Soulshine

Ah, it’s another beautiful day in recovery! Well, until we meet someone whose neediness triggers all of our old behavioral patterns. Let’s say we’re having lunch with a friend and she has brought along a coworker. We feel an immediate attraction (attachment) to the coworker. Seems he’s just ended a bad relationship. As we listen to him speak, all of our caretaking sensibilities (or should I say nonsense-abilities) start rising from the grave within our souls. The more he speaks, the more we are convinced we can rescue him—and we aren’t even consciously aware that this is what is actually going on inside of us. As we munch on our sandwich, we begin projecting all of our old codependent neediness onto him. Suddenly he is as codependent and as needy as we want him to be. And we are convinced that we can use what we have learned in recovery to make him OK. We begin spilling out recovery jargon, telling him about the latest Melody Beattie book we’re reading, and helping hi...

“Folks who have no vices have few virtues.” Abraham Lincoln It’s important to own our vices. In recovery, we refer to them as “character defects,” which seems a bit harsh to me. I’m not sure that there’s a nicer word for them. We could refer to them as “vices” or “flaws,” I suppose. But the truth is that they are the imperfections that emerge from our dark side. Every human being has a “light” side and a “dark” side. We are all part Dr. Jekyll and part Mr./Ms. Hyde. And we need to accept this fact. There is no such thing as a perfect person. No one is all light-- and no one is all darkness. What we often don’t understand is that light and darkness need each other. Think about a flashlight. Flashlights are worthless on a bright sunny day. It’s impossible to tell if the flashlight is on or off in the midst of sunlight. A flashlight is dependent upon darkness to make its light seen—and so are we. When we work Step 4 of the 12 Steps, it gives us the opportunity to r...

“The circus elephant doesn’t run away because he’s been chained to a stake like that since he was very, very little.” Dr. Jorge Bucay , Let Me Tell You a Story Before recovery, many of us had a favorite motto: “I can’t do it.” People would lovingly tell us we needed to start helping ourselves, and we would say “I can’t do it. I need you to do it for me!” Or others might suggest that we seek help from a therapist or a support group and we’d quickly blurt out “I can’t do it” as we adamantly listed every reason why we couldn’t possibly help ourselves. Recovery has taught us that we alone are responsible for ourselves—and that no one else is. As a result, most recovering people learn to trade-in their “I can’t do it” motto for an “I can do it” motto. We have learned to be responsible for our own self-care by partnering with a Higher Power, and by setting the proper boundaries that allow us to take care of ourselves. And we’ve learned that we must care for ourselves first ...