Soulshine

Everyone we encounter is a teacher. Everyone has something to teach us about ourselves or about life. And last week, I learned a new lesson about myself from an Ebay seller. I collect old movie posters/lobby cards. I had won a beautiful one on Ebay and it arrived damaged last week. As soon as I saw the packaging, I knew there was a problem. The lobby card had been mailed in a manila envelope and only had one ill-fitting piece of cardboard inside. The cardboard was behind the card so there was nothing protecting the front side (the image on the card) aside from the manila envelope, which had been torn in two places during shipping. Sure enough, when I opened the package the lobby card was damaged in those two spots. I immediately contacted the seller expressing my disappointment about the poor packaging and damaged card, and included photos of the damage. I felt justified in registering my complaint. I had paid for a near mint lobby card, not a damaged one. In addressing the i...

“Who’ll be there when your heart hits the ground?” The Bible (band), Honey Be Good (1988) As recovering codependents, we have learned that there’s one essential person who has to be present for us whenever our hearts hit the ground. And that one essential person is “me.” It’s also essential that we have a strong Higher Power there to comfort and strengthen us. Prior to recovery, the average codependent is rarely present for themselves. That’s because most of us learned to abandon ourselves as children. Our focus never looked inward after our self-abandonment. Instead, we constantly looked outward expecting that there should be someone else to rescue us when we hit the ground. Sometimes we were able to find someone sympathetic to our plight, but they were never able to satisfy the aching need inside of us, much less rescue us. Why? Because the person we really needed to rescue us was the person we never looked to: Ourselves. As long as we remained in a state of self-aba...

I recently had someone tell me he has a hard time asking for help. He said “Every time I want to ask someone for help, I think to myself ‘they probably don’t even really like me anyway, so why would they want to help me?” When he finished his sentence, I pointed out to him “It’s not that they don’t like you; it’s that you don’t like you. And you’re projecting your own dislike of yourself onto other people, assuming that they see you the same way you see yourself.” He looked stunned for a moment, but then said “You’re right.” If we see ourselves as basically unlikeable and treat ourselves like we aren’t worthy of love, or friendship or help, we end up projecting our poor self-worth onto everyone in our lives. We reach a point where we believe that everyone sees us in the same negative light that we see ourselves. This is a primary reason why it is often so hard to ask others for help, or to believe that other people really care about us. In her book Conquering...

“Take a look in the mirror, look at yourself But don’t look too close ‘cause you just might see The person you hate the most.” Natalie Cole, Take A Look Sad to say, but when the average addict looks in the mirror, they more often than not see the person that they hate the most. Or so they think. Truth is that the person they think they are seeing in the mirror isn’t really THAT person at all. No, they aren’t seeing themselves. They are only seeing all of the negative, hateful judgments that they have made against themselves. I don’t know anyone who has liked looking in the mirror less than me. From the time I was a child, when I looked in a mirror, I saw all of the judgments that my parents and others had made against me. I accepted and then adopted those judgments as my own. And I used them again and again to persecute myself every time I had to face a mirror. Recovery has taught me a good lesson, though. That lesson is summed up in a further lyric from the song Ta...