Codependents Invite People to Treat Them as Badly as They Treat Themselves



Recovery has taught me many lessons about codependency. The greatest lesson has been that I must fully accept myself, just as I imperfectly am, in order to authentically love myself. The more I love the person God created me to be, instead of hating that person, the more I attract people into my life who truly love perfectly-imperfect me, too.

Total self-acceptance means we have to let go of who other people told us we “should be.” We also have to let go of all of the negative judgments we’ve made against ourselves because we never could live up to being the person others told us we should be. 

If we refuse to work toward unconditional self-acceptance of ourselves, we will never love ourselves. And it’s REALLY true: “The consequence for the absence of self-love is loosing ourselves to people who don’t love” us either. 

Every active codependent has spent their live accepting the crumbs of love they thought they deserved, because they refused to believe that they were worth more than a few crumbs of love. And that belief was based in self-loathing. Self-loathing must be converted into self-loving. 

It’s only when we truly accept and love ourselves as we are, that we will stop looking outside ourselves for approval and happiness. Self-love enables us to possess both self-approval and self-happiness. And it changes our perspective so that we start looking for people in this world who will compliment our self approval, self love and self happiness with their own. We will truly love them for who they are and they will truly love us just the way we are, too.

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