Still Leaving Your Heart Out on the Door? Stop!

I knew I'd see your face again.
I know you have the best intentions.
So I leave my heart out on the door.
You knock it down just like you did before.

Hold me closer than the needle.
Fill the emptiness I feel.
Hold me closer, I am real.
I'll fill the emptiness you feel.
We feel.
The Lonely Wild, Closer Than the Needle

No one else can “fill the emptiness I feel.” Why? Because the emptiness I feel, I created. And the same is true for everyone when it comes to inner-emptiness. We created it over many years through self-negation. Little by little we gave chunks and pieces of ourselves away through self-rejection and self-abandonment. We chewed ourselves up and spit ourselves out and left a big empty void inside of us. And NO ONE can fill up that inner-emptiness we have created—except for us.

The active codependent doesn’t understand this process. First, they don’t understand that they created their own inner-emptiness. Most addicts blame others for their emptiness and unhappiness. And so they also don’t realize that the inner-emptiness that has been haunting them for most of their lives can’t be filled by another person, or by a place or by a thing.

This is why an active codependent will always leave his or her heart on the door and expect that someone else should assume the responsibility of mending or filling up its emptiness for them. Of course, this always fails. And so do all of the other methods that they then turn to for comfort, like sugar or shopping or drinking. These all fail because no person and no thing can give us our lives back. We have to take them back for ourselves. We have to decide we are worth living for and we have to make the conscious choice to fill up our own inner-emptiness with the self-love that we have been withholding forever.

Unfortunately, active codependents have no way of understanding that they are responsible for filling up their own inner-emptiness until they hit bottom; until that redeeming day when they finally realize that no matter how many times they leave their empty heart on the door, it isn’t going to find lasting comfort in the hands of someone else.

No one can fill the emptiness you feel, nor can you fill the emptiness that someone else feels. The belief that we can is based in codependent thinking. Any two people who come together to fill each other up are fooling themselves. It isn’t love, it’s addictive attraction. It’s the old failed formula that says you fill me up and I’ll fill you up and we’ll both be satisfied—until tomorrow comes.

So start filling up your own inner-emptiness with self-love and self-affirmation. Give yourself the gentle treatment, the kind words, the self-care that you want from others. You whittled away your own inner-completeness. So take responsibility for your past self-negating actions and love yourself into inner-wholeness for a brighter tomorrow.

(The Lonely Wild are a Los Angeles-based rock band.)