David J. Saffold's Blog

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Why are so many young Americans literally killing themselves with drugs, alcohol, and suicide?

I just read an article by Jamie Ducharme in Time Health called

Drugs, Alcohol and Suicide Are Killing So Many Young Americans That the Country’s Average Lifespan Is Falling

The gist of the article says:

Drugs, Alcohol and Suicide Are Killing So Many Young Americans that the Country’s Average Lifespan Is Falling … Death rates for Americans ages 15 to 44 rose by around 5% each year between 2013 and 2016, and drugs, alcohol and suicide are chiefly to blame, the CDC report says.

This article is sobering (no pun intended)! Why are so many young Americans literally killing themselves? I feel that a big reason is that so many of our youth come to adulthood lacking a healthy emotional connection to themselves. They have no personal connection to a loving God which makes them vulnerable to becoming dominated by a destructive sense of self. I say this because this is my experience coming to adulthood and the reason for my teenage addiction to alcohol and why I put a gun to my head when I was 25 years old.

Looking back on my teenage years, I felt deeply threatened by life and people. Deep down in my core beliefs I felt I had no value, was intrinsically weak and bad, and therefore not truly lovable. These were the destructive beliefs that had come to dominate my sense of self. The threat was that other people would discover my destructive truth which would lead to rejection, condemnation, and humiliation. I walked through life filled with the ever-present fear that I would somehow be exposed for what I really was. Alcohol relieved me of the painful feelings of the intense fear and anxiety that goes with a life experience that is so threatening. Chronic intense pain is so abhorrent that we will do anything to escape it. I found my relief from my chronic emotional pain in alcohol. It freed me momentarily from the pain so I could feel acceptable to others.

The problem is that addiction is destructive by definition. My addiction made me do bad and humiliating things which intensified my destructive beliefs about myself. The addiction interfered with my ability to do good in my life, to progress in my ambitions around work, career, and relationships. The fight against hopelessness and despair eventually wore me out and I put a gun to my head. I didn’t really want to die, I just needed to pain to stop – all else had failed.

It was at this point in my life that I found a personal connection to a loving God. It only took a small change in my beliefs to effect a miraculous change in my life. I never drank again after that experience. I was literally cured of my addiction to alcohol! The dead had been raised to life!

As I nurtured my personal relationship with the wonderful God I had found, my relationship with myself changed. I came to see myself as a wonderful, divine child of a wonderful God who loved me unconditionally. My fear of life and people abated such that I could enjoy relationships, accomplish ambitions, and be my true self in the world. I found purpose, meaning, and value in myself and life which is what I truly wanted all along.

David J Saffold is an Author, Speaker, Pastoral Counselor, and Minister specializing in helping people change their lives through the power of their beliefs. Read a detailed account of Dave’s struggle with addiction, depression, and suicide in his groundbreaking new book “A Beginner’s Guide to Perfection” available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guid...

Freedom From Drugs And Alcohol Addiction

What exactly is drug and alcohol addiction? A good definition, for our purposes, is continuously doing an action that is destructive to your life. In this case that action is consuming drugs and alcohol. The addiction to these substances is both physical and psychological. The physical addiction basically derives from our physical body’s need to balance its chemical makeup. When we continuously introduce potent chemicals into our body, it responds by adjusting other chemicals in an effort to re-balance itself. Detoxification is when our bodies are thrown into severe chemical imbalance due to the removal of the potent chemicals from drugs and alcohol. The physical addiction is remedied by stopping the use of drugs and alcohol and letting our chemical structure come to a new chemical balance.

With that said, it is the psychological aspect that is the real problem in drug and alcohol addiction. This is evident because of the fact that most people who have been through detox and rehab eventually return to their addiction. This is very perplexing to the friends and family who have been witness to the devastating effects of addiction in the lives of their friends and loved ones. It is completely understandable when you understand the inner psychological world of the addicted person.

