Who Will Rescue You?

“Who’ll be there when your heart hits the ground?”

The Bible (band), Honey Be Good (1988)

As recovering codependents, we have learned that there’s one essential person who has to be present for us whenever our hearts hit the ground. And that one essential person is “me.” It’s also essential that we have a strong Higher Power there to comfort and strengthen us.

Prior to recovery, the average codependent is rarely present for themselves. That’s because most of us learned to abandon ourselves as children. Our focus never looked inward after our self-abandonment. Instead, we constantly looked outward expecting that there should be someone else to rescue us when we hit the ground. Sometimes we were able to find someone sympathetic to our plight, but they were never able to satisfy the aching need inside of us, much less rescue us. Why? Because the person we really needed to rescue us was the person we never looked to: Ourselves.

As long as we remained in a state of self-abandonment, we perpetuated an inner-emptiness. By abandoning ourselves, we created a huge hole in our souls. It wasn’t a God hole. God wasn’t missing because God had never abandoned us. Others may have abandoned us, like mom or dad, but that wasn’t what was causing our greatest pain. Our greatest pain was caused by the fact that we, ourselves, were missing from our own lives. We weren’t there for ourselves and so we offered ourselves little to no comfort or support. This was the real cause of our great emotional pain.

Recovery teaches us that we have to be present to ourselves. We must reclaim the self that we abandoned and we must grow into loving and cherishing that very self—the only self we have. Once we reclaim ourselves through being kind to ourselves and we grow to love who we are, the soul-hole we created through self-abandonment begins to shrink. The more we come to love ourselves, the smaller the hole becomes and the less we ache inside.

It’s much easier to face having our hearts hit the ground when we know how to love ourselves through any hurt or disappointment. Once we are present to ourselves, we will also feel the fact that our Higher Power is also present to us during any grieving process we may face. And we can better allow others who truly love us to be present for us too. We’ll allow them to comfort us through simply validating our pain. We won’t need them to rescue us because we will have rightly rescued ourselves as soon as our hearts hit the ground by loving ourselves through the pain.