Soulshine

It’s taken me a long time to take my power back from my thoughts. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, combined with codependency, ensured an endless flow of negative thoughts that engulfed my mind and determined my behavior for years. But things have recently changed. I’ve finally worked Steps 6 and 7 successfully. I’ve acknowledged that I no longer want negative “what if this or that happens” thinking to control my mind, having endless terrifying power over me. And I’ve sincerely surrendered it to my Higher Power, who has taken it from me. Hurray! Now that I am no longer giving power to fearful thoughts, they no longer have any power over me. Next year I’ll be starting a new job position in a new city. I’ll be moving from the West coast to the East coast of the United States. I will be working with people I don’t know and I will have no family or friends in my new city of ministry. Am I filled with fear? Are troubling “what if” dramas running through my mind? NO! Everything

Looking back over 2018, I realize that this has been a great year of inner-conversion for me. There are several lessons that I’ve learned through Recovery, and some of the most important ones, have incorporated themselves into my thinking and behavior this year. Here are the lessons that are making my life so much better… 1.      Attention Does Not Equal Affection : Growing up as an isolated person who felt ultimately unlovable, I grew to desperately desire affection. Most people seemed to avoid me, or so I thought. Truth is, my behavior and body language told people to stay away from me. When someone was willing to have enough compassion for me to push past my steel-wall barriers, I immediately mistook their kind attention for true affection. I was desperate for any small crumbs of affection that I could find. So I immediately mistook their kindness. Instead of seeing that these people were simply being nice, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that they wanted to be

“No, my name’s not Baby, it’s Janet; Miss Jackson, if you’re nasty.” Janet Jackson Boundaries are essential to recovery from codependency or any addictive behavior. Having boundaries means we learn to say no when something is unacceptable to us. We were never designed to please anyone, aside from our Creator. And yet those of us who grew-up people-pleasing everyone have a hard time learning to say NO in recovery. A boundary tells another person what is acceptable to us and what is NOT acceptable to us. Deep down inside, we know our truth. Our feelings tell us when we are allowing someone else to overstep our boundaries. We immediately feel violated and resentful. Recovery isn’t possible without boundaries. Whenever I feel afraid of alienating someone who is treading on my boundaries, I play Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” through my head. I love the line “No, my name’s not Baby, it’s Janet; Miss Jackson, if you’re nasty.” This quote sets a perfect boundary. Jackson tells us wh

Thoughts and feelings are deeply connected. Bad thoughts often prompt bad feelings, and sometimes bad feelings can lead to an avalanche of bad thoughts. Either way, we need to stop fighting unwanted thoughts and feelings. Why? First, when we fight them, we give them power. The harder we fight them, the more power they gain over us. Second, there’s a reason why unwanted thoughts and feelings arise. We need to consider the fact that bad thoughts and feelings may surface because they want to be released from our systems. Sometimes these unwelcome visitors have been buried inside of us for years— and they want to be set free. And, of course, we want them to leave us. They won’t leave if we fight them or emotionally medicate them away with our favorite addictive behavior. We have to just let them be until they pass through us and are released into nothingness. So now, when I’m faced with thoughts or feelings I don’t like, I simply let them be. I give them space, but I don’t a

It’s amazing. All of my life people have told me I look so calm, when in reality I have always been overwhelmed by a hurricane of horrific thoughts. Worry has been my constant companion, as a result of growing up in a household where there was constant mental and emotional chaos. And, of  course, having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder made it all worse. This constant chaos, mixed with my OCD, put me into an ever vigilant fight or flight mode. Looking back, I can see now that I have almost always been trapped in my sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight), and have rarely been in touch with my parasympathetic nervous system (which actually allows us to rest and be calm.) All of this was fueled by the fact that I never felt safe— at home, school, walking down a street, at church, at a shopping mall, etc. No place on earth felt safe to me. A doctor friend of mine recently told me that there are actually exercises he uses in his practice to help people get out of fight or

Every recovering person carries the heavy burden of inner-shame. We were shamed as children and it easily enslaved us into feeling very bad about ourselves. To this day, we are still struggling with identifying and disabling the shame that tells us we are worthless mistakes. In order to eliminate this shame, we need to identify the source of it and what it is that keeps stoking it inside of us. The source of my shame is pretty easy to identify: My parents, certain teachings of the Church (or the way they were skewed by various authority figures), bullies, teachers, certain societal norms, etc. But identifying what inside of me keeps stoking my shame is more difficult. Turns out, for many of us the truth of what’s stoking our shame is this: Someone else’s rules. I now understand that I have continued to shame myself, just like my mother did, because I am still living by many of the rules she forced upon me as God given truth. In reality, these rules were my mother’s truth, not

