Soulshine

Last night I was watching Scared Shrekless . The first “horror” story in this Halloween movie is called “The Bride of Gingy.” And Gingy’s bride is nothing short of an overly-clingy codependent nightmare. If you are familiar with the Shrek movies, you know that Gingy is the gingerbread man. In “The Bride of Gingy,” Gingy goes to see the village baker because he is lonely and wants a sweetheart of his own. So the village baker agrees to make a gingerbread girl for Gingy. As the baker begins to mix-in the proper amount of sugar, according to his recipe, Gingy insists that the baker include 10 times more sugar than the recipe calls for using. He wants his bride to be truly sweet. Within a short time, Gingy meets his dream girl, Sugar. Suddenly we see them skipping hand in hand through flower-filled fields while the song “Happy Together” by The Turtles plays in the background. But “happily ever after” is not how this story ends. Next we see Gingy and Sugar together in his gin...

“Look, I’m not the one with the problem. It’s the world that seems to have a problem with me. People take one look at me and go ‘a big stupid ugly ogre.’ They judge me before they even know me. That’s why I’m better off alone,” says Shrek. To which Donkey replies “When we met, I didn’t think you were a big stupid ugly ogre.” Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, Shrek It’s true that people often judge us before they know us. But it’s equally true that we often judge ourselves before we even really know us. Codependents rarely know the person who exists inside of them. Oh, we think we know who we really are because we’ve believed the negative things about ourselves that we’ve heard playing through our heads since childhood. Parents and others told us we were “big stupid ugly ogre(s)” and we believed it. We simply accepted what we were told at face-value without ever challenging it and we’ve lived what we have believed about ourselves to this very day. We are often lik...