Soulshine

It’s best to choose to leave the resentments of 2017 behind us today, on this final day of the year. Some of us have been through difficult relationships this year that didn’t end well. Some of us are still holding on to resentments from past years that have become grudges. And often times we are stuck because we are still expecting apologies we never received. I’ve heard many people say “I’ll never forgive him (her) until they beg me for forgiveness.” I used to say the same thing, but Recovery has taught me that holding on to a resentment, in hopes of receiving an apology, is detrimental to no one aside from myself. I would often like to receive an apology from someone who was rude, abusive or who betrayed me in some way. But I no longer EXPECT to receive one; nor do I place limits on my ability to forgive by accepting what I cannot change. If someone has no intentions of apologizing, or is simply unable to do so because they are too wounded inside themselves, I can’t force t...

“God grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” These are among the most essential words in Recovery. For years, those of us with addictive or compulsive personalities have fought reality. We wanted whatever we couldn’t have. We wanted it, or him/her, and we wanted it NOW. It made no difference if reality was telling us we could not have what we so desperately wanted. It made no difference if reality was telling us we were powerless to change the unchangable. We were determined to have it our way— and we were just as determined to be miserable every time we hit our heads against reality’s impenetrable wall. We told ourselves “I can’t (or won’t) be happy until I have Mr or Ms Right, or a new job, or more money, or complete freedom from anxiety, or my kids living their lives the way I think they should be.” We placed our demands on life and set limitations on our own happiness. We created almost every second of misery we experienced. When we refused to face reali...

As the Holiday Season continues and we prepare to enter the New Year, we all have a choice: We can focus on all of our fears and disappointments over the past year, or we can focus on all we have to be grateful for over the past year. We can also choose to focus on the good in every moment that leads up to 2018– or we can focus on all that is negative in the moment and on our unfulfilled expectations. The choice is truly ours. And it’s absolutely true that we get what we focus on. Negative thoughts produce more negative thoughts, and all of those negative thoughts produce negative emotions, including depression. Every day I focus more and more on finding the positive in every moment, which keeps me from ruminating in my head and remaining stuck in my lifetime pattern of negative thinking. The more I focus on the positive, the more I change my habitual default into negative thoughts. As a result, I have never felt so content in my whole life. My negative feelings are daily lo...

This quote is so true. All of my life I’ve struggled because I wanted what I wanted and I wanted it NOW. I never really appreciated what I did have, and so I always wanted more. And I wanted things to be my way— or else. There was no alternative. If I really wanted something, from a new sleek figure to a new stereo to a lifetime lover, I had to have it. No was not an option and neither was happiness— until I got what I wanted. Recovery’s first lesson to me was Step One: I am powerless over (fill in anything here) and my life has become unmanageable. And the Serenity Prayer continued to build on the lesson: God grant me serenity to ACCEPT the things I cannot change. For the first time in my life I realized that I wasn’t solely in charge. God, or my Higher Power, was in control and so I needed to relinquish my insistence on being in control by admitting I was truly powerless over much of life— and over every other person. Thanks to my Recovery work (therapy, spiritual self-hel...

It’s the Holiday Season; a time when those who celebrate Christmas are supposed to be happy, happy, happy. But many people aren’t happy. This can especially be true for those of us with addictive personalities. Too often, our inner-emptiness gets in the way of being happy like we’re supposed to be. Over my life, I’ve spent many a Christmas focusing on what was missing from my life: a romantic partner (one who could love me into being happy, of course), friends, parents who could love me for who I am, a better job, not being thin enough, not being handsome enough, not being personable enough, etc. So, I spent those Christmas holidays being miserable over what I DIDN’T have. I CHOSE to moan and groan and play poor miserable me. But not anymore. This year I’m choosing to focus on the positives. I’m loving myself better, being more the REAL me (and learning that the right people like the real me), being grateful for how generous people are to me, being grateful for friends, for f...

