Take Charge of Your Life!



“I do not want to go through life like my mother…
Afraid that I am not really loved.”
Cassandra Mortmain, I Capture the Castle

Codependents fear never being loved. We have never loved ourselves and we have never allowed anyone else to love us. We have tried to bargain with others for love, we have tried to earn love through caretaking and we have tried to win love through people-pleasing. And we have usually done these things with all of the wrong people; with those who were totally unavailable to give us what we so deeply, desperately longed for—Love.

In recovery, we must learn to take responsibility for the inner-emptiness we have created; the loveless void we have nursed in every wrong way. We begin taking that responsibility by admitting we are powerless over our own self-hatred, over our inability to love ourselves. We surrender that inability to our support group, the universe or a Higher Power.

But we can’t simply stop there and expect that now everything is going to fall into place without any additional effort from us. We have to work HARD at loving ourselves and making our lives better. We must take life by the horns and be determined to live it to the fullest instead of playing it safe or running away as we are so used to doing.

It’s true that life begins at the end of our comfort zones. For some of us it is way beyond our comfort zone to admit we are powerless over our misery, or over others. It is way beyond our comfort zone to enter the rooms of recovery and allow ourselves to open up and be vulnerable in a room full of strangers. And it is way beyond our comfort zone to reach out to healthy people and attempt to build satisfying relationships with them.

So in recovery we have a choice to make. We can spend the rest of our lives praying to a God to make everything right while we sit back and wait… and wait… and get depressed because nothing is happening… and pray and wait some more… and start acting out again because nothing is happening… and pray and wait some more.

Or we can say our prayers and then take responsibility for helping ourselves as well. We can throw caution to the wind, go against our gut feelings of fear and reach out to life. Fear has always held us back, but we can choose today to move one step beyond fear. We can choose to be vulnerable and work with life to make our hopes and dreams a reality.

Or we can stay the current path and live our lives like our mothers or fathers did—in constant fear of never really being loved; of never really loving ourselves well enough to reach out and touch life—of never being vulnerable and truly alive.

What choice will we make today? Today I choose to be ALIVE by letting go of fear and being vulnerable to the joys of life!


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