were inferior to others—and we never looked back. It never occurred to us that the love we were missing was self-love.

Recovery teaches us that there’s only one thing missing from our lives and that one thing is us. It shows us that we have spent most of our lives running from ourselves by always looking outside of ourselves for life’s answers.

So if we are feeling depleted inside our souls, we are what’s probably missing. And we need to then work at retrieving ourselves, befriending ourselves, listening to ourselves, forgiving ourselves and loving ourselves better. After we turn inside, we can then turn to our Higher Power and to trusted family and friends who will help us to further appreciate and love ourselves.