Our inner world is created by our beliefs and the addict most likely has a very distorted belief system that makes life feel very threatening. In my book, A Beginner’s Guide To Perfection, I call these beliefs “Destructive Beliefs”. Destructive beliefs are distorted beliefs that contain self-hating definitions of a person. Most of us have some level of destructive beliefs that create problems in our lives. The addict usually has very severe destructive beliefs. By understanding that our beliefs are deep seated emotional constructs that we feel are absolutely true about ourselves, life, other people, and the world, then you can comprehend what the addict is up against in his or her fight for freedom.

People invariably use drugs and alcohol to medicate the emotional pain stemming from the destructive beliefs they hold about themselves. Their destructive beliefs create a world that is filled with threat, fear, and doom lurking around every corner. This pain is all pervasive and makes existence a living hell. The severe pain of life creates a desperate need for relief – a relief that they once felt with drugs and alcohol. However, drugs and alcohol have stopped providing real relief and have started actually increasing the pain by fueling the power of their self-hating destructive beliefs. The addict is caught in an insidious cycle of destroying their lives in the desperate attempt to find relief from the pain that their destructive beliefs are fueling.

Understanding that the pain caused by destructive beliefs is what is causing the addicted person to keep returning to their addiction is the key to understanding how drug and alcohol addiction works. The severe emotional pain of destructive beliefs is also a major contributor to suicide, anxiety, depression, and other major life problems. Thus, the remedy for addiction is to remove the emotional pain of life caused by destructive beliefs. The addicted person has to change his or her beliefs by creating new beliefs that are constructive to life while removing the power of their destructive beliefs. When existence and life feel nonthreatening then a major part of the cause of addiction is gone and permanent recovery is possible.

David J Saffold is an Author, Speaker, Coach, Pastoral Counselor, and Minister specializing in helping people change their lives through the power of their beliefs. For a more detailed explanation of how to permanently recover from addiction read David’s groundbreaking new book A Beginner’s Guide to Perfection.

I could use your help in getting the life saving message of this book to those in need. Please consider a book endorsement. I would love to be a guest on your blog, podcast, radio or TV show. Contact me via DM or at david.saffold@guidetoperfection.com

The Ocean Of Belief

We are immersed in an ocean of gas surrounding earth called the atmosphere. It sustains our physical life and is so ubiquitous that we give it little notice unless it starts causing harm. For the most part, it stays out of our daily awareness.

The same analogy applies to our beliefs! We are social creatures which means our lives depend on social interaction. Our beliefs are the driving force that creates and perpetuates the social world in which we live. Think of it this way, our personal existence depends on our collective existence which is created and maintained by our beliefs. A nation is just a group of people with similar beliefs. Our economy, government, laws, and the institutions that control our lives are all created and maintained by our beliefs. We are literally immersed in an ocean of belief and, like the earth’s atmosphere, our personal and collective survival is totally dependent upon maintaining this ocean of belief in good order.

Unlike the air we breathe, our beliefs reside within our emotional dimension – our psychology. Unlike the physical dimension of life where action and reaction seem logical and predictable, the emotional dimension is illogical and irrational. The emotional dimension is a place where time is distorted, past, future, and present are intertwined, and monsters and demons coexist with angels and gods. If you doubt this, just go watch the news for a few minutes! The war, murder, school shootings, and terrorist acts can only be explained by the existence of these monsters and demons residing in beliefs of the perpetrators of such horrors. Worse still, our beliefs are deeply submerged below our conscious awareness and so we have very little ability to challenge the veracity of what they are telling us is real and true.

Our beliefs are incredibly powerful! This is so because we will take what they tell us as the absolute truth and reality of life even when what they are telling us is imagined and not really happening. We humans have a knack for applying the feelings and thoughts of past events to current events and judging the current reality according to a distorted conception of a past experience. This explains why people will react so differently when experiencing the same event. When our beliefs become destructive, it will make life feel threatening which causes us to react destructively to events that are, in reality, not threatening or even good for us. Our distorted destructive beliefs are what cause destructive addictions to drugs, alcohol, food, etc., as well as why we stay stuck in life situations that we know are not good for us.

David J Saffold is an Author, Speaker, Coach, Pastoral Counselor, and Minister specializing in helping people change their lives through the power of their beliefs. For a more detailed explanation of how your beliefs create your life read David’s groundbreaking new book A Beginner’s Guide to Perfection.

