by Sean Colligan
Marcus van der Post, debut author of Hidden Addiction: Head in the Sand, Wine in the Hand, spent years of his life feeling adrift. Tossed in the waves of his unacknowledged emotions, he frequently changed course in his career and floated through personal relationships with little hope of ever reaching the shore.
This was the result of a “hidden” addiction: the need to be accepted by everyone around him. Or, in his words, the need to be “a friend to everybody.”
“I tend to be the person that likes to help,” Marcus says. “I can see what other people are going through, because maybe I've been going through similar things. But being busy with other people's problems when you yourself are struggling, it’s not really the way to go.”
Ironically, by refusing to accept his own needs and not communicating them to others, he suffered constant burnout that could never seem to be remedied.
Eventually, Marcus learned firsthand how this “hidden” addiction led to much more visible and dangerous ones, like substance abuse.
“I would be so exhausted, and my way of dealing with that would be numbing myself. It’s a coping mechanism that I carried for many years.”
After trying everything from mindfulness to yoga, Marcus took a friend’s suggestion to try Rapid Transformational Therapy. The result was him finding a new path to self-acceptance; a guiding beacon towards the self-love he needed to overcome his addictions.
A combination of visualization & hypnotherapy, the treatment helped him reexamine parts of what was, for him, a challenging childhood, and how they shaped the currents of his actions as an adult.
“It's not really about the event that happened, it's about the feeling that you carry with it. These feelings were like ‘seeds’ for the problems that developed over the years.”
A first-time author writing about deeply rooted traumas makes for a steep challenge, but Marcus also found another key from his past that helped him on his writing journey.
In his early 20s, before Marcus had considered therapy, he saw the author of Emotional Alchemy interviewed on Oprah. Growing up in the Netherlands, he saw the show broadcast in English with Dutch subtitles.
While English isn’t his first language, Marcus was drawn in by the discussion on the effects of past traumas, and immediately ordered the book online. However, he faced difficulty trying to follow the English text at the time, and gave up on reading it.
But this wasn’t a lost cause, just a matter of timing.
“I was just not ready to understand that language yet, but I kept the book because I knew it was important. I kept it in my closet and moved it over the years. With writing Hidden Addiction I realized, ‘hey, this book is still waiting for me, let's give it another try.’ And then I just absorbed it.”
By sharing his journey with Hidden Addiction, Marcus hopes to provide the same guiding illumination to those who may be looking for an answer just as he was.
To learn more about Marcus, you can connect with him at:
www.marcusvanderpost.com
