Soulshine

“I disappear into the person I love. If I love you, you can have it all: My money, my time, my body. I will assume your debts; and I will project upon you all sorts of nifty qualities you’ve never actually cultivated in yourself. I will give you all of this and more until I am so exhausted and so depleted the only way I can recover is by becoming infatuated with someone else.” From Eat, Pray, Love (Columbia Pictures, 2010) This is the best description of codependent behavior that I have ever witnessed. Many authors have attempted to define codependency, but it’s extremely difficult because codependency is so multi-faceted. But this description of codependent behavioral patterns describes my own codependency perfectly, prior to recovery, and so I’m going to dissect the quote. At the height of my codependency, I always found myself disappearing into the person I was in “love” with, or rather, that I was infatuated with. Looking back, I realize now that it w...

“All we’ve ever wanted Is to look good naked Hope that someone can take it God save me rejection From my reflection, I want perfection.” Robbie Williams , Bodies All my life I have struggled with body-image. As a kid it was no problem. I don’t remember thinking anything negative about my body—until I hit 7 th Grade, that is. Around the age of 12 I learned to medicate my emotional pain with Payday candy bars, Lay’s Potato Chips and lots of sugary sodas. I wasn’t an active kid, aside from walking to and from school, and so it didn’t take long for me to start my compulsive over-eating journey toward becoming “fatty, fatty two-by-four.” And as fate would have it, just as puberty was beginning to make me self-consciousness personified, I had to face all of the family and public scorn that came with suddenly being fat. At one point, I got so self-conscious that I did everything within my little pubescent range of thinking to hide the fat. I wore bulky sweaters—even ...

Everyone desires intimacy and yet most everyone is afraid to be vulnerable before others. We want intimacy, but we don’t want into-me-see. Trouble is, you can’t authentically have one without the other. We have to be willing to open our heart-petals if we want people to see our true inner-beauty, and vice-versa. Building a good relationship with ourselves is the necessary foundation for building a good relationship with others. Once we are willing to honestly look inside ourselves we begin the process of into-me-see; and once we become comfortable with our “perfectly imperfect” true selves, we will gradually become more comfortable with opening up and allowing others to see inside of us. No one can become intimate with us unless we invite them in to know us. We have to allow them to see into the true us. This means we have to be secure enough in ourselves to open up our heart-petals and to be vulnerable before those persons who are important to our lives. In complete nake...

“The meditation room is within. Decorate that.” Richard from Texas, Eat Pray Love Apparently during my trip to Los Angeles, someone was gracious enough to share their nasty little cold germs with me. This week, I’ve found that nursing a cold is a good test of how well we take care of ourselves. It’s also taught me a lot about the inner-critic in my head. In terms of self-care, I decided last Sunday that I would stay away from the office. Then I made sure I had all of the necessary cold medications, including cough drops. I immediately began drowning my body with chicken noodle soup/chicken broth to get the old electrolytes back in balance again. I’ve also downed a lot of green tea and I’ve allowed myself to lie around and watch movies. All of this has helped me reduce the severity of the cold. The cold I had last year took me through three boxes of tissues. This cold has only required one box. On the down side, I’ve heard a lot from my inner-critic. In particular, h...

Yesterday I was watching the film Eat, Pray, Love . It’s about a woman, Liz, who has little sense of self and strong codependent enmeshment issues.   Liz marries a man named Steven when she is very young. He was someone she chose to fade-into, even though they had little in common. Liz gave up her identity to become Steven’s shadow and has been living in the misery of being what he wants her to be for many years. As the movies opens we find Liz discovering that she no longer wants to be Steven’s mirror—and she tells it to him face to face that she no longer wants to be married before fleeing and filing for divorce. I realized while watching the film that there is a great paradox here that many codependents suffer from. First, I do not know of any codependent that enmeshes into someone who actually mirrors his/her likes and dislikes. For some odd reason, we have a tendency to enmesh in someone who is the total opposite of us in terms of personal preferences. We choose some...