I See Me Inside of You--- And I Don’t Like It!

One of the best lessons we get in recovery is to keep our focus on ourselves. Other people don’t make us miserable. It’s our focus on other people that makes us miserable.

The average codependent learns at a young age to completely take their focus off of themselves. As children, many of us learned we weren’t worthy of having needs and wants; and some of us learned that we were so worthless that it was simply too painful to focus any attention on ourselves. So we began the dysfunctional process of making everyone else’s lives our business.

We focused our eyes completely on others and we began to judge them based on the harsh criteria that we were taught to judge ourselves by. We watched for every mistake, every misstep that most everyone around us made and we made it our business to judge and to criticize them.

Many of us learned to focus on one person that we encountered daily—at home, or school or work—and we began giving our personal power over our own serenity away to that person. We searched out their every fault and we raged inside our minds and hearts about what rotten people they were. We also tended to act-out in a passive-aggressive way toward them, unfairly treating them with contempt.

Every day we found new fault with them. They could do nothing right and we became obsessed with despising them. In other words, we created our own little world of chaos and drama inside our heads—and all because we were so determined to take our own personal self-loathing out on someone else.

That’s right. It was never about the other person. It was all about us. The person we chose to be offended by was—for the most part—just like us. Everything we subconsciously hated about ourselves—and refused to face—made itself known by the animosity we demonstrated toward this other person. Subconsciously we saw everything we disliked about ourselves in that other person and so we hated them for the same reasons that we hated ourselves.

Years into recovery we can still have difficulty with this pattern of behavior. We can easily slip back into focusing our attention on someone we dislike because they are too much like us in all the wrong ways and because we don’t want to face ourselves and our issues. When we catch ourselves slipping into obsessing about someone else’s behavior, we need to stop and take a good look in the mirror. Then we need to ask ourselves “What am I refusing to face about myself?”

Through asking that question we can begin the process of facing our own self-loathing and taking our power back from it. We can choose to accept whatever it is we don’t like about ourselves that we can’t change and we can work on changing those things that are within our power to change. And we can do both with the help of our Higher Power, trusted friends and a massive amount of self-kindness and mercy. Let’s keep the focus on ourselves. In the long-run we will create far less drama and much more authentic happiness.