Soulshine

It’s the last day of 2012 and the world is moving forward. We must move forward with it. As 2012 evolves into 2013, take some time to realize, appreciate and be grateful for all of the many wonderful ways in which you have evolved for the better over the past 365 days. If you’ve been reading this blog, at the very least you have gained new-found awareness. That is a great gift. You are better aware of yourself, of your old self-destructive patterns of behavior and—most importantly—of your new-found power to choose healthy life-giving patterns of behavior. If you have been a notorious people-pleaser or caretaker, you know now that you don’t have to please anyone, aside from yourself; and the only person you can really nourish and care for successfully is yourself. You’ve hopefully learned to be more compassionate with yourself; kinder and gentler with yourself; and more open to totally accepting yourself just as you are. You’ve been learning, hopefully, to accept all o...

“Fatty, fatty two-by-four, can’t get through the kitchen door.” Nursery Rhyme I was a pretty skinny kid until around the age of 12 or 13. It was then that my sugar craving really kicked-in as a means of medicating away the emotional pain that I wasn’t willing to face. Lots of sugar and chips and little exercise, aside from walking to and from school, meant that my slim figure began to expand. And expand it did. The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was right at the age when you are becoming self-conscious about your body, which is already changing in multiple other ways with the onset of puberty. All I heard from family was razzing over having become the fat member of the family. And of course, we know how merciless other kids at school can be. My family was so emotionally unavailable that we never hugged, kissed or touch, and so I already was suffering from touch-deprivation—and feeling completely untouchable and unlovable. Now that I was fat, I saw myself as a c...

“Codependents often minimize, alter or deny how they truly feel. In recovery I embrace my feelings; they are valid and important.” Recovery Patterns of Codependence During the Holiday Season it can be easy to rely on old coping techniques to get us through difficult gatherings. One of the patterns that saved us during childhood was learning to deny, alter or minimize our feelings. This is a functional survival technique for a child who is unable to otherwise protect him/her self from emotional abuse. But it is a dysfunctional escape technique for adults who want to simply run away from reality. It’s important that we own our feelings. Every feeling we experience awakens us and brings us back into real life. In addition to adding necessary color to life, feelings guide us. They are our inner-compass. Feelings guide us into proper patterns of behavior and help us to set good boundaries. Feelings also help us to be true to ourselves. When we honor our feelings we hon...

Hope everyone has a very Blessed Christmas and Holiday Season. Remember to let go of expectations. Accept each moment and every person as they are by not demanding that they be as you want them to be. If you accept the moment as it is you will find joy in it. If you accept others as they are, you will find beauty in them. And if you accept yourself as you are you will find joy, beauty and complete peace!

I f you have trouble owning your personal power over the Holidays, turn things over to your Higher Power and accept the help you need to be at peace. I hope this prayer helps! Dear God, I’m powerless over family members and friends during the Holiday season. It’s impossible for me to own their issues by attempting to fix them all. Please help me to let go of my need to control family, friends and their behavior this Christmas. Help me to, instead, focus on my own feelings and behavior. I surrender all of my imperfections to you. And my prayer is that you will help me stay balanced and focused on relating to others from a loving place within me. Please remind me to never take anything that anyone says or does personally. The bad behavior of family and friends is not about me-- It’s about them and their own personal brokenness. When I am faced with negative comments or behavior, I will trust you Lord to help me breathe, acknowledge my feelings and think. I want to ...

I first posted this two years ago at Christmas. I think it’s worth re-posting this year and maybe every year as a reminder that we need to work at owning our own power at Holiday gatherings. It’s the only way we can truly enjoy them. Merry Christmas! “Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer”… OK well maybe not. I mean, yeah, it’s Christmas, but the happiness and cheer is debatable. This time of the year most everyone wants to be happy, but let’s face it, family gatherings sometimes play out like real Nightmares before Christmas. Across America most every family has an Uncle Eeyore, who makes the Winnie the Pooh character seem like the Sugar Plum Fairy; an Aunt Grinchella, who’s conniving and controlling; and a brother Ebenezer, who is bitter and angry at the world. So much for happiness and cheer-- unless we adopt a new attitude toward family and the holiday. First, we have to choose to accept Eeyore, Grinchella and Ebenezer just the way they are by empathizing with ...

