Soulshine

Sometimes we are the victims of emotional abuse and sometimes we are the perpetrators. Anyone who was emotionally abused by a parent learned that parent’s abusive patterns of behavior. We then learned to use the same patterns of behavior against others as a means of controlling and manipulating them in the same way that we were controlled and manipulated. Beverly Engle, in her book The Emotionally Abusive Relationship , defines emotional abuse as “any nonphysical behavior that is designed to control, intimidate, subjugate, demean, punish or isolate another person through the use of degradation, humiliation or fear.” Examples of such behavior can be judging and criticizing others, discounting or negating a person, accusing or blaming someone, placing unreasonable expectations on others or using the silent treatment. She goes on to say that emotional abuse includes negative attitudes and symbiotic violence. Negative attitudes include believing people should do whatever we say, ...

Sometimes we’re just tired. We’re tired of life. We’re tired of the same old daily grind. We’re tired of falling back into the same old patterns of behavior that rekindle our misery. And we’re tired of feeling frustrated, marginalized and hopeless. We find ourselves emotionally crawling on our knees, wondering why life isn’t getting better. When we get into this sort of funk, we know it’s time for an emotional cleansing. We’ve been holding-in all of our feelings, we’ve been feeding off their toxicity and we are on the brink of spiritual death. At times like this we need to let it all out. There’s no point in trying to control it or hold it in any longer. So we scream, beat our hands against the floor and feel the full rush of our frigging bottled-up pain. As it explodes out of our system, we curse our Higher Power and divorce ourselves from it. We need a fresh start. We need to divorce ourselves from everything and every pattern of behavior we’ve relied upon—and we need to...

Who are you responsible for rescuing in this life? NO ONE except yourself. Unless you are a firefighter, a police officer, an emergency medical worker or a hazmat worker, you are not responsible—or capable—of rescuing anyone from any tragedy or life-threatening situation. So get over the fact that you are not a superhero. God never made you responsible for saving everyone in your little world. Somehow, some way you made yourself into the savior of the world. And you can relinquish the title at any time to its rightful owner: God. Any compulsion you have to rescue your significant other, your children, siblings, parents, friends, coworkers—or anyone—from themselves or their problems is a misguided illusion. Surrender them all to God and allow God to do for them what you have absolutely no ability to do—rescue them. Listen to them, validate their feelings and help them to feel loved, but don’t dawn your superhero cape. Don’t make their problems your problems. Don’t bail ...

Fear is a major motivating factor in the behavior of many people. We have fears layered upon fears, and many of us are not aware that our surface fears are signposts. They tell us we need to do some inner-digging. We need to go deeper inside ourselves to undercover the primary fear that drives our belief system, and thus all we say and do. Last year, I mentioned the 1944 movie “Mr. Skeffington,” starring Bette Davis, in one of my daily posts. And today I’m going to revisit the character of Fanny Trellis-Skeffington. On the surface, Fanny seems like an extremely vain and plastic person. But Fanny’s obsession with her physical appearance is not driven by vanity. It’s driven by fear. If we begin to examine Fanny’s fears, we first come to see that she is fearful of aging. She’s unhappy to learn that she is pregnant. Why? Because it means she can no longer be a child herself. Worse yet, her baby will grow-up and as it gets older, so will Fanny. Underneath her fear of growing ol...

Everything in the universe has a natural flow. We are part of that flow. Like every other element or living thing within the universe, we have our intended place and purpose. So then why is it that we humans spend more time struggling with life than we do flowing with it? We often choose to make our day, and life, a struggle. It doesn’t have to be. We can take conscious, positive control of our day and we can ask our Higher Power to govern our subconscious input each day. Each morning, pray to your Higher Power and ask for the guidance to flow with the universe. Pray that God keep you naturally within your place and focused on your purpose for each given day. Let go, stop struggling and allow yourself to flow. In doing so, you may find yourself more frustrated than usual at first. Why? Because you will still be hell-bent on having things your way. That stubborn little need to control the uncontrollable will still be present. Let’s call it withdrawal. So you might find ...

It’s pretty foreign for an active (non-recovering) codependent to focus on their own personal problems. Active codependents have been trained to focus outside of themselves. So an active codependent often lives to solve the problems of other people. In this way active codependents live vicariously through the lives of others. It’s how they (the codependent) avoid taking responsibility for living their own lives. Typically, if someone, say a friend, comes to an active codependent with problems, the codependent will immediately feel the need to “own” their friend’s issues. And they (the codependent) will do just that. He or she will take on their friend's problems as if they were his or hers to solve. For example, a friend comes to you with money problems. He’s completely overextended himself financially and he’s in a panic. He can’t pay his mortgage this month, he’s in arrears on his credit card payments, his utilities have been cut-off and he’s now being hounded by collec...