Being inside my head has never been a nice, safe place to be. Instead, it’s been a place of perpetual horror overrun with fear, dread, doom and anxiety. If nothing bad was literally happening in the real world around me, I’d always find a quick way to create a terrifying drama in my head.  Recovery has given me the awareness to realize how I've learned to thrive on chaos since childhood. And I can now see how much my subconscious mind, in particular, works against me. It’s easier to recognize conscious negative thoughts, but extremely difficult to have control over the negative subconscious tapes that are constantly replaying through my head. Since I’m not always consciously aware of subconscious thoughts, I’ve decided to develop a simple mantra to retrain my brain. That mantra is “My subconscious mind is now working FOR me. All my subconscious thoughts bring healing and wholeness.” Right now, everything is actually going my way in the real world. Under the direction o

I believe that so many of us have a hard time loving ourselves because none of us are able to love as God does. And that’s because many of us grew up under the scourge of a religion that taught us that God loves us based on our behavior. And this very vision of God was more often than not reinforced by our parents. We weren’t able to actually see God in daily action, but we were able to witness the behavioral patterns of our parents. No doubt that most of our parents loved us unconditionally deep down inside, but their behavior rarely reflected this love. Instead we experienced the very human side of our parents; the side that was easily frustrated and angry; and the side that was quick to lash out at us with threatening, angry comments like “I love you when you’re good, but I don’t love you when you’re bad.” This type of verbal abuse, combined with dysfunctional behaviors like the silent treatment, led us to believe that love was based on what we did or did not do right

The real problem for so many people who suffer from addictive behaviors is that we refuse, or simply don’t know how, to love ourselves. Many of us know that self-love is the cure and we know that self-love leads to good self-care. Yet time and again we continually fall into the trap of self-loathing. Self-loathing is our default setting. We naturally go there. It’s as comfortable as a warm wooly blanket on a winter night. And it’s as self destructive as wrapping ourselves in that blanket when we know we are severely allergic to wool. Yet, no matter how much it hurts, we still choose to wallow in it. Over and again, I have encouraged many people to be responsible for their own happiness. I’ve encouraged them to “take the actions required for” their happiness. Actions such as monitoring their thoughts, disengaging from negative thoughts and replacing them with kind thoughts about themselves. I’ve reminded people that feelings are necessary to process life, to accept all of

The above quote is so true! Most of the stress I experience is a byproduct of my thoughts. Rarely does stress ever arise from what’s actually happening in the present moment. For one thing, I’d have to fully BE in the present moment to actually experience it, and my lifetime pattern of behavior has been to BE in my head. Living in our heads is epidemic. I don’t know many people who haven’t learned to separate themselves from the present reality by living in the Neverland of their minds. And yet, the Neverland in our heads is a place where we are constantly being clawed by Captain Hook. How many times do we have to walk the plank before we finally realize that living in our heads is a big mistake? The answer to that question probably lies in just how trapped we are in our addictive ways of thinking and acting. At some point in our lives, it was safer to leave reality behind and to live in our heads. Today, however, that is definitely no longer true for me. The present moment

Thoughts have always been a problem for me because I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Rarely have my thoughts been on my side. Instead of being sources of healing for me, they’ve been sources of self-destruction. Until now. Over the past few years, I’ve realized just how powerful my thoughts are. They can cause turmoil in my body in ways I never realized. Since 2005, I’ve been coping with acid reflux. I started with the over the counter medications, but then progressed to using prescription strength, which worried me because of the possible negative side effects. Those possible side effects made my OCD crazier, so four weeks ago I stopped taking the medication. Instead I’ve taken one Pepcid in the morning and one in the evening— if I’ve needed to! Did I really have an acid reflux problem all those years, or was it my self-destructive thinking that upset my gastric system and caused me unnecessary problems? Seems it was the latter. I’m totally amazed that I’ve been able to g

