Self-Acceptance is the Doorway to Self-Love


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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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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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No One Can Calm Your Codependent Crazies, But You

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Ah, the codependent crazies. Those needy, needy feelings. I remember well the deep emotional pain in the pit of my stomach: The throbbing sting of shame, fear, loneliness and anxious desperation. Those feelings that are like fingernails on the blackboard of your soul. They eat you alive from within as they dig deeper and deeper into the black hole of your inner-emptiness. Yes, I remember them well. And I remember evenings of mental and emotional insanity-- squirming with a magazine, pacing back and forth, indulging in chocolate, chasing up and down the stairs hoping the doorbell would ring, and staring endlessly at the telephone for a sign of hope. All I needed was a call from my false higher power; a call that would help me to know that I was OK, that I was needed, that I was worth thinking about in some good way. I was dying to be emotionally caressed on the head like a poodle desperate for the attention of his master. And certainly I had made that other person into my mas...
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In Recovery We Learn That Our Self-Worth Never Depends on Another Person

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Actually, I think a better spin on the above quote would be “your self-respect and self-worth never depend on another person.” Why? Because codependents make another person into their Higher Power, just like alcoholics make liquor into their Higher Power. And when we are constantly choosing people— mostly toxic people— to be our false Higher Power we generally make the mistakes listed below: We hand over all of our self-worth and we’ll-being to another person, then we start manipulating, or trying to change them into making us happy (instead of being responsible for our own happiness), we forgive them over and over every time they lie to or abuse us in other ways, because we trust their words while ignoring their actions, and we go running back to them over and over because we have become so addicted to our need for their approval.  In recovery we learn that we don’t need anyone’s approval, especially a toxic person’s, except our own. Recovery teaches us to turn ou...
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