On Monday I took a little Christmas shopping excursion to Tubac, a small arts and crafts village south of Tucson . In one of the shops I came across a small Christmas ornament shaped like a heart. It was red and designed like a locket that you might open and place the picture of someone you love inside of it. The outside of the heart-locket said “You Fit My Heart” (or so I thought on first glancing at it). Immediately I thought to myself “How perfect is that? I fit my heart!” And I felt warm inside. It felt right. Self-acceptance and the gift of self-love were suddenly mine to own. I purchased the heart-locket ornament and when I arrived home later in the day, I already had a perfect place in mind on my Christmas tree for it. As I was taking the ornament out of it’s wrappings, I glanced at it again and realized that it didn’t say “You Fit My Heart.” What it actually said was “You Fill My Heart.” Any initial disappointment was immediately wiped away. “Wow,” I thought, “That se...

What is fear of abandonment? It is the insatiable terror within our souls that no one could ever possibly love us—and stick with us-- for simply being who we are. It’s the constant fear that at any moment someone we care about may decide we aren’t good enough for them and thus choose to walk right out of our lives-- forever. How did we come to be possessed by a fear of abandonment? Most likely someone used a life-altering form of shame to try and control us when we were small children. We may have been told that we were lovable only when we were good and that we weren’t lovable when we were bad. The inference here being that we could be sent packing if we weren’t “good enough” to be lovable all of the time. Worse yet, we may have been threatened with physical abandonment by parents who valued us so little that might just sell us to the gypsies. And of course there were also those of us who were literally physically abandoned by parents who placed them up for adoption. The...

“Letting someone else decide who we will be, how we will act and what we will feel implies that we have given up our own life in exchange for whatever the other person wants us to be.” Karen Casey, Codependence and the Power of Detachment Codependency is the experience of giving up our own lives. We give up who we are, what we like, what we believe, what we feel, what we want and what we need in exchange for the imagined safety of fading into another person. We think that by enmeshing into someone else we will find love, acceptance, happiness and security. We also think that by blurring the line between our identity and the identity of the other person we will gain a sense of respectability, of finally being lovable in the eyes of the world. We couldn’t be more wrong. We gain nothing—and lose everything-- by enmeshing into another person. No one finds happiness, comfort or love by perpetually trying to please another person. What security is there in never knowing what...

There is a big difference between detachment and disinterest. Many people who suffer from codependency confuse these two terms. Active codependents are so enmeshed in the lives of others that they don’t know where they end and those they are caretaking begin. For the most part, active codependents cast their own problems aside as they choose to own the problems of the people they have taken hostage. The active codependent feels responsible for owning, moaning and groaning over and solving the problems of others. They mistakenly believe that it is their responsibility to rescue others from their problems and that by rescuing others they will rescue themselves from being loveless. In recovery, codependents learn that they need to be responsible for their lives and no one else’s life. This means that we have to learn to separate ourselves from the people we have become enmeshed in. We need to come to an understanding about life-ownership. We are the stewards of our lives—only—an...

Sometimes I feel very fragile inside. My soul feels like it’s made of the thinnest layers of glass. Inside a heavy sludge is pressing against its every angle. I feel the layers of my soul cracking as the sludge is propelled against them by the pounding of my heart. I feel the voices in the sludge welling-up into my consciousness: “I’m worthless shit,” “I’ll never make it in this life,” “No one really loves me and no one ever will,” “I’m destined to failure,” “I never should have been born.” The pain of the past comes roaring back and I realize that I have many areas in my soul still left to heal. Awareness is my saving grace. I know I need to sit with my fragile feelings and allow them to simply be. They are valid and they need me to learn from them. They are the walking dead, mirrors of the past, and I must walk with them throughout my day in order to release them, free them and their horrors from my soul. This is how I reclaim my life from them. I am intent on honoring ...