My name is Janet Stegman, and I am the author of Sandcastles: Tools for Letting Go of Addiction and the Pain of the Past. I have a counseling practice in which I help people heal of addiction and anything else they want to be healed of. I am able to counsel people to let go of abuse because I healed myself of creating abusive relationships in my life, and also of addiction – to food, men, control, you name it.
I grew up with an alcoholic, rageaholic, highly critical, and controlling father who was also wonderful in many ways, and an alternately wonderful and critical, controlling mother, who used me for her therapist starting when I was eleven. At eleven years old, I knew everything single thing my mother hated about my father.
When I was a teenager, my father would give me detailed advice on how to seduce boys and describe to me with all the details a teenage daughter does not want to hear his sexual encounters with his girlfriends and pre-marital relations with my mother.
At seventeen, an all-consuming and debilitating eating disorder and love addiction took over my life. At nineteen, I was introduced to the 12-Step programs and began my recovery. 35 years of 12-Step programs helped me understand feelings and self-esteem, but they didn’t heal my addictions. Then I found the Journaling combined with the Tapping combined
with the Inner Child Work, and my addictions subsided. I came to understand that addiction is always caused by some type of abuse, whether it be blatant physical, emotional, or mental abuse, or more covert types of abuse such as neglect, abandonment, or being ignored. I learned how identify abuse. I worked first on being able to refuse to take abuse from my parents and others and then on how to stop attracting abusive relationships into my life. I started the ball rolling by reading books like Toxic Parents and The Emotional Incest Syndrome.
I found that there are five phases of healing from abuse.
The first is: Realizing that you are being abused.
The second is: Identifying abuse after it’s happened.
The third is: Identifying abuse while it’s happening.
The fourth is: Identifying abuse while it’s happening and stopping it.
The fifth is: Not creating abuse in your life.
I learned how to use the Journaling combined with the Tapping combined with the Inner Child Work to circumvent the use of food and relationships to assuage my painful feelings and get to the root cause of my addictions and clear them.
Healing from addiction and abuse can take some time. It took me years. But through my work, I figured out how to let go of addiction and abuse in a short period of time. And that is what prompted me to write Sandcastles. I don’t want another person to have to take one more moment of abuse or be caught for one more moment on the runaway train of addiction, if I can help it. My book is available from the “Your Online Publicist” website, https://youronlinepublicist.com/product/sandcastles-tools-for-letting-go-of-addiction-and-the-pain-of-the-past-by-janet-stegman/, and soon on my own personal website, booksbyjanetstegman.com. I also have a website entitled “janetstegman.com” or “Janet Stegman, Author & Healer”, which has more information about me and my work.
A couple of years ago, I had an experience in which a fellow I was seeing came over to my house and then refused to leave. When I told him I didn’t want to be his girlfriend, he became verbally abusive, locked himself in my bedroom so I couldn’t get to my clothes, threatened to burn my house down, threatened to take my dogs, threw his dog down in front of me, and told me there were people coming to put me into a prostitution ring and murder my ex boyfriend. He went thru my desk and stole the titles to my vehicles (all used, but nonetheless mine) and told me he was going to sell them all. He said if I came home and stayed with him, he would stop the people from murdering my ex boyfriend and taking me into the prostitution ring. I lived in constant terror and trauma for weeks. It turned out he was on parole for horrible crimes, so I went to live in the church parking while
Community Beyond Violence helped me get a restraining order. Community Beyond Violence counseled me, filled out the necessary court documents for me, and came to court with me. I got the restraining and move-out orders and the Sheriff got him out. I will never forget the kindness and help Community Beyond Violence showed me.
During this time, while all this all was going down, it hit me that I had been vibrating in abuse since I was a child and that I this situation was in my life so I could heal that. I started clearing my vibrating in abuse with The Tapping, also called Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, and before I knew it, the fellow was gone, and I was back in my home. He has never come back, knock on wood. I’m good now. I’m just happy. I mean, there are always challenges and lessons to be sure, but I now have tools to cope with them without feeling the need to turn to food or men or anything else except feeling the feelings, identifying the painful ones, and tapping on them and heading into some Inner Child Work with my therapist.
I want everyone in the throws of addiction and/or abuse to know that there is hope for you; that you deserve to be treated with kindness and respect; and that you can reach out for help to heal your abuse and addiction issues – from the inside so that you never again allow it into your life. You can heal the part of you that has vibrated in abuse since you were a child and addiction later on and believes that those are home, feels comfortable with them – they are what you know.
I want you to know that there is help for you through becoming aware of what abuse looks like and knowing on a cellular level that you deserve to be and can be treated with kindness and respect. There is help for your addiction through finding out the root cause of the addiction and clearing it.
Please, please love yourself enough to reach out for help – to heal from the inside. So you can be happy. My book Sandcastles can help you get happy.
Be well my precious ones.
