Soulshine

  When we realize that we have re-engaged in unhealthy relationships, we have at least two choices: We can detach, cut the other person off and play the blame game. We can make every mistake their fault and choose to dislike or even hate them. Or we can choose to realize that we are both broken inside, that we both made mistakes and we can detach with love. Detaching with love is necessary. We can't rightfully blame the other person for everything that went wrong in the relationship. It truly takes two to tango. So we have to be willing to admit to our own mistakes and to admit that under the other person's brokenness, we did see beauty in their soul. Sometimes it's also necessary to detach with love because we are making spiritual/recovery progress and the other person isn't. We can't force anyone to be willing to work at recovery and to be wiling to fix themselves. And we cannot fix them. There have been many times when I've heard friends sa...

Recovery is a partnership. It is a partnership between God (Higher Power), ourselves and other people whom we can trust. Recovery is never an act of praying to your Higher Power and then expecting your Higher Power to suddenly zap you with instant wellness, and make everything OK. That's not prayer. That's magical thinking.   We have to first be willing to do whatever work is necessary to make our lives better; to change our patterns of thinking and behavior from negative to positive. Recovery always starts with "me." Once we are willing to do our best to change our character defects into character assets, then our Higher Power can help us.  We first need to do for ourselves whatever we can do to make our lives manageable and functional. What we aren't capable of doing for ourselves, we need to surrender to our Higher Power and allow that Higher Power to handle all that is beyond our control.  We also need to be willing to reach out to others we tr...

Before Recovery, I always attracted people who couldn't possibly love and accept me for who I am. Looking back, I realize the real reason why I attracted and was attracted to those people; because I was unable to love and accept myself for who I am. Recovery has taught me that I have to have a good, loving relationship with myself-- I have to love and accept myself warts and all-- if I want to fix my radar when it comes to relationships. The more I come to love and accept myself, despite all of my perceived/real faults and failings, the more I am attracted to people who also love and accept me for who I am. And the less I am attracted to people who don't accept and love me for who I am because they are unable to love and accept themselves for who they are. Loving and accepting people for who they are doesn't mean that we have to love or accept all of their beliefs, attitudes and behaviors; nor do they have to accept all of our beliefs, attitudes and behaviors.  W...

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...

“If these Christians want me to believe in their god, they’ll have to sing me better songs; they’ll have to look more like people who have been saved; they’ll have to wear on their countenance the joy of the beatitudes. I could only believe in a god who dances.” Friedrich Nietzsche In recovery it’s important to know a Higher Power, or God, who dances. We need a Higher Power who smiles when we rise in the morning, who understands when we’re frustrated, who offers empathy when we hurt inside, and who loves us no matter how bad our behavior has been throughout the day. And we need a Higher Power who will love us to sleep each night no matter how bad we may feel deep down inside about ourselves. In other words, we need a Higher Power who is ON OUR SIDE. Too many of us grew-up in households where God was a tyrant, a hanging judge; and some of us grew-up in households where there was no God at all. Either way, we never knew a God who danced with us. We never experienced an...

   Feelings are my friends. Say it over and over. Make it your daily mantra. We humans have been blessed by God with a myriad of feelings— all of which are present to help us process life and grow into healthy mental and emotional states. Yet, many of us learn at a very young age to avoid our feelings at all costs. We learn to run from them or to turn them off completely. Either way we end up become emotional pressure-cookers.    Emotionally unavailable people are left feeling nothing but an underlying numbness or shame-based anxiety. Sooner or later suppressed feelings cause us to explode into anger. This anger always ensures that shame will raise its ugly head and stare us in the eyes. And if we are unable to face this shame, we will run from the shame and into the arms of our addiction of choice.     What most of us fail to understand is that every time we are greeted by an uncomfortable feeling, like shame or guilt, we anxiously reach for the fire...

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...

“Let people go by releasing your neediness for their love.  Love yourself instead!” David Elliott, Healing I have often wanted people to give me the love that I felt my parents did not give me. It seems it’s that maternal/paternal wound that often haunts us well into adulthood. We may be grown men or women but we still ache inside for the love we were denied as small children: We want to be told “I love you;” we want to be held and hugged; we want to feel the warmth of a mother’s or father’s love. And, unfortunately, we often project this need (or neediness) onto others. More often than not, the people we choose to project our need for maternal/paternal love onto are equally as emotionally unavailable to us as our moms and dads were. We subconsciously choose men and women whose personalities resemble those of our parents. Then we proceed in trying to secure from these people the love we were unable to receive from our parents. And nine times out of 10 our success rate ...

“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” Franklin Roosevelt    Fear, more than anything else, has kept us frozen and powerless to protect ourselves. From the time we were small, many of us learned incorrectly that we had no right to speak our truth, to own our emotional truth (our personal power) or to trust anyone to be truthful with us.    As a result, we learned to remain silent in the face of abuse perpetrated against us and we learned to stuff all of our feelings. We became possessed by our fears: 1) fears that we didn’t count; 2) that we deserved the abuse we received; and 3) fear that we were destined to be victims.      Today we are all here to prove to ourselves and to the world around us that we do count, that we deserve to be treated with proper respect and that we are not victims of life or anyone.    Today we are proclaiming that we will own our personal truth, that we will learn to experience and understand our ...

“God grant me serenity to ACCEPT the things I cannot change…” Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer Acceptance can be hard for many codependents to swallow. Some of us are so tuned-in to the idea that we can make another person love us; that we can somehow earn love and acceptance. And we are especially adept at falling in love with people who are totally unavailable to us. At first our efforts at earning love seem to reap rewards. We people-please the other person or we caretake his/her every need; and they respond positively to us. As a result, we begin to dream of spending the rest of our lives with this person and we quickly build a Disney-style fantasy in our heads and hearts. We invest a great deal of time and effort into getting the love we want from this person of our choosing, but we rarely experience the reciprocal love from them that we so desperately want. Over time the beautiful dream begins to become a nightmare. We feel our grip on the other perso...

“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. Mary has chosen the better way and it will not be denied her.” Jesus Christ, Gospel of Luke Addictive personalities are gods unto themselves. Even those of us who may be regular church-goers still suffer from self-godliness. We’re control freaks. We rule the world and everyone in it who affects us in any way. We’re all Martha’s, the Christian Patron Saint of Control Freaks. Like Martha we profess faith in a Higher Power, but we rarely relinquish control to that Higher Power. Every time we meet Martha in the Christian Gospels, she’s working hard at telling God what God needs to do, or she’s telling God how to correct the mistakes God has made. The quote above is taken from a story about Jesus visiting the home of the two sisters, Martha and Mary. Martha is anxious about preparing dinner while Mary is entertaining Jesus. Martha gets mad that Mary isn’t helping her and she commands Jesus to tell Mary to get ...