I don’t have a green thumb and have never gardened. But I’ve certainly heard enough about how plants actually do grow when people speak kindly to them. So I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that plants also die when people say ugly things to them. It’s about time that we codependents stop talking ugly to ourselves. It’s impossible to be happy or grow in any positive way when we are consistently hard on ourselves with our words and in our thoughts. Harsh thoughts affect our bodies and thus our physical health as well as our mental and emotional health. I know this is true because anytime I’m being hard on myself with ugly thoughts, my digestion problems go through the roof. When I start speaking kindly to myself, my whole body calms down and I feel fine. My digestion problems diminish and my blood pressure returns to normal. It makes no sense to choose to punish ourselves with ugly self-thoughts. We want others to speak kindly to us, right? Then we need to be the first to do so

It’s pretty easy for me to recognize and avoid other people’s drama today. I now know when something is not my circus and not my monkeys. But managing and avoiding my OWN circus and my own monkeys is a different story. I was watching a tv show last night and immediately recognized how the lead character was creating his own drama. The frightening thing was that I saw myself in him TOTALLY! The dramas he created for himself, and inflicted on his friends, were the exact same ones that I get entranced in: relationship issues, make believe health problems, workplace drama, etc. I sat basically watching myself on tv and I was horrified. The past two weeks my OCD has been overactive and has had me acting out all sorts of health-related dramas. I’ve magnified little things and turned them into gut-churning fears and traumas—all at my own expense. And, even though I’ve kept it all pretty much to myself, after watching tv last night, I realize how much I’ve gushed my little health dram

In his book “I Am,” Howard Falco does a masterful job of pointing out how powerful internalized “I Am” statements are. Negative “I Am” statements filter through our conscious minds and embed themselves in the subconscious mind. As a result, they become tapes that play repeatedly through our heads. No wonder we often feel so bad about ourselves. This process is made even worse for addictive persons who also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). OCD makes intrusive, negative thoughts almost impossible to control. The thoughts rob victims of their personal power over not only the snowballing thoughts but the emotions that accompany them. Life becomes a nightmare of horrible “I Am” thoughts and desperate feelings. When my OCD kicks in uncontrollably, I get knots in my stomach, shooting pains in my chest and my indigestion goes off the scale. If panic sets in, I get nauseous and start hyperventilating. I’ve had a bad bout with the OCD over the last week, but I think I made it o

Wouldn’t it be great if our brains had on/off switches that allowed us to turn off all negative thoughts? Great? It would be awesome. Almost all of my personal misery is produced by negative, obsessive-compulsive thoughts that I often cannot control. I realize that, as a safety mechanism, I learned as a child to live inside my head. The real world, and so many of the people in it, wasn’t safe. Living in my head seemed safer, and it probably was until I grew into adulthood. Living in my head began to work against me in my teen years. Yes, it kept out much of the cruelty of the real world, but it also created a fearful, paranoid very small world inside of me. And because I unknowingly had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), that world became a nightmare of compulsively reliving  bad experiences and creating imagined scenarios that were equally as unpleasant (“What if” thinking). There is a reason why animals are happier than humans. It’s true that they stay in the present mom

Losing our attachment to toxic people is a great feeling. But an even better feeling comes from losing our attachment to toxic thoughts about ourselves. In recovery, I’ve found it much easier to recognize and release toxic people than I have found it to recognize and release toxic internal poisons. Toxic thoughts are so entrenched and they have so many toxic suppressed feelings attached to them. Toxic thoughts are like an endless chain-gang, and each thought has a ball and chain attached to it. The ball is the bomb-of-a-negative feeling that’s constantly imploding within us every time a certain negative thought resurfaces. I’ve been working for years to recognize my toxic, self-deprecating thoughts and to face the feelings that are attached to them. Still, I struggle to be free. Every time I think I’ve dealt with the thoughts and feelings that swirl around “not being good enough” in multiple ways, I end up bitten in the butt again. Last Saturday was great. I felt free to “fe

I’ve never, ever been in love with my life. In loathe with my life, yes. But never in love, until now. It’s amazing how life-changing a movie and music can be when we really “get” the messages underneath the surface. On the surface, the film “I Feel Pretty” seems like another tween comedy targeting female audiences. But underneath some of the raunchy humor is a very serious message: You determine your happiness based in the choices you make and the beliefs you choose to adopt as truths; especially the beliefs about yourself. Renee (played by Amy Schumer) is a young woman who hates her outer appearance. And like so many of us, she has accepted the chains that society/family/religion place upon all of us. Renee doesn’t like her face or her larger than the “norm” body. She’s allowed the world to tell her she is unacceptable as she is— and she has chosen to believe what the world around her is saying: “You have no value if you aren’t drop-dead gorgeous and thin as a rail.” Both

