Soulshine

“Happiness is a byproduct of the way we live our own lives, not the way others live theirs.” Karen Casey , Codependence and the Power of Detachment Detachment is a major buzzword in codependent recovery circles. So what is detachment? It’s the process of realizing that we are enmeshed in the lives of others, admitting that we are powerless over them and then making the conscious choice to separate or detach ourselves from the people whose lives we’ve been trying to live. Part of losing ourselves in those people involves the need to control them. We mistakenly believe that if we can control them and make them be and do exactly what we want, we will finally be happy. This type of codependent thinking, believing that our happiness is the byproduct of how other people live their lives, is modeled perfectly by Hannah, the character from the movie Pilgrimage that I wrote about yesterday. She was so enmeshed in her son Jim, so caught up in the belief that her happiness was ...

“Every time we take on someone else’s responsibility, we are keeping them stuck, and in the process making a hostage of both of us. It is not easy to let the addict mature, but we must. We are harming him or her every time we step in and bring order to the chaos he or she created.” Karen Casey , Codependence And The Power of Detachment Codependents often struggle with an inner-need to rescue other people from their problems. The motivation for a codependent is simple: If I can rescue this person, he/she will need and love me. What the active codependent fails to understand is two-fold. First, no one is going to love us based in what we “do” for them. People either love us for who we are, or they don’t. Second, it’s impossible to rescue another person from him/herself and his/her problems. It’s especially impossible to rescue another addict from his/her problems. Active addicts don’t really want to be rescued from their addictions. They often do want to be rescued from t...

“Letting someone else decide who we will be, how we will act and what we will feel implies that we have given up our own life in exchange for whatever the other person wants us to be.” Karen Casey, Codependence and the Power of Detachment Codependency is the experience of giving up our own lives. We give up who we are, what we like, what we believe, what we feel, what we want and what we need in exchange for the imagined safety of fading into another person. We think that by enmeshing into someone else we will find love, acceptance, happiness and security. We also think that by blurring the line between our identity and the identity of the other person we will gain a sense of respectability, of finally being lovable in the eyes of the world. We couldn’t be more wrong. We gain nothing—and lose everything-- by enmeshing into another person. No one finds happiness, comfort or love by perpetually trying to please another person. What security is there in never knowing what...