I could use your help in getting the life saving message of this book to those in need. Please consider a book endorsement. I would love to be a guest on your blog, podcast, radio or TV show. Contact me via DM or at david.saffold@guidetoperfection.com

The Power of Your Personal God

I do not claim to know everything about the existential mysteries of God. However, I do know that we can connect to a source of immense power that we can use to consciously create incredible things in our lives. I call this power, God. We connect to this life altering power that I call God through our beliefs.

Where does the power of God come from? I can’t really say, but I suspect that it is of the infinite universe which is our ultimate creator and parent. If you consider the infinite universe, you must apprehend its infinite power and energy. When we tune our beliefs correctly we open a connection and begin drawing in this immense power and energy. The effect in our lives is immediately palpable. We begin expanding with confidence, courage, creativity, personal power, purpose, compassion, and love. That which we thought was impossible for our lives begins moving into the realm of the possible. That which we don’t like about our lives starts falling away to make room for that which we truly want. Instead of failure, we begin experiencing success in the aspects of our lives that are most important, such as our relationships, finances, business, health, etc.

When I was twenty-five years old, I was at deaths doorstep with severe alcoholism. Life for me had degenerated into intense threat, failure, hopelessness, and doom. All my efforts to break free of my forlorn condition ended in failure. The intense emotional pain of living under such conditions was so unbearable that suicide seemed the only option left. When I created a tiny belief in a personal God, I connected to a power that cured my addiction and began healing my sense of failure and doom. As I expanded my connection with the power of God, my life started prospering accordingly. Things I never imagined started moving into the realm of reality in my life. It was like magic! This might sound absurd to some but it is true. I have also seen it happen with others. I have worked with many people over the past twenty years and have seen how their lives literally blasted off when they made the required adjustments in their beliefs and began tuning into the power of God. I have seen people dying from drug and alcohol addiction restored to life, happiness, and prosperity. I have seen people trapped within a life they don’t want begin creating lives they never imagined could be possible.

How do you connect to the power of God? You have to correctly adjust your beliefs by establishing a belief relationship with an idea of God that is deeply personal. Think of God as your creator/parent and yourself as God’s child. As your parent, God is responsible for nurturing you and helping you grow into your full potential. Let yourself create the type of parent (life nuturor) you would truly want for yourself.

What are the attributes and qualities that you would assign to God? How would God relate to you? Don’t hold back. Let yourself create God according to your deepest desires. You should end up with a wonderfully perfect parent if you do this with absolute freedom. This is how you discover the idea of God already dwelling within you. This personalized idea of God within you is the starting point for re-tuning your beliefs and connecting to the immense power of God.

One way to experience the power of God first hand is to feel the unconditional love you already possess. Close your eyes and be still and quiet. Imagine holding your baby child lovingly in your arms. If you are not a parent, imagine that are and picture yourself holding your own helpless little baby. Imagine your baby looking up at you with trust, dependence, and the joy of knowing that you are providing for his or her life. Feel the intense love you feel for your baby! In this moment, ask yourself what can make you not love your child as much as you do right now? You find that nothing could diminish the infinite love you feel for your child. Nothing your child has done or may do can make you feel less love for your child right now because your love is unconditional. Your unconditional love sees the truth of your child – your child is perfect just as he or she is and always will be!

If you were able feel the unconditional love you have for your own child then you have just experienced a little bit of the immense power of God.

David J Saffold is an Author, Speaker, Coach, Pastoral Counselor, and Minister specializing in helping people change their lives through the power of their beliefs. For a more detailed explanation of connecting to the power of God, see Chapters 4 and 5 in David’s groundbreaking new book A Beginner’s Guide to Perfection.