All of my life I have projected my negative, abusive thoughts about myself onto others. I’ve long been plagued by a fear of being myself because I assumed that everyone saw me the same way I saw myself: Unlovable in every way. I thought I was a mistake who had no right to even exist. And everyone I saw, saw me in the same way. They all knew my shame, my worthlessness. Is there anyone who’s meaner, or more abusive, to you than you are? If you suffer from addictive behaviors, then the answer is obvious: No. There is no one whose nastier to you than you are. I relate. The question we need to ask ourselves now, is “Why?” Why are we so ugly to ourselves when we don’t have to be. Maybe it’s habitual for us. We’re so use to beating ourselves up that the self-abuse plays constantly through our subconscious minds. But it doesn’t have to remain habitual. Self-abuse is a choice. We can choose to accept ourselves just as we are, or we can choose to continue torturing ourselves. I have m

"I should've guessed that you would only ever hurt yourself, I should've guessed there's nothing I could do to stop you..." I Should've Guessed , RAC featuring Speak Truthfully, in life there is NOTHING we can do to stop someone else from hurting themselves, aside from prayer. We can surrender our powerlessness over the person to our Higher Power, and we can ask our Higher Power to help that person. Our Higher Power can do what we are unable to do.  Too many codependents, even after years of recovery, still feel the need to rescue other needy people. We want to stop them from hurting themselves. We want to stop their drinking, or their drugging, or their sexually acting out, but we are powerless to do so. We feel caught between a rock and a hard place: If we try to rescue them, we will be falling back into our own codependent craziness, and if we let go of the deep desire to rescue them, we feel guilty. We feel like bad people. We don'

An underlying need for the average codependent is to meet someone who will make them OK with themselves. We all want someone who will complete us by loving us into loving ourselves. Recovery teaches us that this is an impossible fantasy. In reality, there is no prince or princess to rescue us Cinderellas/Cinderfellas from our loathsome selves. Yes. In recovery we learn this truth but we are still desperate for that special someone to love us. Well, imagine this: What if we are the special someone who needs to love us first? How about we make the effort to choose to reconnect with our past, not to punish ourselves (we’re champions at that), but to better understand how we need to start loving ourselves. Our past can point out to us the many ways in which we were deprived of the love we needed. Instead of lamenting the lack of love we received from important others (and punishing ourselves over it), why can’t we begin to love ourselves in the very ways we wanted our parents, fam

Most every addict can agree with the above quote. The vast majority of our battles are inside our heads. Even real life battles often start off in our heads. We then project them onto the people around us and create a drama that wouldn’t have existed at all if we weren’t constantly at war with ourselves. I am constantly feeling ill-at-ease with myself. I look in the mirror and see a fat man with chicken legs. Only I see it. I know in reality I’m not fat, but when I look in the mirror I see the battle that I have constantly waged against myself. I don’t see what other people see when they look at me. The good news is that most of this self-deprivation is only in my subconscious mind today. It’s dismissed by my conscious mind. That’s a step in the right direction. But I still have to face the uncomfortable feelings that arise from subconscious thoughts. My goal is to reach the day when both my conscious mind and subconscious mind are equally on my side. I know it’s going to ta

Every single one of us is “currently under construction.” In many ways we are like ancient buildings that took centuries to construct: Each day we are in the process of becoming complete, but we are still under construction. And we won’t truly be complete until we breathe our last breath in this life. It’s easier to be patient with ourselves— as well as being kinder— if we realize and acknowledge that we are continually works in progress. So many of us demand complete perfection of ourselves as if we were created complete and whole at birth. We were NOT! Becoming complete is a lifetime growth process, and becoming perfect is a twisted fantasy. We will never be perfect. No one ever will be. The sooner we accept this fact, the sooner we gain serenity because realizing perfection is impossible allows us to finally grow comfortable in our skin. Instead of counting flaws today, how about we count the ways we have grown in recovery? Recently I’ve had to learn to stand up to bullies.

