A Little About Me: Robert Burney

Hi. My name is Robert Burney. I am a "Counselor for Wounded Souls," a non-clinical, non-traditional therapist - a healer, teacher, and spiritual guide whose work is based upon Twelve Step Recovery Principles and emotional energy release/grief process therapy. My expertise is in codependency recovery, emotional healing, inner child work, Spiritual awakening and integration, personal empowerment and self-esteem, relationship dynamics, alcoholism/addiction recovery, and teaching people how to Love themselves. I have pioneered innovative, powerful techniques for emotional/inner child healing that allows individuals to learn how to relax and enjoy life while they are healing. I am also the author of Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls - a Joyously inspirational book of Mystical Spirituality that combines Twelve Step Recovery, Metaphysical Truth, Quantum Physics, and inner child healing.

The healing paradigm that I share in my book and on my web site is one which has evolved in my personal recovery over the past 16 years and in my therapy practice over the past 10 years. I specialize in teaching individuals how to become empowered by having internal boundaries. My work is based on the belief that we are Spiritual Beings having a human experience and that the key to healing (and integrating Spiritual Truth into our emotional experience of life) is fully awakening to our Spiritual connection through emotional honesty, grief processing, and inner child work. The goal of the work is to be able to relax and enjoy life in the moment - while healing and learning how to have healthy, loving relationships with self and other humans. It is the unique approach and application of the concept of internal boundaries, coupled with the Spiritual belief system I teach, that make the work so innovative and effective.

The wounding that needs to be healed is the result of being raised in a shame-based, emotionally dishonest, Spiritually hostile environment by parents who were raised in a shame-based, emotionally dishonest, Spiritually hostile environment. The disease which afflicts us is a generational disease that is the human condition as we have inherited it. Our parents did not know how to be emotionally honest or how to truly Love themselves. So there is no way that we could have learned those things from them. We formed our core relationship with ourselves in early childhood and then built our relationship with ourselves on that foundation. We have lived life reacting to the wounds that we suffered in early childhood. Living life in reaction to old wounds is dysfunctional - it does not work to help us find some happiness and fulfillment in life.

The Spiritual belief system that I share with people can be incorporated into any open-minded individual's personal beliefs. It is a belief system that allows for the possibility that maybe there is an Unconditionally Loving Higher Power - a God-Force, Goddess Energy, Great Spirit, whatever it is called - which is powerful enough to insure that everything is unfolding perfectly from a Cosmic Perspective. That everything happens for a reason - there are no accidents, no coincidences, no mistakes. It would be possible for someone to use the tools and techniques that I teach - for inner child healing and setting internal boundaries - to change some of their codependent/reactive behavior patterns and work on healing their childhood emotional wounds without a Spiritual belief system underlying the work. It would be possible but in my view would be kind of silly. Spirituality is all about relationships. One's relationship to self, to others, to the environment, to life in general. A Spiritual belief system is simply a container for holding all our other relationships. Why not have one that is large enough to hold it all?

In my personal recovery, I found that I needed a Spiritual container large enough to allow for the possibility that I was not a flawed, shameful being. I searched until I found some logical, rational means to explain life in a way that would allow me to start letting go of the shame I was carrying and start learning how to be Loving to myself. For me it became a simple choice: either there is a higher purpose to this life experience or there is not. If there is not, then I don't want to play. So, I chose to believe that there is a Spiritual purpose and meaning to life. And choosing to believe in a Loving Higher Power has transformed my life from an ordeal to be endured to an adventure that is exciting and Joyous much of the time.

The bottom line for me is that it works for me, it is functional, for me to believe that there is Spiritual purpose and meaning to life. It works to make my life experience happier today. The tools and techniques, insights and beliefs, that I set out in my book and web site work. They work to support the idea that each and every one of us is Lovable and worthy. Try it - you might find it works for you also.

next: About Co-dependence