I thought I had tried everything.

How it was

I'm thirty-five and I live in Los Angeles. For most of my adult life, if you'd asked me what was wrong with me, I'd have said: everything, and nothing I can put a name to.

My house was loud when I was little. Not fists — shouting, and being told, in a hundred small ways, that I was the problem. I learned early to make myself very small. When I was fifteen I was sexually abused. I didn't tell anyone for years.

Then the men. One after another, charming at the start, and then slowly taking everything — my confidence, my money, my friends. Each time I thought I'd finally found somewhere safe. Each time it turned out to be the same room with a different door.

By my early thirties there was a fog I couldn't lift. Depression sitting on my chest. Panic attacks that came out of nowhere — in the car, in the supermarket, at three in the morning. And two things that got me through the day. Wine, most evenings. Cocaine, whenever I could get it.

Everything I tried

I'm not going to run any of this down. Most of it helped a little. None of it touched the thing underneath.

Years of talk therapy. I'm grateful for it — I understand my own story better than I used to. Understanding my story didn't stop me drinking.

I sat with ayahuasca. Twice it was extraordinary, and for a few weeks I felt lighter than I had in years. Then I went back to the same life and the same bottle.

And I went to rehab. I did the programme. I said the words. I came home. Within a few months I was drinking and using again. That's the part people find hardest to hear, and it's the true part. I wasn't resisting it. I wanted it to work more than I've ever wanted anything.

By the end I didn't believe I could be helped. I believed I was the sort of person who doesn't get better.

The work

A friend who'd been through this sent me to a healer. I wrote to him the way you make a last phone call — everything, in more detail than I'd ever told anyone.

We worked for four hours, but not in one go. Two sessions of two hours. He said one sitting would be too much, and he was right: it was intense, and it was never overwhelming.

He doesn't work the way anyone else I'd been to works. He has his own way of doing it, and I've never come across anything like it. We worked with archangels, and with my Higher Self — for healing, and for clarity. Not only to get me through it, but to help me learn from what had happened.

I won't pretend I understood all of it, and he never asked me to.

First there were energies around me and attached to me that he said weren't mine. When those went, my chest — tight for as long as I can remember — felt like a fist opening.

Then the guilt and the shame. Twenty years of it. What was done to me, and worse, the feeling underneath that it had somehow been my fault. That went too. I cried in a way I've never cried in my life, and it wasn't grief, it was relief.

Then fear. He went through my body and found where it was still living — my throat, my stomach, my hips — and took it out of each place.

The part I can't explain properly is the fragments. He said that in different parts of my body, six pieces of me were missing. Not damaged. Gone. As each one came back I felt it arrive. That's the only way I know how to say it. Something that had been thin for twenty years was whole again.

Last, the damage in what he calls my energetic body — torn, in the places where the worst of it happened — was repaired.

I didn't do anything. I lay there. Things happened, and I was awake for all of it.

After

I'll say this exactly. After that session, something changed. I didn't want to drink any more. I didn't want the cocaine.

I didn't decide to stop. There was no white-knuckle week, no counting days, none of the bargaining I'd done a hundred times before. The wanting was just gone. For the first two weeks I kept waiting for it to come back, because it always had.

It didn't come back.

The first month I slept like someone who hadn't slept in years. In the second and third months things I'd buried under the drinking started coming up — anger I'd never let out, grief I'd never let myself feel. That part wasn't easy. But it was clean, and I could feel it without having to switch it off.

Around six months in, I stopped thinking of myself as someone in recovery and started thinking of myself as someone who doesn't drink. The panic attacks used to come several times a month. Now they're rare, and when one comes I can sit with it until it passes.

It's been two years. Two years without a drink, two years without cocaine.

I'm not telling you it'll work for you. I'm telling you what happened to me.

I didn't need to go to therapy any more. I felt free, light and empowered, with a clarity I hadn't had in years.

What I understand now

I spent years thinking the drinking was the problem. It wasn't. It was what I did to survive the problem.

And I believed I was broken in a way that couldn't be fixed, because that's what years of trying and failing teaches you. What I understand now is that some damage isn't about understanding. I understood myself very well. That was never the missing piece.

Why I'm telling you this

Because for about eight years I was the one reading a page like this at two in the morning, looking for somebody who'd been where I was and got out.

If that's you: I'm not here to convince you of anything. I only want you to know there's a version of this where it stops. It happened for me at thirty-three, after everything else had failed.

What I still use

The meditations I still use are free, and they're on this page. One is for letting go — that's the one I put on when something is sitting on my chest and won't shift. Another is for connecting with Higher Self. All of them were tools he gave me.

Two years on, I still use both.