Soulshine

If we did less judging and more loving the world would be a holier place. And if we want to be less judgmental and more loving of everyone, we need to begin by being kinder to ourselves. Today is the last day of 2014. Let’s take a few moments and look back over the year. How well did we love ourselves and others? Did we do a good job of choosing to be kind as opposed to being critical? Did we listen with compassion and express understanding when people needed validation? Did we place ourselves into the hearts and minds of others in order to empathize with them, even when they were difficult or even ugly with us? Or did we immediately go on the defensive, take things personally and go into attack mode? Did we make love our priority? The answers to all of these questions depend on how we treated ourselves. If we made loving ourselves a priority in 2014 then we most likely did a better job of loving others as well. The choice to love ourselves better enabled us to be less judgme

“You saved Richard Callahan’s life. You can’t live it for him.” Helen Pryor, American Dreams We codependents tend to want to live other people’s lives. And it seems to be especially difficult for codependent parents who are now facing the fact that their children are no longer “kids”—they’re grown adults themselves. I gave a series of talks to mostly baby-boomers last week and a recurring theme was their need to control the lives of their adult children, in particular when it comes to God or church. Many baby-boomers are church goers. They grew-up believing that it was sinful to miss out on attending church on Sundays. Now they are faced with children and grandchildren who don’t believe it’s important to attend church. And so these baby-boomers have an intense need to rectify the situation by trying to impose their beliefs onto their adult children and grandchildren. In effect, these baby-boomers want to live their children’s lives for them and so they coerce and n

In her book Conquering Shame and Codependency , Darlene Lancer says we codependents “may be drawn to drama-filled relationships to enliven us. We tend to consider stable people boring and are instead drawn to drug addicts, unavailable partners, dysfunctional work environments, excitement, abuse or conflict.” How true. Over the years I’ve hated having chaos in my life and yet, truth is, I couldn’t live without it. I always fell in love with totally unavailable people. It was my means of ensuring emotional turmoil, which guaranteed me two things: 1) It would prove that I really wasn’t good enough and 2) it would ensure I’d continue to be miserable, which I suppose was better than feeling numb. I could people-please, caretake and walk on air for any unavailable person. I would become emotionally attached, obsess over them day and night, fantasize about the great love-life we were going to eventually have, think up all sorts of ways to be near them—and then drown myself

“Let people go by releasing your neediness for their love.  Love yourself instead!” David Elliott, Healing I have often wanted people to give me the love that I felt my parents did not give me. It seems it’s that maternal/paternal wound that often haunts us well into adulthood. We may be grown men or women but we still ache inside for the love we were denied as small children: We want to be told “I love you;” we want to be held and hugged; we want to feel the warmth of a mother’s or father’s love. And, unfortunately, we often project this need (or neediness) onto others. More often than not, the people we choose to project our need for maternal/paternal love onto are equally as emotionally unavailable to us as our moms and dads were. We subconsciously choose men and women whose personalities resemble those of our parents. Then we proceed in trying to secure from these people the love we were unable to receive from our parents. And nine times out of 10 our success rate is e

Oscar Wilde said it perfectly: “be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” We were created by God to be ourselves: The unique individuals that God empowered with a specific purpose for the betterment of our generation on this earth. So “rejoice” in who you are by choosing to see yourself in a favorable light, by retaining the personal power God blessed you with at birth and by using that power to bless humanity. No one can take our personal power away from us. Even our parents weren’t able to do so when we were children. We freely chose to give our personal power away to Mom and Dad because we believed they had to be right and we had to be wrong. As disempowered children, we developed victim mentalities that caused us to give our power away to most everyone. As a result, we never learned to build good boundaries. When other children bullied us, we ran instead of standing our ground; when people insulted us, we took it on the chin while we quietly died inside ourselves; and whe