I finally learned the above lesson this week. After giving a talk, two people came up, backed me against the wall and verbally assaulted me. I took a stand on a social issue; the same stand that leaders of my Church had recently taken. These two persons are also members of the same Church. And because they didn’t like the message coming from above, they chose to assault the messenger. Sadly, ministers across all faith groups are faced with this same type of verbal assault. At the time it happened, I was caught off guard and wasn’t even fully aware of what was happening to me, or how I was feeling in the process. My therapist clarified it for me the next day. He said “You were bullied by these people.” I quickly realized he was right, and I told him I felt like a five year old who was being scolded by both parents simultaneously. Then I realized that I’d been participating in this type of abuse since I was a small child. I grew into adulthood allowing people to bully me because

We can’t fully understand our purpose in life until we are willing to face our fears and push past them. Recovery— and any successful endeavor in life— calls us to move beyond our comfort zones. It’s often uncomfortable telling our deepest, darkest secrets to a therapist or to members of a recovery group. Recovery requires us to be vulnerable as we change our ways of thinking, behaving and interacting with others. Awareness forces us to make a choice: We can choose to stay stuck, where we feel comfortable but miserable, or we can choose to move forward into a dark newness that will quickly bring new light into our lives. The first option is easy. The second option if lifegiving. Easy is a cop out. It’s a choice to merely exist. Lifegiving is adventurous. It’s a choice to step away from merely existing and to live through experiencing the unfamiliar. It’s reaching for the stars, knowing that with the help of our Higher Power, we can dance among those stars to our heart’s content.

“Me, too” has been a continual stumbling block for me. It’s always OK for OTHER people to be happy, to enjoy their work, to enjoy good foods, to get plenty of sleep and exercise, to have play time and to enjoy pampering themselves with niceties. But it’s NEVER been OK for me— at least not inside of my head. Recovery has taught me that only I am responsible for myself. And that I am ONLY responsible for my life. Just as I am responsible for my life, every other person in this world is responsible for their own lives. I am not responsible for them and they are not responsible for me. This means that only I can make myself happy. Only I can decide what’s good for me and what’s not. Only I am responsible for meeting my health, economic and social/spiritual needs. In other words, if I don’t take care of me, who’s going to do it? NO ONE. Because no one is responsible for my life except me— and my Higher Power. When I was in Rome last month, I felt guilty about having fun, about en

I really don’t have to say much about the above quote. It says it all and it’s so true. We are too often taught faulty ways of thinking as children. So many of us get the wrong message at very young ages: Love is about finding the right person to love you. Looking back I realize I wasted many years trying to find that “right” person— the one who could love me into loving myself— instead of trying to BE that “right” person myself. It never occurred to me that I needed to love myself, nurture myself and accept myself enough to become the right person— the person I really needed most in my life. After all, what is my life without me? Now I know that I’m what’s been missing from my own life for years. My life is empty without me and without my spiritual Higher Power. This is true for all of us.  Once We find ourselves, become the “right” person God intended us to be, and become the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with, then we attract others into our lives who can co

I attended a men’s Ala-Non meeting on Monday and one of the men said he believed alcoholism was rooted in self-contempt. I’ve always believed that all addictions are based in poor self-love. Of course, self-contempt is a leading cause of poor self-love. Self-contempt is more than a lack of self-acceptance. It’s self-bullying. It’s an expression of self-hatred. And certainly, there’s little to no self-love present when we are tearing ourselves apart with self-contempt. Self-contempt is a process of playing prosecuting attorney, hanging judge and angry jury against our very selves. It’s total self-persecution and for many of us, it happens daily with no mercy or hint of self-forgiveness. Our self-contempt may be behavior we learned as children from adults who also persecuted themselves, but from the time we became adults ourselves, we have been solely responsible for our own self-contempt. We can’t be blaming others for what we continually do to poison our own self-love. True,

No one has to be Christian to understand this quote. Our Higher Power knows the worst about each of us, and yet our Higher Power loves us endlessly. Many of us understand this, but our addictive patterns of thinking keep us from feeling that great love of a God, or our Higher Power. As a result, many of us suffer from self-imposed guilt. There are two forms of guilt: 1) the natural guilt we feel when we have done or said something hurtful or wrong; and 2) self-imposed guilt that results from our inability to forgive and love ourselves. Natural guilt exists to tell us we have caused harm to someone, and to prompt us to take responsibility for what we have said or done that was harmful. Once we make amends, natural guilt subsides. Self-imposed guilt persists after we have made amends. It’s a biproduct of the addictive personality’s inner-critic, which is that internal voice that is constantly telling us we are worthless mistakes. As children we learned to believe that most every