Awareness Allows Us to Fix Ourselves and to Attract People Who Value Our Self-Worth

People who enter Recovery programs for codependency, or any other addictive behavior, don't appreciate their own self-worth. Rarely, do they even understand that their primary problem is lack of self-love. The average person who enters Recovery is usually still trapped in the idea that there's really something wrong with other people in their lives. We think that those persons need to change because we are in denial to the fact that we are the one who really needs to change.

And when many of us enter Recovery, we are rarely aware of the fact that for years we have been prisoners to our past, and the self-defeating behaviors that the past still continually imposes upon us.

Replacing denial with honest, humble awareness is the first step toward turning our lives around. We enter Recovery needing to realize that we are the broken person, that our radar for choosing good friends and partners is seriously damaged, and that this is why we have a history of all of our relationships blowing-up in our faces and falling apart.

Recovery is ALL about fixing ourselves; primarily about fixing our self-love. Once we develop the ability to be kind and loving toward ourselves, we also begin the process of building stronger self-esteem. We come to appreciate our worth as persons created equal to all others through the image and likeness of God that we all represent.

And the more that we love and appreciate ourselves, the better able we are to set boundaries with people in our lives who don't truly love and appreciate us for who we are. People who only appreciate us for their ability to manipulate and abuse us to their benefit will resist those boundaries. This is a sure sign that we no longer need these people in our lives.

Improved self-worth will help us hold fast to the boundaries that we set, and eventually, most people who simply befriend us to meet their own selfish needs will walk away. As they do, we may feel hurt at first, but we will eventually be made stronger by that hurt. It will help us to fix our broken radar for choosing people to engage in relationships with. We will learn to pick people who are actually healthy for us: People who truly love us for who we are and who value our worth. 

We will no longer attract, or be attracted to, people who's only purpose is to cling to us because they want us to rescue them from themselves. Awareness will enable us to break our past patterns of choosing needy people to engage in relationships with. And we will no longer feel the need to cling to someone with the hope that they will rescue us from ourselves.

Awareness and improved self-love give us the ability, by the grace of our Higher Power and the help of our support groups, to rescue ourselves. We will then develop healthy inter-dependent relationships with healthy people; leaving our old addictive codependent patterns behind us, where they belong-- in the past.