Soulshine

“A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.” E.W. Howe I had a very big scare over the past week that was like hitting bottom harder than hard. My father had heart disease, so I had a calcium scan to make sure I don’t have heart issues. The calcium numbers themselves came back great, but the scan indicated a potential mass in my chest. When those words were spoken to me over the phone, my heart sank through the floor. I never expected to hear anything like this. Then my OCD went on a tear: “Oh, my God! What does “a mass” mean? Is it huge? Is it cancer? Am I going to have to have surgery? Radiation? Lose my hair? Die before I ever even truly live my life to the fullest? I never in my life have seriously thought about dying. I’ve always been amazingly healthy for an often wacked-out OCD codependent crazy (!), but now I was faced with the true reality of life and death. I turned to my Higher Power and said “Enough is enough. I’ve wasted too many years hating myself.

Codependents are infamous for engaging in enabling behaviors. These behaviors are always more about us (the codependent) than they are about the other person. We feel inferior and insecure and so we engage in caretaking—a serious form of enabling—in order to feel loved and needed by the other person. We rarely recognize the fact that our caretaking/enabling behavior hurts both us and the other person. We drain ourselves by constantly being “on call” to meet every possible need or to solve every problem of the other person. We also inhibit that person’s ability to be responsible for him/herself, and we allow them to escape all possible consequences for their own behavior or poor choices. How do we know if we are enablers? I have paraphrased a list of enabling characteristics offered by Tom Ferry in his book Life by Design . We are an enabler if we do any of the following: 1.  We worry that someone else can’t handle life situations without our help. 2.  We fo