I could use your help in getting the life saving message of this book to those in need. Please consider a book endorsement. I would love to be a guest on your blog, podcast, radio or TV show. Contact me via DM or at david.saffold@guidetoperfection.com

Ma Is Dying

Tuesday 4/17/2018 Crying Again

This morning I found my eighty-four-year-old mother sleeping with her legs hanging off one side of the bed. She has gotten much weaker and can’t pull her legs up onto the bed anymore. She could last week, why not this week? She cries out in pain as I pull her to sitting position – I have to hold her back so she doesn’t fall back on the bed. Everything with her is a chore – hard labor! I flinch when her pain makes her cry out. Her hip muscle has stretched from lying like that all night. I finally get her to her recliner and get some Tylenol down her throat. “Ouch, ouch, ouch, everything hurts” is the song she is constantly singing. I beg her to eat something but can only convince her to drink a little vitamin drink. So I sit down on the couch and my eyes well up with tears. I have a great urge to cry just like I cried yesterday morning. I don’t know what to do and nobody else knows either. I am helpless and don’t like being helpless – so I cry. I guess I am not the tough-guy I like to think I am.

On the way home, I think of the loving moments I have had with my mother since I brought her up to the senior living facility near my home in Nashville, TN. The other week she asked me to sit down next to her on the bed. She put her arm on my back and I put my arm on her leg. We sat quietly in loving connection. It felt weird because this intimate connection is not something I was used to with my mother. Then there is our little goodbye game we started up since her arrival. When I leave and say “I love you”, she responds with a ‘one-up’, and says “I love you more.” I go further as say “I love you double more!” We go on like that until we break out laughing. I think of these loving moments as I drive back home and know that God is blessings my life. I need these jewels because the rest is slimy, smelly, oozing mess.

Our relationship is quite different from what it had been for ages. Sure, I called my mother every few weeks and visited once or twice a year. She was far away and doing for herself in the golden years of her retirement. She lived alone but had a kind neighbor and some occasional friends looking in on her. She was happy with the bridge game and her murder mysteries. That is all gone now. Now she is dying in my face, up close and personal. I am mad about the upset that this is causing in my life! I wish she would hurry up and die so I can get on with MY life. Yet, I love her and wish I could help her more somehow, someway. Her debilitated condition keeps me feeling like I am not doing enough for her. I want to fix her but everything keeps breaking and she cries out in pain … “Ouch, ouch, ouch, everything hurts!”

I still want to cry, I still don’t know why, I still don’t want to do it, or feel it, or see it, or smell it, or hear it! Ma is dying and I can’t do a damn thing about it. Yet, somewhere, deep within, all is well and I thank God I am here with her during this time.

Friday 4/20/2018

I went to see my mother this morning as usual. It was early and so was dark in her apartment. I saw her lying in the bed and walked over to see if she was awake. Her eyes were open and so I was about to speak but didn’t – She wasn’t awake. It took a few moments for my comprehension to catch up with the sight before me. I was offended by the sight of death on my mother’s face. I tried to close her eyelids but they popped open again so I used more force. The movies make it seem easy. I then tried to close her mouth but to no avail, so I pulled the covers up over the lower part of her face. Now she looked peaceful. I lay down beside her and put my arms around her one last time. The warmth of her body told me she had just left. I hope she was still close enough to know I was there with her even at her last moment on earth. After a little while, I sat up and cried like a baby for a bit and then quietly stood vigil as the legions of emotions and memories marched in review before my awareness. I saluted as bravely as I could – hut, -two, -three, -four …

All day long people expressed their condolences and asked how I was doing. I told them it was a weird thing to be experiencing immense joy and deep sadness at the very same time. It is surreal to cry while feeling wonderfully blessed. Both my joy and my sadness felt eerily beautiful in their own way. Intermixed within all these emotions of this day was the the feelings of deep loneliness accompanying the realization of the end of the great epoch of my life.

That night, as I lay in bed, my mother came to me and said, “My beloved son, I came to you these past three months to prepare you for this day. The baton is now in your hands. No more will I be there before you on the conveyor-belt of life. From now on, when you look up, you will only see the eternal darkness. You must look within for the light as you move towards the dark void beyond. Farewell my wonderful son.”

Farewell my wonderful, beautiful Ma!

The Power of Your Beliefs

Your personal core beliefs are the most powerful force in your life. They are the energy that creates the experiences that make up your life. They create the good as well as the bad you experience in your life. They determine what you get in life and what you don’t get in life. Because they are formed early in life you are unaware that it is this incredible power within you that is creating your life.

