Helping each other find our inner kings and queens

​I had the chance to speak to a beautiful group of people yesterday. I opened my talk with this quote: "The greatest time to kill a king is when it's a child. The reason the enemy has been at you since you've been a child is because there is a king in you."

From one perspective, this is biblical. My Christian brothers and sisters know how committed the enemy was to killing the baby Jesus before He could ever be regarded as a king.

If this biblical perspective isn't your perspective, I understand that. But there's another perspective. It's science.

A vast majority of the neural pathways of our brain are formed in childhood. A majority of the ways we see and receive the world are formed in childhood. A majority of the ways we come to see relationships - are they safe or are they threatening - are formed in childhood.

And all of those ways are harder - intensely harder - to change the older we get.

Scientifically speaking.

I had no idea when I was putting my talk together that I'd follow a young woman who'd share the story of her life. A story that started with a traumatic childhood. A childhood that fell into addictions and all the horror that goes with both fighting against and supporting those addictions.

But hers was also a story of recovery. This beautiful queen is now sober and an author and a therapist and a leader in her church.

As she talked, though, as she walked us through her nothing less than a miracle story, I couldn't help but wonder, how many will never overcome their childhoods the way she had? How could they?

How many will never see the kings and the queens within themselves because of all that had been killed within them as children?

How many will land in and stay in addictions as a way of dealing with that pain. Because when you see addiction, that is most often what you're looking at. You are looking at someone grieving the loss of the queen or the king within them.

No one lands in addiction because that is who they want to be. They land there because they no longer know how to be who they were born to be.

That is the brutal cycle of addiction. It momentarily helps one forget their pain, but it NEVER allows one to forget who they were supposed to be. It never allows one to be removed from the shame and from the guilt and from the self-hate of not realizing their inner queen or king.

When you look at someone struggling with addiction and allow yourself to think, "what a wasted life." Trust me, no one has said that to the addicted more than the one suffering the addiction.

Which is why we need to skip "wasted life" thoughts and meet folks with safe places. Safe places for folks to say, I've lost my queen or my king, and I want to find her.

I want to find him.

Folks struggling with addiction, they aren't lost. They've simply lost their king or their queen. And quite often the events of their childhoods have left them ill-equipped to find them alone.

The truth is, we are ALL ill-equipped to find ourselves alone.

One first step we can take is stop judging people for who they are and start being curious about the king or queen they've left behind.

And then, if you're truly interested in being a healer, help them find them.

I've said this often, we are all one way or another in a fight against our childhoods. I do believe that's the enemy's doing. The greatest time to kill a queen is when she's a child.

The greatest tragedy of that fight isn't the fight itself, though, it's that so many of us are in these fights alone. Or that we turn our fights on one another.

Which all makes the enemy smile.

What scares the enemy? That's the thought of us ever joining in each other's fights. Togetherness. Healing. A world full of queens and kings.

That's a fight the enemy can't win.

And it is absolutely one we owe it to each other TO win.

Today.