Soulshine

“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 ...

"I had been practicing misery every night by focusing on everything I hated... all it did was make everything worse. What if, instead of griping, I practiced gratitude? Not the 'count you blessings' thing. What if I practiced gratitude for everything just as it is-- for what I hated and disliked?" Melody Beattie, Make Miracles in Forty Days There's no greater acceptance of reality than practicing gratitude for the people and things we don't like, or even hate. After all, we give our personal power away to people, behaviors and things we can't control. And we give that power away by investing a great deal of time and negative energy in ruminating over what we are powerless to change. We have the power to change only one person and that person is us. Nothing changes for the better until we decide to change for the better. So how about we look at people who have hurt us, people we have come to hate, and see them as teachers instead of seeing them a...

“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 ...

“The hardest thing for me was understanding that letting go didn’t mean letting go of people, places and things,” Darlene’s friend said. “It was letting go of my ideas about how life should go.” Melody Beattie, Choices Letting go is not about giving up on life or about abandoning people, places or things that we love. Letting go is about accepting everything about life that we have no power to control or change. It’s about accepting reality as it is, not as we want it to be, or how we think “life should go.” Reality is also about accepting people exactly the way they are and about discerning boundaries. Boundaries tell us where we end and others begin. People in recovery rarely enter with good boundaries. We are so enmeshed in others that we can’t separate our lives from theirs, or our problems from the problems of those we care about. Here is a good litmus test for setting boundaries in terms of what problems are ours to own and what problems are not: My problems direct...