Soulshine

Guilt and shame are big problems for many addicts, including codependents. We feel guilt and shame about many things. Some of us feel the general guilt/shame of not being good enough; some of us feel body guilt/shame; and some of us feel an overall existence guilt, as if we don’t have the right to exist at all. Guilt/shame over not feeling worthy (or good enough), guilt/shame over our appearance (body) and existence guilt all go hand in hand. If we don’t feel good enough, that feeling can be rooted in many things; like not being a good enough son or daughter, or not being a good enough student, or not being a good enough person. Body guilt/shame is obviously about physical appearance. It might be that we feel we don’t have pretty enough hair, or we have feet that are too big, or we are too short, or we are too fat, or maybe we believe we just have an oddly shaped body that isn’t acceptable in the eyes of the world. All of these things combined can give us an over-arching exi...

“Loneliness can only be understood, never escaped or overcome—except temporarily.” Darlene Lancer , Conquering Shame and Codependency Loneliness and codependency often go hand-in-hand. For years I tried to bury my loneliness through losing myself in other people. I thought that if I could just fade into someone else, all of my emptiness, all of my loneliness would dissipate. But it never did. When fading into someone else wasn’t alleviating my inner-emptiness, I tried to escape my loneliness through other addictive behaviors. Shopping always worked best for me. Buying anything gave me that TEMPORARY respite from my loneliness and my emptiness. But it was always TEMPORARY—very temporary. The problem here is the solution we addicts so often use. We want to escape from our uncomfortable feelings. Escaping is a solution that never works. Instead of trying to escape from difficult feelings, like emptiness, loneliness or anxiety, we need to welcome these feelings. We need to...

“When true love is lost, life can bleed of all meaning. We are left blank, but the possibility of destiny remains. What we are meant for may yet be discovered.  And…that journey to find our destiny may defeat even time itself.” From the film Winter’s Tale (2014) Life without love certainly does bleed of all meaning. I’ve often thought about the words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians “If I have faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” Life without love is pure nothingness. And this is why life is often so painful and devastating for people who suffer from codependency and other addictions. Early in life, addicts lose all perspective of self-love. They thus completely lose their grounding in life. They lose the roots of who they are: Love itself. And they gradually become a living, breathing form of nothingness (the sense of being left blank). And in their nothingness, they look desperately outside themselves for validation, for love, for approval and...

According to author Rita Mae Brown “a controller doesn’t trust his/her ability to live through the pain and chaos of life.” Brown then goes on to say that “there is no life without pain just as there is no art without submitting to chaos.” Anyone who has ever suffered from codependency knows the fear of facing pain and chaos. And we codependents certainly do a masterful job of trying to control life in regards to emotional pain and daily chaos. My question, however, is this: Do we try to control life to avoid chaos and the pain it causes, or do we try to control life to ensure chaos and the pain it causes? I think we are often trapped between both the need to avoid and the need to create chaos and pain. After all, many codependents willfully choose to engage in relationships with people who are toxic for them. We invite chaos and pain into our lives based in our need to repeat the childhood patterns of chaos and pain that we are so familiar with. And yet once we have...