Remove Your Emotional Armor

“The purpose of your life isn’t to arrive safely at your death.”

Anonymous

Codependents usually don’t like to take risks. If we did, we wouldn’t need to rely on manipulation as much as we do before recovery. We would instead ask for what we want and need. We would take the risk of facing a “No” from someone. But many of us believe we aren’t worthy of what we want or need and we are too afraid of rejection to ask. So we avoid risk-taking by relying on manipulation.

As a result, life becomes a series of playing it safe day after day. And playing it safe often means continual reliance on ourselves to meet our every want and need without the help of anyone. Some of us become fortresses made of flesh. We become so self-reliant that it no longer even occurs to us to ask for help from anyone.

Total self-reliance is a problem with many facets, however. For one thing, we are in a state of denial when we believe we can march through life without being vulnerable or relying on assistance from others. This is a protection mechanism that may have worked for us as children; it may have kept us safe from being vulnerable to deepening emotional pain, but as adults we must face that pain. We are strong enough to handle it, and doing so means we must be vulnerable enough to share it with someone who is trustworthy.

Subconsciously many of us know that we are in a state of denial when we try to be totally self-reliant. And we know it because time and again we do resort to manipulating people to get what we are not able to supply to ourselves and we are too afraid to ask for. Every time we resort to manipulation we are admitting that we do need other people in our lives, and we are exposing the cracks in our emotional armor.

In addition, if we continue to engage in the dance of total self-reliance, we continue the practice of alienating ourselves from others. We withdraw more and more from the world around us and we isolate as a means of making it safely through the rest of our lives. In doing so, we miss out on all of the fun, excitement and beauty of a life that is meant to be shared with others.

There is great truth in the idea that the purpose of our lives isn’t to arrive safely at our deaths without ever having faced the joy and pain of having loved and lost. Life isn’t about avoiding the pain, it’s about facing the pain and living it all of the way through to the flip side of pain, which is joy. Life is about being vulnerable enough to scrape our souls, to have them shot through with holes, knowing that in the long run those holes will heal and we will be more resilient and happier people for having taken the risk of living our lives.

And when the holes are weighting us down, life is about being vulnerable enough to share the pain the holes cause us with others who can empathize because they, too, have holes they are healing from within themselves.