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If You’re Unhappy, This May Be Why

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I’ve spent most of my life trying to make other people happy because I felt responsible for their feelings. And the above quote is spot-on true. I’m the one person who’s not been happy, as a result. We are not responsible for other people’s feelings. We aren’t their savior. They are responsible for their feelings and we are responsible for ours. Yes, we can express empathy and compassion for others, but we need to stop taking on their feelings and problems as if they are our own. They aren’t. Another person’s problems and feelings affect us indirectly. Our own problems and feelings affect us directly. If we are feeling directly responsible for another person’s feeling/problems, there is something wrong with us. In other words, if a friend is going through a divorce, that is their problem; not ours. If we feel responsible for solving their problem, or for owning their feelings to the point of neglecting our own problems and feelings, we are trapped in codependent caretaki...
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Fear of Abandonment Often Fuels Codependency

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For an active codependent, there are reasons why one sign of affection from another person can be one too many and why one hundred signs of affection will most likely never be enough. The codependent’s internal neediness for affection is fueled by self-negating factors. Let’s look at some of these factors. The first self-negating factor is the codependent’s belief that they are not as good as other people. This belief causes codependents to see themselves as unlovable in the eyes of others.   An active codependent can see value and beauty in most anyone aside from themselves. Why would this be? Well, most likely because, as children, they were treated like they were somehow subhuman by parents and/or other adults. Seeing themselves as subhuman robbed the child of self-love before it could ever take root inside of them, and thus robbed them of any hope for having good self-esteem. A second self-negating factor, also related to poor parenting skills, is fear of aba...
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Take a Giant Step Outside Your Mind!

You stare at me in disbelief You say for you there's no relieve But I swear I'll prove you wrong. Don't stay in your lonely room Just staring back in silent gloom. That's not where you belong Come with me I'll take you where the taste of life is green And everyday holds wonders to be seen. Come with me, leave yesterday behind And take a giant step outside your mind. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Take a Giant Step  In reality, there’s only one world. Yet nearly all of us have created parallel universes inside our heads. Addicts, in particular, seem to spend way too much time inside their head-worlds. I suppose this is because the real outer-world didn’t feel safe to us when we were children. So we chose to escape from it by withdrawing into a little dream world inside our childhood heads. Unfortunately, with each passing year, our childhood dream worlds slowly eroded into adult nightmare worlds; probably because we became more and more reliant up...
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Eat, Pray, Love Taught Me Much About Myself

“I disappear into the person I love. If I love you, you can have it all: My money, my time, my body. I will assume your debts; and I will project upon you all sorts of nifty qualities you’ve never actually cultivated in yourself. I will give you all of this and more until I am so exhausted and so depleted the only way I can recover is by becoming infatuated with someone else.” From Eat, Pray, Love (Columbia Pictures, 2010) This is the best description of codependent behavior that I have ever witnessed. Many authors have attempted to define codependency, but it’s extremely difficult because codependency is so multi-faceted. But this description of codependent behavioral patterns describes my own codependency perfectly, prior to recovery, and so I’m going to dissect the quote. At the height of my codependency, I always found myself disappearing into the person I was in “love” with, or rather, that I was infatuated with. Looking back, I realize now that it w...
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