Addiction: One Cause, One Solution with Barbara Sarah Smith

This is part two in our series about the book Addiction: One Cause, One Solution. My guest is Barbara Sarah Smith, who co-authored the book with my guest from Episode 1, Christian McNeill.

Barbara shares about her connection to the subject of addiction recovery, why it matters to her, and how she sees addiction differently now that she understands the principles of mind, consciousness and thought that shape our human experience.

Barbara Sarah Smith is retired from her work as a mental health practitioner where she worked for over 40 years in various settings including acute health care, hospice, outpatient mental health and addictions treatment. 

In 2014 she was introduced to a new, principle- based understanding of mental health that has transformed her life as well as her client’s lives in extraordinary ways. Rather than a pathology based lens, she now teaches her clients about our innate emotional health and resilience.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

* How our past has the ability to affect us only as long as our thinking is focused on it.

* On the universal nature of wanting to feel better

* Our fluid experience of life and how that helps with addiction recovery

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

* Book: Addiction: One Cause, One Solution

* Jamie Smart on subtractive psychology

* Book: Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

You can find Barbara Sarah Smith at GiftsOfInsight.net and on Facebook @GiftsofInsight.

Transcript of Interview with Barbara Sarah Smith

Alexandra: Barbara Sarah Smith, welcome to Unbroken.

Barbara: Thank you. Lovely to be here with you.

Alexandra: I’m so happy to have you here. This is part two of our series on Addiction: One Cause, One Solution, which is the book that you co-authored with Christian McNeill. So I’m so glad to have been able to speak to the both of you.

Barbara: Well, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Alexandra: We were just I was just saying before we started recording, for our listeners that many of the questions today that I’m going to ask Barbara are similar to ones that I’ve asked Christian. I did that deliberately. Because I think sometimes from different voices and different perspectives, we can hear different things, they might just strike us in a different way. So that’s the reason for that. 

Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to discover the three principles?

Barbara: Okay. Well, I’m an MSW by education. And I have been in the field of social work in all different forms for 46 years, I really loved it. I had a private practice for about 45 years before coming to this. And I really loved my work, I had a very full practice, very full practice.

Years ago, I really started to burn out, I thought,