Soulshine

Higher Love, at times I lose sight of where I end and others begin. I’ve had a tendency to focus my attention on what others like, want and need; and to take-on their issues and problems, instead of attending to my own. Because I haven’t had good boundaries, I’ve often taken-on other people’s likes and dislikes, even though a small voice deep inside told me that something was wrong; that I wasn’t being true to me. I have also taken-on and tried to solve problems that weren’t mine and this has at times caused hard feelings between myself and the true owner of the problems. Help me, Higher Love, to stop losing myself in others. I want to believe that I am truly a Light to the world and that I matter. But I have to be completely me in order to Shine in this world, something I’ve been afraid to be in the past. With your help, Higher Love, I will discover my true self and my inner-light will begin to glow. I will also learn to love and honor myself by setting proper bounda...

Let’s start by thinking of boundaries in this way: Boundaries are where you end and I begin, or vice-versa. Boundaries separate me from you and in doing so, they protect both of us. Many people go through life, however, without any sense of boundaries because they have very little sense of self. Instead of focusing on themselves and their own needs, they have spent their entire lives focusing on others and their needs. People with no or poor boundaries have blurred the line between where they end and other people begin. In many ways, these individuals are like Siamese twins to everyone that they have chosen to attach themselves to. They can tell you their husband’s favorite sport, their wife’s favorite color, their brother’s favorite food, their daughter’s favorite TV show or their best friend’s favorite book. But they can’t begin to tell you about their favorites in these or most any other category. They have been so busy assuming the identities of other people that thes...

  “God dwells within me.” Liz Gilbert, Eat Love Pray So many of us have cast-iron doors over our hearts. A massive attack by nuclear bombs couldn’t begin to blast open the doors that so vigilantly guard who we really are. Yup. For Many years now those doors have done a stealth job of keeping everyone out—including us. I’m just beginning to realize that most all of my life I, too, have been standing on the outside of the mega-iron doors that I built, placed and sealed over my heart. This is why I haven’t really known me, and this is also why other people haven’t really known me or been able to warm-up to me—including God. When I say God, I don’t mean that I have kept God out by having these big iron doors over my heart. No, quite the contrary. God dwells within me and within all of us. In reality, when I sealed those iron doors over my heart, I not only sealed myself out, but I sealed God inside. For many years now, I have been standing outside of my heart and...

“You’re giving me a song and a dance, a tale of romance, But haven’t I heard those words before? You’re telling me you’re gonna be true, but I shouldn’t listen to you For hasn’t my heart been fooled before? Oh, you’re giving me a song and a dance, and I’m falling for your romance But haven’t I heard those words before? You’re Giving Me a Song and a Dance , Marty Symes You’re Giving Me a Song and a Dance was a song made popular by the orchestras of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman back in the 1930s. Peg La Centra sang the lyric for Shaw and Helen Ward sang it for Goodman. Every time I hear this song, it reminds me of the Codependent Trap. What’s the Codependent Trap? It’s when we engage in the dysfunctional, codependent Song and Dance that others spin for us and we spin for ourselves. It’s about the “song” with the codependent words that play through our heads; that old “song” of neediness. We known how it goes. We sing it to ourselves all of the time. It’s all abo...

The past few days I’ve been on a real emotional rollercoaster. Since 1998, I had been taking 200 milligrams of Zoloft everyday for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Last year I talked with my doctor and decided to start weaning myself off of the Zoloft, which I had started taking as a means of increasing my natural serotonin production. It helped with my OCD, but later I learned that it also was emotionally numbing-me-out. Deciding that I wanted to start feeling the full rainbow of my feelings again, I began working my way down to 100 milligrams of Zoloft a day; then down to 50 milligrams a day. Last week, I took the last Zoloft I had. Since that time, emotions have started gushing out like crazy. Last Sunday evening I was watching an old Ginger Rogers movie called Romance in Manhattan . Rogers plays a New York showgirl who chance-meets a newly-arrived Yugoslavian immigrant (played by Francis Lederer). They go up to the top of her apartment building one evening; and as Led...

Higher Power, I very much want to open up my heart-petals. But all of my life I have feared rejection. It’s devastating to have someone walk out of my life and abandon me. Being vulnerable before others means that I must face my fears of rejection and loss. It also means that I must let go of my need for approval from others. Throughout my life, I have relied heavily on the approval of others to make me feel OK about myself. For the most part, I have felt good about me when others gave me their approval, and I have loathed myself when others disapproved of me. Please help me, Higher Love, to gain my self-worth through your approval alone. And help me to be satisfied with the approval I provide for myself through cultivating my self-love. Believing that I need no one’s approval to be a worthwhile person will help me to be more open and vulnerable before the people who really matter in my life. It will give my heart-petals wings to open and to embrace true intimacy ...

Everyone desires intimacy and yet most everyone is afraid to be vulnerable before others. We want intimacy, but we don’t want into-me-see. Trouble is, you can’t authentically have one without the other. We have to be willing to open our heart-petals if we want people to see our true inner-beauty, and vice-versa. Building a good relationship with ourselves is the necessary foundation for building a good relationship with others. Once we are willing to honestly look inside ourselves we begin the process of into-me-see; and once we become comfortable with our “perfectly imperfect” true selves, we will gradually become more comfortable with opening up and allowing others to see inside of us. No one can become intimate with us unless we invite them in to know us. We have to allow them to see into the true us. This means we have to be secure enough in ourselves to open up our heart-petals and to be vulnerable before those persons who are important to our lives. In complete nake...