To truly understand the power of your beliefs you must become aware of how they are working, behind the scenes, to create your experience of life. Your core beliefs are not your conscious thoughts but produce your thoughts. They are deeply embedded within your core energy and create the thoughts and feelings you experience. Because they are a part of your core energy, you cannot change or influence them at the level of your conscious thoughts. This is why people often fail to create desired life changes by using techniques such as “positive thinking”, “talk therapy” and the like.

If you have core beliefs that you are unimportant, not good enough, a bad person, evil, guilty, sinful, ugly, stupid, a failure, unlikeable or ultimately unlovable then you are doomed to perpetually create these experiences in your life. Your beliefs will keep interpreting your life events according to themselves to prove to you that they are absolutely true about who you are. You will react accordingly and take actions and make decisions that align with your beliefs without knowing that you are literally creating your life according to your beliefs.

A client of mine had a belief that she was not very important, aka, not good enough, not smart enough, not pretty enough, etc. She remembered feeling this way from an early age. She had been trying to change her destructive beliefs using positive thinking and claimed she was making some progress using this thought technique. One day, a person at her work got upset with her and threatened to inform her boss that she didn’t have the correct attitude for her job. This experience immediately filled my client with fear and she told me she was going to call her boss and explain the situation. All her progress with “positive thinking” immediately vanished because her deeper core beliefs were triggered and she became filled with threatening feelings and thoughts. These powerful feelings and thoughts drove her actions which was to call her boss and explain the situation before the other person called him and complained about her.

Luckily, she told me about what had happened before she took the actions her beliefs were propelling her to take. This gave me a chance to show her how her negative beliefs were operating in her life. Because my client had been in a hurry, this person didn’t get the amount of attention she wanted from my client. The pain this person felt caused her to lash out at my client with words to the effect that my client was not good enough. My client felt deeply threatened because her intense fear was that her negative beliefs about who she was would be publicly exposed. In essence, this person told my client she was not good enough and my client literally believed her. My client’s desperate reaction to her feelings of threat was to contact her boss and defend herself – tell him she really was good enough for the job. I further explained that contacting her boss would literally create a future situation that would prove her negative beliefs. My client was about to create a problem about herself in her boss’s mind which would lead him to think that maybe she really wasn’t the right person for the job – that she was not good enough. The person that got upset with my client simply threatened to complain to my client’s boss but had not actually done so, and most likely never would. Wow, my client saw firsthand how her beliefs were creating her experiences of life and perpetuating themselves by creating experiences that proved that she truly wasn’t good enough! It wasn’t other people creating her life experiences! She was unknowingly doing it to herself.

To help my client understand how her beliefs were creating her experience of life, I showed her how someone else, who was good enough, would have reacted to the same situation. This person would not have felt threatened and would have shrugged the incident off with a laugh and maybe a thought of “this person is a grouch.” Bringing the incident up with the boss would never have entered his or her mind because there was no need to convince anyone that they were good enough for the job. The point is that my client’s beliefs were creating the life she experienced and was determining what she gets and doesn’t get in life.

Once my client saw how her beliefs were affecting her job she also admitted that it affected other aspects of her life. She was fearful that her fiancée would reject her because she was not good enough. This feeling of threat in her relationship with her fiancée was making her react to him in ways that pushed them apart instead of closer together. Her beliefs were literally working to create rejection!

This experience helped my client see how her negative beliefs about herself were affecting all aspects of her life, financial, relationships, career, emotional and physical health, and spiritual health. She further saw how her beliefs are determining her future by driving her reactions to current life events.

David J Saffold is an Author, Speaker, Coach, Pastoral Counselor, and Minister specializing in helping people change their lives through the power of their beliefs. For a more detailed explanation of the power of your beliefs, see Chapters 1 and 2 in David’s groundbreaking new book A Beginner’s Guide to Perfection.

I could use your help in getting the life saving message of this book to those in need. Please consider a book endorsement. I would love to be a guest on your blog, podcast, radio or TV show. Contact me via DM or at david.saffold@guidetoperfection.com