Be who you are. This is a primary lesson of Recovery programs. Most of us with addictive personalities have been running from who we are since childhood, when we first got the message that being ourselves wasn't "good enough." Well, Recovery teaches us we are good enough just as we are. And that we need to accept ourselves, faults and all, instead of trying to be false, shiny, plastic images of our true selves. Owning our true identities means we have to reprogram our thoughts about ourselves. Recovery helps us to weed-out the lies we learned to believe about ourselves and to nourish the flowers that are waiting to grow in our souls. It also means that we have to face and accept all of our feelings. As Stephen C. Paul says in his book Illuminations , "Emotions pass like clouds across the sky. They're to be noticed, accepted, acknowledged and allowed to flow on."  Accepting our difficult feelings is essential to accepting our true selves. Som...

As a codependent I’ve spent much of my life WAITING for someone else to bring me flowers, or rather, to MAKE me happy. I had decided I couldn’t be happy being me, so there was no way for me to make me happy. So my happiness became someone else’s responsibility. I wanted someone to rescue me from horrible me. Sounds like an old Disney movie, doesn’t it? From Snow White to Cinderella, the story line is basically the same: Helpless person, who can’t ensure their own happiness, needs a prince or princess to rescue them, to MAKE them happy— ever after! Recovery has taught me real life doesn’t work that way. It works like this: I have to relinquish all of my reasons for feeling inferior and hating myself. I have to work at accepting me just as I am. Self-acceptance leads to self-love over time. When I’m having difficulties in accepting and loving myself— in tending the garden of my own soul— I need to place what I can’t do for myself into the hands of a Higher Power. My Higher Pow...

I am constantly telling people “practice being kind to yourself. The kinder, and less critical, you are to yourself, the kinder and less critical you will be of others.” And it’s so true. We addicts/codependents can be very critical people and very judgmental. It becomes a pattern of thinking we use against ourselves and eventually it spills out onto everyone around us. Through Recovery I’ve learned that my thoughts and beliefs create my reality. Reality rarely creates my thoughts or beliefs. When I live in my head, instead of living in the present moment, I create my own “reality,” a false one. Miserable thought builds on miserable thought until I am an anxious, frustrated, sad, miserable mess emotionally. That used to be my only way of life. Recently, I’ve trained myself to become more focused on the actual, true reality around me. Now, if I turn on some favorite music, I actually listen to the songs and enjoy them. In the past, I’d turn on some favorite music and barely hea...

Codependents tend to be rescuers. At some point we developed the idea that we are the savior of most everyone in our lives. Certainly in my own codependency, I have been a master of care taking other people, attempting to fix all of their problems, doing difficult things for them that they should have been doing for themselves, and ultimately attempting my best to save them from themselves and their own addictive behaviors. Even after 22 years of recovery work, I can still fall into the “I am the Savior trap.” So I am learning to draw a fine line between helping someone vs. attempting to save them. First off, I know for fact that I can’t save, or even help someone who refuses to first help him or herself. When someone isn’t acknowledging their addiction, or they are balking at working their Recovery program, I see their behavior as a big red flag. The same is true if someone is constantly blaming other people for all of their problems or for the fact that they have addiction pro...

Want to scare an addict to death? Offer them true, unconditional love. Every addictive person longs to be loved, and yet everyone of us is terrified of real love. We didn't experience it as children, and so when we meet someone who offers authentic love to us, we're terrified. We don't have the ability to believe or trust that it's authentic. This reality is captured wonderfully in a new song by The Neighbourhood called Scary Love : "Don't wanna be alone, (but) you're too pretty for me. Baby, I know it's true, yeah... Your love is scaring me. No one has ever cared for me as much as you do." Before Recovery, whenever someone offered me the real love that I so desperately wanted, I was terrified and subconsciously found ways to push the person away. I always managed to force them to abandon me because I was too broken inside to believe or trust that anyone could actually love me. After all, I DIDN'T love me, so why would anyone else...

