Shout It From the Rooftops!

"I am adorable!" Enough said.

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If You’re Unhappy, This May Be Why

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I’ve spent most of my life trying to make other people happy because I felt responsible for their feelings. And the above quote is spot-on true. I’m the one person who’s not been happy, as a result. We are not responsible for other people’s feelings. We aren’t their savior. They are responsible for their feelings and we are responsible for ours. Yes, we can express empathy and compassion for others, but we need to stop taking on their feelings and problems as if they are our own. They aren’t. Another person’s problems and feelings affect us indirectly. Our own problems and feelings affect us directly. If we are feeling directly responsible for another person’s feeling/problems, there is something wrong with us. In other words, if a friend is going through a divorce, that is their problem; not ours. If we feel responsible for solving their problem, or for owning their feelings to the point of neglecting our own problems and feelings, we are trapped in codependent caretaki...
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Whose Happiness Are You Responsible For?

Many codependents believe their purpose in life is to live for others. Unfortunately. It’s easy for us to believe this since we really don’t want to live for ourselves. We’d rather escape from our own selves—and our own lives—by focusing on the lives of others. So, instead of being responsible for our own well-being and happiness, we make ourselves responsible for everyone else’s. In doing so, we self-promote ourselves into being the architects for the lives of our spouses, children, parents, friends or anyone who will volunteer themselves into our hands. We work extra hard to please these people and to ensure their every ounce of happiness. We wipe away tears, make excuses for their behavior, comfort away their fears, pay their bills, match-make their romances and remember their birthdays. Day and night we are mentally and emotionally “on-call” for fear that someone may need us at any moment; and for fear that they may turn to someone else, who could eventually end up taking our plac...
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Eat, Pray, Love Taught Me Much About Myself

“I disappear into the person I love. If I love you, you can have it all: My money, my time, my body. I will assume your debts; and I will project upon you all sorts of nifty qualities you’ve never actually cultivated in yourself. I will give you all of this and more until I am so exhausted and so depleted the only way I can recover is by becoming infatuated with someone else.” From Eat, Pray, Love (Columbia Pictures, 2010) This is the best description of codependent behavior that I have ever witnessed. Many authors have attempted to define codependency, but it’s extremely difficult because codependency is so multi-faceted. But this description of codependent behavioral patterns describes my own codependency perfectly, prior to recovery, and so I’m going to dissect the quote. At the height of my codependency, I always found myself disappearing into the person I was in “love” with, or rather, that I was infatuated with. Looking back, I realize now that it w...
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Toxic People Are Attractive Until We Understand the Language of Addiction

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“Rick Von Slonecker is tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, liar, drunk and thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In short, highly attractive to women.” Nick Smith , Metropolitan Nick Smith is a character from the 1990 movie Metropolitan , and he makes a good point: Toxic people are always attractive. Why is that? Well, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that so many of us in our society are raised by toxic people; and what we know, we gravitate toward. Many of us grew up in households where addiction was a problem. Dad was an alcoholic and mom was codependent on his addiction, or vice versa. We watched and we learned. Addictive behaviors became the norm for us. We didn’t like them, but they became familiar and comfortable. The older we got, the more we learned we could hide behind addictive behaviors and we gradually developed our own addictive personalities. As we grew toward adulthood, we subconsciously recognized the signs ...
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