Own Your Personal Power: All You Need is Inside of You

Last night at my CODA meeting, one personal flaw— or character defect— that kept surfacing was the inability of codependents to own their personal power. This is a common flaw for codependents because so many of us were robbed of our personal power as children.

We weren’t allowed to be ourselves— or in some cases to even be children— so we ended up being whomever mom or dad wanted us to be. We may have also had to parent our own parents because they drove us to feel responsible for all of their unhappiness.

As a child I gave all my personal power away to my mother. I became whomever she wanted me to be by bending and twisting to constantly please her. If she was upset about something, I always felt responsible for her feelings— and for owning her feelings and making her happy.

As I grew into adulthood, this need to feel responsible for her problems expanded into a need to be responsible for EVERYONE’S problems. As a result, everyone else came first. I came last. I gave all my power and energy away to pleasing others. And sometimes I still do so today. I still feel heavy pressure inside myself to be overly responsible for everyone and everything.

Placing everyone’s else’s needs above our own is only one way of giving our personal power away. We also give our personal power away when we place more value on what others think about us than we do on what we think about ourselves.

For example, we may overhear someone speaking about us. We can’t really hear what’s being said exactly, but we’ve heard our name mentioned. Immediately, many of us assume that we are being attacked or made fun of by the people whose voices we can hear. In doing so, we make a bad assumption that demeans us and makes us feel inferior and hurt. We have just given our personal power away to others— and we have done so by making a negative assumption about ourselves. We have projected our own unhealed, bad feelings about ourselves onto a conversation we couldn’t even really hear. All we heard was someone say our name.

We don’t have to give our power away like this. We can assume that they are talking well of us. Or we can tell ourselves that it’s none of our business what other people may be saying about us— and that we don’t have to care what anyone else thinks about us. When we walk down this path, we continue to own our personal power by refusing to allow other people’s opinions of us to rule our feelings. We are just as powerless over what others think about us as they are over what we think about them.

And because we are powerless over others, we need to learn to let go of our need to feel responsible
for them and their problems. We also need to learn to let go of our need to please them and gain their approval. As America says in the song “Tin Man”— “Oz never did give nothing to the tin man that he didn’t already have.” And the same is true for us. God gave us everything we need to be whole and equal to others. No one else can give us anything we don’t already have. Believe it and stop giving your personal power over your feelings and life to others.