Lord, You know I have spent many years running from myself. Since childhood I have been uncomfortable with me. I spend time alone-- and I am truly alone because I have yet to befriend myself in any loving way.   I need to know how to be intimate with myself in honest, loving and fulfilling ways. Please help me, Lord, to sit with and become comfortable with myself.   Help me to understand the many ways in which I have chosen to alienate me from myself. And help me to heal all of the wounded spaces inside of me that are so tired of being mistreated by me.   Help me to root through the lies that I have believed about myself so that I may discover the true beauty of who I am, which has been buried under those lies.   Then help me to replace my self-criticism with words of kindness, gentleness and loving encouragement. Help me also to treat myself in loving ways that nurture me and bring my true beauty to the surface for all people-- and especially me-- to see. ...

I have said before that expectations are preconceived resentments. This is a lesson that many codependents need to learn over and over again. After all, we are good at assembling numerous expectations in our heads, primarily about what other people should or should not be doing. It’s habitual behavior and we need to be aware of our tendency to fall into the Preconceived Resentment Trap. It’s January and in the United States it’s cold and flu season. If I come down with a cold or flu, it’s easy for me to not want to be responsible for myself. After all, we codependents aren’t masters of taking good care of ourselves to begin with, and so it’s easy for us to shift our expectations toward everyone else in the family. So let’s say we have a cold. We’re sniffling and coughing, feeling achy and miserable and wanting someone to rescue us. We notice a pain in our throat, and we realize that we don’t have anymore cough drops. So we sigh and think how wonderful it would be if our s...

There’s age-old wisdom in the idea that if you wish to build a good relationship with another person, you need to start by building a good relationship with yourself. This is a difficult concept for those of us who, through our codependency, believed that building a good relationship with another person was all about rescuing that person from themselves while at that same time said person rescued us from ourselves. Certainly the idea of our first building a good relationship with ourselves was never on the table. In fact, to the average codependent, the very thought of building a good relationship with themselves is repulsive. Instead we think things to ourselves like “Me? Build a good relationship with icky old me? YUK! NO WAY ! I need to find someone who can rescue me from myself and make me OK!” There’s a lot of faultiness to this thinking. First off, if we find ourselves so repulsive, why in the world would we assume that there could be someone out there in this world...

“Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.” Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection   As recovering codependents, one of the most difficult things we must do is own our life story. For many years, I distanced myself from my story in the same way that I distanced myself from myself and from owning my own life. The strong desire I had to escape from myself meant that I had to escape from my story as well. And my method for escaping myself and my story was to enmesh in someone else and to come to own his identity and his story. Owning our story means many things to me. First, it means we have to come face to face with ourselves and decide that we will no longer run from who we are. In doing so, we have to look past our denial—all of it. We have to acknowledge and accept that we are worthy, good and lovable (though flawed) people. We have to be able to look in the mirror and say “I love and accept you just the...

I can look back over my life and see a pattern of my past becoming my present. I guess it’s not surprising since we humans like to stay in our comfort zones. We stick with what we know, and we rarely take the time to question whether or not what we know is good for us. If your past keeps catching up with you, it’s time to discover what it is trying to teach you. There’s a reason why it’s haunting you. Codependents are very good at playing the Blame Game, and I think this is a primary reason why we end up repeating our past. The Blame Game is a protection mechanism that allows us to deflect all of our faults onto others. By using the Blame Game, we focus solely on the bad behavior of others. It enables us to believe that the other person is 100 per cent to blame for all of the problems in a relationship because it enables us to turn a blind eye toward everything that we ourselves have done wrong. After all, to blame others is to pretend to be faultless. It’s easy to see wh...

“The meditation room is within. Decorate that.” Richard from Texas, Eat Pray Love Apparently during my trip to Los Angeles, someone was gracious enough to share their nasty little cold germs with me. This week, I’ve found that nursing a cold is a good test of how well we take care of ourselves. It’s also taught me a lot about the inner-critic in my head. In terms of self-care, I decided last Sunday that I would stay away from the office. Then I made sure I had all of the necessary cold medications, including cough drops. I immediately began drowning my body with chicken noodle soup/chicken broth to get the old electrolytes back in balance again. I’ve also downed a lot of green tea and I’ve allowed myself to lie around and watch movies. All of this has helped me reduce the severity of the cold. The cold I had last year took me through three boxes of tissues. This cold has only required one box. On the down side, I’ve heard a lot from my inner-critic. In particular, h...

I’m not sure I know what it’s like to feel fully alive. It’s scary to think of experiencing a moment to the fullest; to actually 100 percent feel the pain, the ecstasy, the thrill, the turbulence of any given moment. I hadn’t been conscious of my fear of being fully alive in the moment until last Wednesday. I was at Knott’s Berry Farm in Los Angeles with a friend of mine named Richard—who we also affectionately refer to as Bubba. For those who don’t know, Knott’s Berry Farm is an amusement park in Southern California. Both Bubba and I like rollercoasters, and so the first ride we jumped on was the Silver Bullet, one of the best rollercoasters in my opinion. It scared me so much that I don’t think I had my eyes open more than a couple of seconds here and there. And this was evident in the picture that was snapped of Bubba and me on the ride. My eyes are closed tight and the expression on my face is even tighter. I look like I’m taking a really painful dump! Bubba, however, ha...