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 ...

Living the lives of others is a very codependent trait. I was watching an old John Ford movie last night from 1933 called Pilgrimage . It was about a widow named Hannah living on a farm in Arkansas with her young adult son, Jimmy. World War I is raging across Europe and there’s a war raging inside of Hannah. Hannah doesn’t know how to live her own life. She isn’t willing to be responsible for herself and her own happiness even though she is actually a very strong person. She’s made Jimmy into her crutch and she’s living vicariously through him. This seems to work fine until Jimmy meets Mary and falls in love with her. Now Jimmy wants his life back and on his terms. He loves his mother and he has love enough in his heart for her and Mary. Jimmy wants to get married and Hannah is totally opposed. She isn’t willing to release her hostage. Hannah tries everything to keep herself enmeshed in Jimmy. She threatens him, spies on him, goes to Mary and threatens her—and all in th...