Soulshine

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt It’s certainly true that no one has ever made me feel inferior, aside from myself. We often make the mistake of blaming others for “making” us feel a certain way when there is no truth to this concept. No one “makes” me feel a certain way. I “choose” to feel a certain way. If someone says something and I feel diminished in some way it’s probably because they’ve unknowingly touched on an area inside of me where I ruthlessly criticize myself. More often than not, there’s no intent on behalf of the other person to be mean. It’s more about how I feel about myself. We can’t go through life telling ourselves repeatedly “I’m not good enough,” or “I’m such an idiot” or “I’m so ugly” or “I’m so incompetent” and not feel the repercussions of it at any given moment. This self-inflicted mental cruelty makes us hyper-vulnerable. We’re constantly on guard and at any moment we can purposely take anything a...

One of the most essential lessons that recovery teaches us is this: We are not responsible for the problems of other people, nor are we responsible for fixing them (other people or their problems). So many codependents are masters of the fine art of caretaking and that makes detachment from others and their issues especially difficult. Even after years of recovery, we may still feel tinges of guilt when others bring us their problems and we aren’t able to do anything. That’s OK. We can allow ourselves to feel the guilt (which is really about us wanting to boost our self-esteem by being needed), and we can let go of it. In the past, we wanted to fix everything for everyone for all of the wrong reasons. It was all about us and our need to be loved and needed. As we learn to love ourselves better, the urge to win the love of others through caretaking begins to subside. But we may still be faced with lingering doubts about whether or not we are doing enough when others we lov...

I don’t believe the compulsion to control another person is ever for the benefit of the other person. It’s all about us. We feel insecure, we feel unlovable, we feel empty spaces growing inside of us and so we desperately turn to others to quiet our codependent crazies. When others aren’t being what we want them to be, when they aren’t making us feel OK about ourselves, we then do everything within our power to manipulate them into pleasing us. A good example of this theory comes from the novel Now Voyager . Jerry Durrance, a major character in the novel, is married to Isabel. It’s not a happy marriage because Isabel guilted and shamed Jerry into marrying her. Isabel is extremely insecure in herself and she must have all of Jerry’s attention. Unfortunately for Isabel, too much of Jerry’s attention goes to their younger daughter, Tina. Isabel feels terribly threatened by Tina. As a result, Isabel is always trying to make Jerry choose between her and Tina. When Jerry choose...

We vow to put an end to the three obstacles of earthly desire, actions and retribution, and transform the afflictions. We vow to realize the wisdom that sees clearly things as they are. May our desire to put an end to these obstacles be universally realized. Buddhist Chant The average person places many obstacles in his/her daily path. Those of us who suffer with addictive behaviors know that unattainable desires present a serious problem for us. We too often want what we cannot have and we are in serious denial about the fact that we are powerless. It’s our great denial that leads us to believe that we can attain our desires through manipulation of reality. This blindness then leads us down a path of destruction as our focus and our actions become obsessively driven toward attaining the impossible. We desire this particular man or this particular woman and we want them to save us. We want him or her to want us as badly as we mistakenly believe we want him or...

It seems the average person spends more time living inside their head than they do living in the real world. This may be especially true for codependents. Many of us are great at taking nothing and making a huge drama out of it— all inside our heads. We can be in traffic and decide that the driver behind us is following too close. In a split second our brains are creating a horrific scenario. We suddenly envision our car being hit from behind. Our car is smashed and we have whiplash, of course. To make matters worse, the driver who hit us has no insurance. As this sick little story develops through our twisted little thought patterns, we become more and more anxious and angry. And over what? Nothing. It’s all a farce inside our heads. In reality nothing is really wrong. In fact, we suddenly look in our rear-view mirror and see that the driver we were so concerned about is no longer even behind us. Yet we’re upset because we created a head drama out of nothing more than a ...

After having a sandwich at a local eatery today, I stopped in a small grocery and got a double dark chocolate protein bar for dessert. There were some tables outside the grocery, so I sat down at one. A man came out of the grocery, looked up at the sky and asked me “You think it’s gonna rain today?” The skies had been overcast all day and so I said “Yeah, we’ll probably get a little rain.” Before I could even take a bite out of my protein bar, he started talking about weather-related conspiracy theories. I don’t mean global warming here. I mean ideas along the lines of governments manipulating weather patterns to purposely cause catastrophes. I personally don’t believe in these theories and I tried to say so, but it took a while. I could barely get in a word. When I did get a chance to disagree, he backed off and went into other conspiracy theories. Ten minutes or so later, he headed on his way. I sat and realized that it wasn’t too many years ago when I would have fe...