Soulshine

One of the most important things about attending a recovery group, like Alcoholics Anonymous or Codependents Anonymous, is that you get to tell your story. Our personal stories are very important. They represent a life that is like no other. Yes, we all have overlapping experiences in life, but no one else has ever experienced life in exactly the same way as we have experienced it. We have all experienced painful situations in our lives, but no one has experienced emotional, mental, physical or spiritual pain as we have. So it’s important that we share our stories, the good and the bad, with people who are safe. Telling our story is scary territory for many of us. First off, we grew up with the unwritten rule that we are forbidden to tell our family story. We were told things like “What happens in this house stays here. You understand that?!!!” Or “We don’t air our dirty family laundry, so keep your mouth zipped!!!” As a result, so many of us learned to clam-up and keep every...

In his book Loveability , Robert Holden says “the basic fear ‘I am not loveable’ can play itself out in so many ways… ‘There is something wrong with me,’ ‘I am unseen,’ ‘I am not understood,’ ‘I am incapable,’ ‘I am not safe,’ ‘I am not interesting,’ ‘I am all alone,’ or ‘I don’t matter.” Over the course of my life I have experienced all of these fears. Likewise over the past 18 years of my recovery, I have encountered countless numbers of people who have suffered greatly from the same fears. Anytime we believe we are not good enough to be loveable—not even to be loveable to our parents or God—our thinking will begin to nosedive off a cliff into total self-annihilation.  For me, believing I was “not good enough” led me to believe that I needed to be invisible. It seemed logical to me that if people couldn’t see me, they also couldn’t defile or hurt me: They couldn’t criticize or bully what they could not see. So I worked hard as a child to be silent, to breathe quietl...