You Belong to You!

“You Belong To You and not to me
Love shouldn’t take away your liberty
You Belong To You and no one else
Let Love be a heaven and not a hell”

Johnny Hates Jazz, You Belong to You (2013)

This song lyric by Johnny Hates Jazz is music to every RECOVERING codependent ear. One of the first great lessons of recovery is that we don’t belong to someone else. Many of us spent years searching for that special person that we could belong to, that we could enmesh into and that we could loose ourselves in.

Those were the days when all of our focus was outside of ourselves. Back then we thought our salvation existed within someone else. We expected that someone else was responsible for our lives and our happiness. All we had to do was find that special person and they would be our permanent fix. They’d magically transform everything about us. Suddenly everything that was so wrong with us would become so right.

Ah, yes! Life would be so good! NOT!!! Every time we thought we’d found that special savior, it turned out that there were many strings attached. First, we learned that we’d have to caretake them into rescuing us. If caretaking wasn’t enough, then we’d have to please them in every way possible. We learned—at least subconsciously—that an enmeshed relationship meant that we no longer had any liberties. We had to give-up who we were in order to become what the special person wanted us to be.

Our personal saviors always required that we like what they like and that we be what they wanted. We had to belong to them if they were to save us from ourselves. After awhile, most of us got tired of belonging to our false Mister or Miss Right. The love that was supposed to make us OK with ourselves and happy with life was no longer a heaven for us (if it ever was). It quickly became a hell.

Sad things was that we didn’t “get it” the first time around. Once we dumped our first false savior, we went off looking for another one. Some of us can’t even begin to count the number of times we made this mistake, but that’s not important now. What’s important is that we finally learned our lesson and woke-up to the reality that our behavior was insane.

We entered recovery programs and we started learning that no one could be our personal savior; that we couldn’t belong to anyone who was going to make us OK. We learned that only we can make ourselves OK. And this means that we have to belong to—and treasure—ourselves.

The work of recovery is the work of turning inside ourselves, discovering who we really are and learning to love who we are. It’s the process of coming to belong to ourselves. After all, no one has rejected us in this life as much as we have rejected ourselves. In recovery we learn to stop rejecting ourselves, to start appreciating and loving ourselves, and to start the process of truly belonging to ourselves.

Once we are able to love and belong to ourselves, we begin to value who we are. We also begin to retain our personal liberties and we learn to respect the personal liberties of others. In this way, we begin to build healthier relationships and we allow love to be a heaven and not a hell.