I’ll Be Me and You Be You!



“I do not explain, defend or justify my life to anyone.
I am my own creation, intent on being myself.”
Dr. Chris Michaels

Many codependents spend a lot of time explaining, defending and justifying their lives—even their existence—to others. Someone criticizes something we said or did and a panic alarm goes off inside of us. We then bend over backwards to whitewash ourselves. We back pedal on our beliefs or our values and desperately repaint ourselves in the color that this critical person wants us to be.

Before recovery many of us were like chameleons. Every hour of every day often led to a change in our color or in our song and dance. It was always more important to us to sing the song someone else wanted us to sing, or to dance the dance that made other people happy. Yup, we were champions of giving our personal power away to everyone we thought was better than us.

And by the time we entered recovery, many of us didn’t know our own voices anymore. We had completely lost contact with our inner-voices, which are there to guide us through life as we become our own persons. We had no idea of how to be our own persons anymore because we falsely believed we had to justify our existence by pleasing others.

Well, recovery has taught us that we don’t have to justify our existence to anyone. We do not have to explain or defend who we are. And we certainly don’t need to recreate ourselves to make anyone—that’s ANYONE—happy.

We were all created beautifully and equally. No one has more or less value than we do. We are free to be ourselves and we don’t need the approval of anyone to be OK with ourselves. Likewise, no one needs our approval to be OK with themselves. Everyone is free to be exactly who they were created to be.

Today, let’s hold on to the intention of simply being ourselves, regardless of what anyone else wants or thinks. Let’s be intent on being our own creation, which is simply being who we REALLY are.

If we’ve lost touch with who we are, we can take some quite time to listen to the quiet inner-voice inside of us, to connect with the Spirit, and to begin reclaiming our real selves.

Let’s also take some time to accept and honor the people around us by loving them as they are and not as we’d like them to be. They aren’t obligated to please us anymore than we are obligated to please them. In this way, we can mutually admire the REAL person in everyone.

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