Soulshine

Forever bitter, or eventually better? The choice is truly ours. When I first entered Recovery for codependency in 1995, it didn't take me long to feel very bitter and angry toward my parents and our entire nuclear family structure. It was polluted with addictive behaviors. I had learned all of these behaviors from my parents. Back in 1995, I was in my 30s and angry as hell with my parents. I was even angry with my mother, from whom I had learned all of my codependency, even though she had been deceased for two years. I said angrily at a CODA meeting "They screwed-up my entire childhood, teen years and much of my young adult life! I am so angry with them. Why should I have to pay the price of doing all of this recovery stuff for something that I'm not guilty of? It was taught to me! I didn't choose it! I didn't know I even had a choice!" Others at the meeting understood how I felt. And they congratulated me for getting in touch with my feelings and...

It's so true: We only have one life to live-- OURS. And we have a choice everyday. We can choose to work our recovery programs, to consciously change our thinking and behaviors; or we can choose to stop working to improve our lives and regress into the old misery we have so desperately wanted to escape. So how do I want to spend the rest of my life? I want to love myself unconditionally and to stop hating myself. I know learning to love myself unconditionally will help me to accept and love others unconditionally. All of my relationships will improve. I will choose healthier people to engage with and our relationships will be between equals. I am tired of running after people who don't see me. I am always attracted to the most emotionally unavailable and neediest people. After 22 years of Recovery, this is an instinctual battle I have to face every single day. Only through working my CODA program can I consciously choose to no longer engage in relationships with e...

Back in 2004, I was directing a retreat called "Open Up Your Heart and Let Yourself Out" at the Serra Retreat House in Malibu, California. While perusing through their bookstore, I came across the book "The Addictive Personality" by Craig Nakken. As I read through portions of the book, I felt fear, trepidation and ultimately-- resistance. I immediately wanted to put the book down and never look at it again. But after a few minutes, I picked the book back up and when I realized how strongly I was feeling resistance to what I was reading, I realized that resistance had a positive message for me. I traced the feeling of resistance back to denial. This book was challenging the denial that I was still trapped in. Yes, I had been in recovery for codependence for several years at this point, and I understood that I was powerless over other people. But what I hadn't owned up to were my two primary side addictions, which I turned to when I felt codependently ov...

Self-love is a tough one for most everyone who enters a Recovery program. So many of us as children were taught, or programmed, to loath ourselves. We were constantly criticized by our parents and rarely, if ever, received positive recognition. We were taught by them that we were not valuable, that we did not count and that we were basically unlovable.  Growing up in my own household as a child, I learned I was lovable if I did all of the right things to please my parents, but otherwise, I was NOT lovable. Love had to be earned and it could be withdrawn at any second of any day. This led to a fear of abandonment as well as self-loathing inside of me.  Life became a hell of emotional instability for me. One day I might be lovable in the morning, but by afternoon, I was getting the silent treatment or hearing words like "I'm ashamed to even call you my son!" As an adult I firmly believed I needed someone who could love me unconditionally into loving mysel...

    Addicts typically engage in self-sabotage. This behavior is based in our dire need for chaos and drama. So many of us were raised in families where there was constant chaos, endless drama and very little—if any—stability. As we grew older and developed addictive personalities, we also developed an incessant need for self-sabotage by way of chaos and drama. As adults, we often times find ourselves split between loathing the chaos/drama and desperately needing it. We are split because we have two personalities: Our natural-born personality and our unnatural addictive personality. On a conscious level, our natural personality is tired of chaos and drama. But on a subconscious level, our addictive personality is thriving on creating as much chaos and drama as possible. We are thus often times conditioned for daily chaos and drama. And when they don’t naturally exist, we will create them for ourselves—and everyone else in our lives. There are a plethora of ways in whi...

