Self-Acceptance is the Doorway to Self-Love


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If The Eyes Had No Tears, The Soul Would Have No Rainbow

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I'm sitting in a Panera Bread in Los Angeles, eating my cinnamon scone and preparing to cut my trip here short. I'll have to return home tomorrow and then fly to Omaha, Nebraska for a funeral. A young father in his 30s died there last Friday, leaving behind a wife and three small children. There are always questions in these types of situations: Why? Why someone so young? Why someone who had a wife and kids? The "why" questions can be endless, and there's never a quantifiable answer.  I don't believe in "it was just his time" or that God called him home. There's too much cruelty to these pat answers and they make God seem like a beast. What purpose could there be behind such imagined acts of God? I see no redeeming purpose to seizing a young man from his young family. I do believe that life happens. When someone dies and there is no acceptable answer to "why," I believe it's simply the human condition. It's the way...
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If You’re Unhappy, This May Be Why

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I’ve spent most of my life trying to make other people happy because I felt responsible for their feelings. And the above quote is spot-on true. I’m the one person who’s not been happy, as a result. We are not responsible for other people’s feelings. We aren’t their savior. They are responsible for their feelings and we are responsible for ours. Yes, we can express empathy and compassion for others, but we need to stop taking on their feelings and problems as if they are our own. They aren’t. Another person’s problems and feelings affect us indirectly. Our own problems and feelings affect us directly. If we are feeling directly responsible for another person’s feeling/problems, there is something wrong with us. In other words, if a friend is going through a divorce, that is their problem; not ours. If we feel responsible for solving their problem, or for owning their feelings to the point of neglecting our own problems and feelings, we are trapped in codependent caretaki...
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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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Own What's Yours to Own

“Feeling compassion for other people is not about becoming obligated to them or feeling responsible for their lives.” Howard Falco, I AM Codependents often confuse compassion with a strong sense of obligation. When we first enter recovery, we may believe we are responsible for the lives of everyone we have grown attached to, or taken hostage. We are so used to linking our compassion for others with a deep sense of being obligated to fix their lives. Their every feeling has become our feeling and their every disappointment, failure or hang-nail has become ours to own and heal. We have made ourselves responsible for making their world all sunny bright. As a result, separating feelings of obligation from feelings of compassion can be very difficult for many newly recovery codependents. Initially, compassion without obligation seems like a cop-out. We feel as though we are letting others down by relinquishing responsibility for their lives; when, in truth, we are showing true compassio...
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