Soulshine

There’s much emphasis on gratitude in recovery circles, but I don’t think it’s as simple as it sounds. We hear a lot about “act as if” you are grateful or “fake it till you make it.” This can work to a degree in helping us to develop a more positive vision. But it doesn’t work all that well when something that’s truly key to our lives is missing. “Acting as if” becomes pretty hollow after you discover that you yourself are missing from your life. “Fake it till you make it” only goes so far when the great love you’ve always longed for never materializes. And no amount of gratitude for wealth, good health or anything else can balance the desperation that comes with never having lived the life that deep-down you really wanted. So on this Thanksgiving Day, be as grateful as you can be. No one is required to be 100 percent grateful when they have a hole in their heart, and that’s OK. We all do the best that we can in any given moment. If we aren’t feeling as grateful as we thi...

“We have a tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth.” Don Miguel Ruiz , The Four Agreements Codependents love drama. We create endless dramas in our heads every day. And most of these dramas are based in false assumptions we make about others and unreasonable expectations that we love to impose on everyone we know. Rarely are our dramas favorable ones. They usually entail us being the victim of someone else’s behavior; and, of course, we always imagine that behavior as being detrimental toward us. Unfortunately, because we believe our assumptions are the truth and our expectations are legitimate, we make terrible judgments against innocent people. We get angry with them, we pout, we accuse them of things they have never said or done, and we layer them with guilt or shame for not being who we wanted them to be. In other words, we screw-up our relationships based in the very messed-up drama...

In his book Loveability , Robert Holden says “the basic fear ‘I am not loveable’ can play itself out in so many ways… ‘There is something wrong with me,’ ‘I am unseen,’ ‘I am not understood,’ ‘I am incapable,’ ‘I am not safe,’ ‘I am not interesting,’ ‘I am all alone,’ or ‘I don’t matter.” Over the course of my life I have experienced all of these fears. Likewise over the past 18 years of my recovery, I have encountered countless numbers of people who have suffered greatly from the same fears. Anytime we believe we are not good enough to be loveable—not even to be loveable to our parents or God—our thinking will begin to nosedive off a cliff into total self-annihilation.  For me, believing I was “not good enough” led me to believe that I needed to be invisible. It seemed logical to me that if people couldn’t see me, they also couldn’t defile or hurt me: They couldn’t criticize or bully what they could not see. So I worked hard as a child to be silent, to breathe quietl...