It may be a recovery cliche, but it is certainly true: Codependent people do not make friends, or lovers, they take hostages. Whenever we experience that truly needy feeling, that desperate desire to cling to someone, to have ALL of their attention, we have taken them hostage in our minds and hearts. This is when we need to find our way out of the fog by surrendering to our Higher Power and by attending a CODA or Al-Anon meeting. The spirit we experience within the group will help to bring us back to mental and emotional balance, to sanity.

      Over the past 15 years I’ve come to value the power of setting boundaries. For many a year, I’ve joked about going home for my “annual dysfunctional family Christmas.” Family gatherings, for any reason (holidays, weddings, etc.), were often painful because I either didn’t know how to set boundaries, or didn’t feel worthy of setting them, much less having them respected. But in recent years that has changed. I decided a few years back that I would no longer be party to negativity at family gatherings. Our family has long been divided by religious beliefs, political leanings and various levels of self-righteousness, as many families are; and I no longer wanted to participate. So I set the boundaries that I would no longer participate in political or religious conversations. Instead, I urged that we talk about those things that unite us and bring harmony, instead of those things that divide us. Of course I couldn’t enforce these boundaries on anyone but mysel...

Sometimes in CODA meetings we allow ourselves to be bothered by someone else who attends the same meeting. We then fixate on that person until we decide that we aren’t going to the meeting anymore because that person bothers us. This is a cop-out on our behalf. It is actually our subconscious choice to ditch recovery in favor of relapsing.                          Why? Because no one can truly bother us unless we choose to allow them to do so. The first recovery lesson we receive In Step One is that we are “powerless over other people.” It’s the addictive part of us that wants to control and change other people to please ourselves. If I am bothered by someone in a meeting it’s because I’m refusing to admit that I am powerless over them. If something about them bothers me, I am choosing to let it bother me. And if I’m thinking about leaving the meeting permanently...

According to author Rita Mae Brown “a controller doesn’t trust his/her ability to live through the pain and chaos of life.” Brown then goes on to say that “there is no life without pain just as there is no art without submitting to chaos.” Anyone who has ever suffered from codependency knows the fear of facing pain and chaos. And we codependents certainly do a masterful job of trying to control life in regards to emotional pain and daily chaos. My question, however, is this: Do we try to control life to avoid chaos and the pain it causes, or do we try to control life to ensure chaos and the pain it causes? I think we are often trapped between both the need to avoid and the need to create chaos and pain. After all, many codependents willfully choose to engage in relationships with people who are toxic for them. We invite chaos and pain into our lives based in our need to repeat the childhood patterns of chaos and pain that we are so familiar with. And yet once we have...

“I didn’t know I was broken until I wanted to change.” Bleachers, I Wanna Get Better (2014) No one suffering from codependency, or any other addictive personality defect, knows that they are “broken” until one day they decide they need to change. That day happened to me in early October of 1995. Prior to that day, I had no idea that I was the one with the problem. I knew I was rarely happy and I knew that most all of my relationships had a pattern of falling apart. But I thought it was always the fault of the other person and that fact that they refused to change in the many ways that I insisted that they change. It never once had occurred to me that I was the one who truly needed to change because my patterns of behavior were dysfunctional and extremely broken. The only change I was willing to engage in was a false sense of change known was people-pleasing. Yes, I would pretend to be whomever someone else wanted me to be; meaning I would pretend to like what they ...

In his book Loveability , Robert Holden outlines what love is and what it is not. I find this list to be very helpful in terms of facing and calming the codependent crazies. Let’s look at the 10 points he makes below. I have placed my spin on them for the purpose of seeing these points through a codependent love lens… Is it love or is it FEAR?   When we believe “I am not loveable,” the fear is always “Love has forsaken me.” And this will cause us to look for ways in which love is failing us. We will be on-guard constantly and will likely drive a wedge between us and the person we are professing to love. This can be especially true if we have abandonment issues. Is it love or is it DEPENDENCY?   I am unable to love me and so I make someone else responsible. Dependency is the issue for us codependents. Our self-love is generally so poor that we desperately want someone else to make us OK and so we look for that person who will be responsible for all of our need...