Soulshine

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” Soren Kierkegaard Being who we are is essential to our happiness. And yet, so many codependents have no idea of who they really are. We rejected and lost our real selves years ago. We buried them under a false self; often times an “ideal” self that reflected the person that our parents or others wanted us to be. For some of us this ideal self was fueled by perfectionism. The real self underneath ached with inadequacy. It was the frog underneath the prince we were attempting to project to the world around us; or the raggedy Cinderella underneath the princess we wanted the world to see. We were two people in one and that drained a lot of energy out of us. It’s exhausting to live with two personas. First off, it takes a lot of energy to suppress our real selves. We are constantly on-guard that some part of our unacceptable real self with accidently pop-out and be seen by others. But it’s equally as exhaus...

“You can’t lose someone who truly loves you, and you can’t hold captive someone who doesn’t.” Anonymous If we are uncomfortable in our skin, we will often be fearful of losing people we “think” we love. I say “think” for a reason. When we are uncomfortable with ourselves we are often attracted to toxic people. We mistake the toxic-- usually addictive-- attraction for love. When we make this mistake we are actually fearful of losing the poison that has nearly killed us.  We become anxious and we search for ways to manipulate and control the other person so we can keep a tighter hold on our prisoner. I believe our grip tightens because we mistakenly believe that if we lose this person, we will lose ourselves, our chance for happiness and our lives. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We can’t lose ourselves by losing another person unless we have long ago abandoned ourselves by fading into the other. We can’t lose our chance for happiness either, because we never had a c...