Soulshine

One thing codependents need to learn to say is “It’s my life. Don’t you forget it!” Too often we have given our personal power to be our true selves away to others. We may still be whomever mom or dad wants us to be, or whomever friends want us to be, etc. Our Higher Power brought us into this world and it is our God-given right to be the very persons God created us to be. That means we wear the clothes that we want to wear; we have our hair cut the way we like it; we read the books or watch the TV shows or movies we want to watch; we eat the foods and indulge in the hobbies that we like, etc. We are all called to be ourselves. If someone doesn’t like our choices or like who we truly are, we don’t have to care and we certainly don’t have to change for them to gain their approval. If they don’t like us just the way we are, they will never be able to love us. So we really don’t need them in our lives. Learn to set the boundary “It’s my life. I choose to be who I am. Please res...

“Loving on our hands and knees, always trying hard to please, never in my life have I questioned or discovered why.” This is the chorus to China Crisis’ 1985 single “You Did Cut Me.” Anyone who is codependent can relate to every word in the chorus to this song. I spent 30 some years bending over backwards “trying hard to please.” I begged for love on my hands and knees by care taking and people pleasing endlessly. And all I received in return was perpetual requests for help, and shaming if I said “No!” Never did “I question or discover why” I embraced these bad patterns of behavior until I went to therapy in 1995. That’s when I discovered that I had almost every known symptom of codependency. But I didn’t discover what the real difference was between codependent behavior and the natural want to help others until the following year. And how do we distinguish the difference between being codependent and being helpful? We examine out motivation for our behavior. In the height of...

   There can be no self-love without self-acceptance. The two are directly linked and self-acceptance— complete and unconditional— must come first. It’s our ability to accept ourselves 100%, just the way we are, that produces a healthy self-love. This fact is presented beautifully in the 2007 film Penelope, in which Christina Ricci plays a character, Penelope, born with the facial features of a pig.     From the day Penelope is born, her parents refuse to accept her as she is. As a result, she learns to reject herself over her facial features as well. By doing so, she has accepted a curse that has been placed on her and she has given the curse total power over her by refusing to accept and love herself as she is. The curse is only broken when she finally decides she's happy with herself despite having the facial features of a pig. Self-acceptance is the key that can break any curse we have placed on ourselves as well.    So what are you ...

Many codependents have a problem with needing to be right and a problem with forgiving. These problems begin inside ourselves. First of all, we aren’t very good at having empathy and compassion for ourselves and our own brokenness. As a result, we rarely look beyond the surface of other people to see into their personal brokenness in order to have empathy and compassion for them. This contributes to an attitude of “us against the world.” We then become more concerned with being right, in order to addictively boost our poor self-esteem, than we become interested in having authentic relationships with others. When we develop a “my way or the highway” means of thinking, we engage in arguments with people, even if we don’t like confrontation. And it’s more important that we win the argument than it is for us to keep the friendship. In other words, being right becomes more important to us than people are. This is why it’s so important in Recovery to develop a sense of true empath...

ANSWERED PRAYER by ABC The truth about codependency is this: Every active codependent lives by the one false and highly flawed belief, that another person can be his/her Higher Power. I spent much of my life desperately searching for the person who was going to be my answered prayer. That person was going to sweep me off my feet, rescue me from my miserable self, and love me so intensely that I would eventually learn to love the person I loathed most in this world: Me. Recovery is a difficult lesson for every codependent. It teaches us that no person can be our true Higher Power. It teaches us that no one is responsible for making us happy or loving us into loving ourselves. And it teaches us that no one person can be our “answered prayer,” aside from ourselves. Even years into recovery, we can have those days when we wish someone would say to us “I love, I love, I love you; I need, I need, I need you; let me be your answered prayer,” but deep down what we’re really experi...