Soulshine

“You are the reason I live.” Erasure, Reason (2014) I hate to disagree with Erasure. They’ve been one of my favorite bands since the 1980s. But NO ONE can be the reason why I live, aside from myself and God. No other person outside of ourselves can truly be the reason why any of us live. If we find ourselves feeling that way it’s a big red flag. And that big red flag is trying to tell us that we are doing a poor job of loving ourselves. The only reason we ever feel like we can’t live without someone else is poor self-love. When we are in that state of poorly taking care of our own wants and needs, we will feel very empty inside. We will have an aching inner-neediness that drives us to be obsessed with ending that horrible, desperate feeling by attaching ourselves to someone else. The problem is when we are desperately trying to attach to someone else in order to feel better, we are like leeches sucking the blood or life out of the other person. And deep down we know...

“It’s not your hair that makes you handsome; it’s your personality.” Charlie Wehrley I have a good friend who’s gradually losing his hair. He likes to claim that it doesn’t really bother him, but he keeps a comb in his car (as vain as I am, I don’t even do that) and he’s always combing his hair forward to cover balding areas. He’s also constantly forcing it forward with his hand if the wind blows up. So I suspect that his hair loss bothers him more than he likes to let on. He’s the type of person who likes to laugh everything off, and that makes it hard to know just how much something painful really eats at his heart. But when hair loss came up again while we were talking recently I told him “It’s not your hair that makes you handsome; it’s your personality—and you’ll never lose that.” And it's really true. He has the type of personality that makes him loveable in every respect because it's who he REALLY is. Unfortunately in our society people often don’t ge...

“Blame aggressively shifts shame onto someone else… Making someone else the problem allows us to feel better about ourselves, while having the effect of making the other person feel the way we really feel inside.” Darlene Lancer, Conquering Shame and Codependency Addicts love to play the blame game. Most of us are pretty poor at taking responsibility for our own mistakes and dysfunctional behaviors. This resistance is rooted in our poor self-esteem, which makes it nearly impossible for many of us to admit that we were wrong in any way. As a result, it’s often subconsciously important for us to make someone else responsible for our mistakes, as well as for the guilt and shame we feel about having made those mistakes. It’s rare for a codependent to be able to honestly laugh-off his/her mistakes. We don’t know how to laugh at ourselves and we are too paranoid that people will reject us for making mistakes. Our refusal to acknowledge and take responsibility for mistake...