Perfectionism is a big problem for many people, especially for addicts. So many of us are hard on ourselves because we can't be perfect. We spend our whole lives wearing masks: make-up, latest hairstyles, designer clothes, etc. We also wear the masks of being on our best behavior, of hiding our fears behind achievements at work, or of trying our best to be popular at social events. Our entire lives are wrapped-up in jumping through hoops to please others and make ourselves acceptable. As a child, I was told by my mother that I had to be perfect or people wouldn't accept or like me. It became a mandate in my childhood mind that grew into a mental/emotional monster as I grew into adulthood. Rachel Platten has a new song, Perfect for You , that truly hits the nail on the head. Here are some of the lyrics:   “I'm flawed, I'm flawed, I know this,  You like me in small doses,  What am I supposed to do with that?  Yeah, yeah, oh oh…A nd it's true,  I can'...

Many of us suffer from frozen hearts. We are insensitive to ourselves and to others. We talk about the fact that we never seem to experience the presence of God, or our Higher Power, and that we rarely feel truly loved by God, or others. But the problem is not with our Higher Power, or with other people. The problem lies within us. As children, so many of us froze our hearts to survive in our chaotic toxic home environments. And we grew into adults without realizing that we had long ago frozen our own hearts. Recovery has made me aware of how frozen my heart has been since age four or five. And I still suffer from a frozen heart, in many ways. Rarely do I actually feel the authentic love of God for me. Intellectually I know God loves me, and everyone, but emotionally, I don’t FEEL that love. So I’ve started praying for God to thaw my heart in ways that I have not been able to do myself. In the film Frozen, the troll king tells Anna “Only an act of true love can thaw a frozen...

I have a hard time forgiving myself. Part of the problem may have to do with my codependency and the fact that, as a child, I was led to believe that I was fundamentally bad. My parents didn’t make a distinction between the person and the behavior. It was never a matter of you’ve done something bad, but I still love you. It was simply you are bad. It was never simply a matter of you’ve made a mistake. It was all about you are a mistake. My Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) undoubtably contributes to the problem of often feeling like a bad person to this very day. When I make a mistake, or am lax about doing something by the rules, or am tired of dealing with everyone else’s problems and place them on the back burner, I feel bad and guilty— obsessively. It’s a horrible feeling in my gut. It feels like death wrapping its boney fingers around my heart and squashing me from within. It’s actually how I feel today. And the difficult thing is that, although I’m guilty of negative t...

Ever find yourself in a good mood and then had one bad thought pop into your head that became a raging river of bad thoughts? I have. At any moment I can go from feeling peaceful or happy to feeling miserable— All because of one negative, fearful, self-degrading thought that snowballed. Critical self-thoughts and self-judgments account for most of our “over-thinking” misery. Over-thinking seems to be the new buzz phrase. For codependents and other addicts over-thinking leads to endless negative self-talk. Combined, the two (over-thinking and negative self-talk) are the perfect combination for emotional misery. And, of course, emotional misery is the trigger for addictive behaviors. We engage in our addictive behaviors, we “act-out” when we are in desperate need for a mood enhancer: Something that can help us escape the emotional misery our negative thoughts and self-talk have evoked. The problem with this form of escapism is that it’s false. Acting-out with alcohol, people...

Recovery is all about choosing to “DO SOMETHING” about our lives when we don’t like them. It’s about deciding we are responsible for our own happiness. It’s about choosing to be responsible enough for ourselves to make the necessary changes to make our lives better. Recovery is about doing, letting go of what we can’t do, and trusting that others can help us, including our Higher Power. Life is always a partnership. We can only do so much to make our lives worth living. And what we can’t do for ourselves, we have to entrust to God or our personal Higher Power. I remember back in the 1980s when I was wanting a new job. I prayed and prayed and nothing happened. Then I realized 1) that I didn’t really believe God wanted to help me (I wasn’t worth God’s concern); and 2) that I wasn’t hustling to get every job interview that I possibly could. Part of me didn’t expect God to help me, and the other part of me thought God should just magically drop the right job out of the sky for me!...