Soulshine

“But now I know That the world still turns And the sun still burns And that’s what I’ve learned without you And the days roll on And my heart gets stronger too Don’t think I didn’t love you Just because I made it through But I learned to love myself Without you.” Reba McEntire, Myself Without You Throughout most of my life I have been a fiercely independent codependent. The only times I ever wavered from being fiercely independent were when I met someone who pushed all of my buttons in all of the right ways; meaning a person who had just the right addictive personality to match mine. Anytime my addictive “yin” met an addictive “yang,” I’d swing almost immediately from the extreme of being fiercely independent on myself to the opposite extreme of being miserably dependent on that other person. Of course, once we both sucked all of the life out of each other and the relationship ended, I’d go defiantly back to being fiercely independent; even though my

“The more you love yourself, the more you are able to love others.” Robert Holden, Loveability In his book Loveability , Robert Holden points out the fact that at the beginning of every new relationship there is a grace period. During that initial phase “you feel so happy and so blessed to have met each other that any doubts about your loveability are temporarily suspended.” How true! Whether or not this grace period lasts depends on how we view ourselves. As Holden makes clear, it depends on whether we live by the basic truth “I am loveable,” or the basic fear “I am not lovable.” The average codependent lives by the basic fear “I am not lovable.” And so this means that our grace period in any new relationship is fairly short. It doesn’t take long for us to get inside our heads and to start feeling inferior, needy and clingy. This happens because, as Holden points out, the less we love ourselves:             -the more critical we become of others (as well as ourse

In her book Facing Codependence , Pia Melody points out the fact that codependents tend to bounce between extremes. We can bounce from low self-esteem to arrogant, from too vulnerable to invulnerable, from good boy/girl to bad and rebellious, from overly dependent to anti-dependent, and from controlling to chaotic. I know what it’s like to bounce between all of those extremes. Before recovery, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing when I allowed myself to swing like a pendulum between extremes. Now I do. I am aware when I go from feeling empowered to totally disempowered. And that’s a really painful bounce for me because the feelings of being disempowered are ingrained from childhood. Mentally, they make no sense to me. I know I’m not truly disempowered, but my feelings don’t agree. In fact, my feelings violently disagree. At least now I know that these feelings of disempowerment are not really about the NOW. They aren’t about the reality of the present moment. They are a