Soulshine

“Happiness is a byproduct of the way we live our own lives, not the way others live theirs.” Karen Casey , Codependence and the Power of Detachment Detachment is a major buzzword in codependent recovery circles. So what is detachment? It’s the process of realizing that we are enmeshed in the lives of others, admitting that we are powerless over them and then making the conscious choice to separate or detach ourselves from the people whose lives we’ve been trying to live. Part of losing ourselves in those people involves the need to control them. We mistakenly believe that if we can control them and make them be and do exactly what we want, we will finally be happy. This type of codependent thinking, believing that our happiness is the byproduct of how other people live their lives, is modeled perfectly by Hannah, the character from the movie Pilgrimage that I wrote about yesterday. She was so enmeshed in her son Jim, so caught up in the belief that her happiness was ...

Let’s look a little deeper into the character of Jimmy Seymour from the film Broadway Serenade . Once Jimmy realizes that he never lost Mary Hale, his many attempts at self-sabotage unfold before his eyes. Jimmy is able to see clearly for the first time that it wasn’t Mary who had stopped loving him. It was Jimmy. He had stopped loving himself many years ago; he had abandoned himself, lost himself. He then acted-out in ways that forced Mary and others to abandon him as well. Jimmy had accused Mary of being unfaithful to him, when deep down he really knew that she was true to him. The real problem was that Jimmy was never true to Jimmy. And as a result, Jimmy was filled with self-loathing and many personal insecurities about himself. He couldn’t trust in Jimmy and so he couldn’t trust in Mary or anyone else. He was overly critical of himself and this had made him into a very angry young man. His anger then spilled over onto Mary and others, alienating them further from Jimmy. ...