Soulshine

It's so true: We only have one life to live-- OURS. And we have a choice everyday. We can choose to work our recovery programs, to consciously change our thinking and behaviors; or we can choose to stop working to improve our lives and regress into the old misery we have so desperately wanted to escape. So how do I want to spend the rest of my life? I want to love myself unconditionally and to stop hating myself. I know learning to love myself unconditionally will help me to accept and love others unconditionally. All of my relationships will improve. I will choose healthier people to engage with and our relationships will be between equals. I am tired of running after people who don't see me. I am always attracted to the most emotionally unavailable and neediest people. After 22 years of Recovery, this is an instinctual battle I have to face every single day. Only through working my CODA program can I consciously choose to no longer engage in relationships with e...

    "Feelings are just visitors, let them come and go." Mooji Sometimes we struggle the most with our difficult feelings at night. We feel empty, anxious, needy, even desperate inside, and these feelings drive our desire to act-out. This is when we need to remember that feelings are just visitors. They won't last. We just need to accept them and allow them to pass through us. So next time we're in that bad emotional state, instead of acting-out, let's think about how loved we are. God loves each and every one of us immensely, and we all have people in our lives who love and care about us, too. It would be better to reach out to one of those persons, as well as our Higher Power, instead of reaching for a means of self-medicating. Instead of acting-out, we can also make a list of all we are grateful for, counting up all of our blessings. And we can push past our denial and self-pity and credit ourselves for being truly good people.

   Learning to love ourselves by facing our feelings, embracing them and accepting them is a major step toward healthy living. Once we take that step, we will find that it is only the first of many necessary changes we will be making in our lives. These changes will all bring about positive results, but none of these changes will be easy.    One of the most difficult changes we will need to make will involve our relationships with others. Like Gwen (Sandra Bullock) in the film 28 Days , we will find that some of our old friends and lovers are toxic for us. After Gwen left treatment, there was little doubt that she’d have to let go of her old lifestyle and all of those who are still living addictively if she wanted to remain sober.    Gwen does what she has to do concerning Jasper, her fiancé. She walks away from the relationship, but she does so without animosity. In other words, Gwen detaches from Jasper with love. She’s not angry with him and she do...

Addiction is an emotional dis-ease. It’s all about running away from our uncomfortable emotions (shame, in particular) and thus running toward addictive acting-out to drown those emotions into a comfortable state of numbness or euphoria or a false sense of happiness. I was recently watching Sandra Bullock playing the role of “Gwen” in the film 28 Days . Gwen is either drunk or drugged-out all of the time. She’s constantly running from her shame through alcohol (or drugs), which causes her to do more shameful things, which causes her to feel worse about herself, which causes her to then drown herself in more alcohol and drugs. It’s an endless cycle of Gwen running from her feelings about herself. Unfortunately, Gwen also has a partner-in-crime: Her fiancé Jasper. Jasper is equally as trapped in addictive acting-out. As the movie progresses, we learn that Jasper is actually a substitute for Gwen’s mother. Her mother was a hopeless alcoholic who died from her disease when Gwen w...

“Nothing changes until you do.” Mike Robbins Deeply engrained in codependent thinking is “everyone else needs to change and it’s my job to see that they do.” God knows that before I entered recovery that was my entire philosophy on life. There was good reason for it. I had been taught from an early age to always look outside myself to find happiness. And finding happiness outside of myself meant that I needed to control life, including everyone and everything. It didn’t take long to realize that it was easier to control things than it was to control people. And this marked the beginning of my addictively acting out with things. After all, a chocolate chip cookie can’t scream “Don’t eat me!” Food has no power to stop us from over-consuming it as a means of seeking false happiness. The same is true for alcohol or any other substance. Likewise, clothes in department stores can’t stop us from buying them as a false means of alleviating our self-loathing. Controlling things ...

“The mirror wasn’t judging me, I was judging me. In front of the mirror, I came face to face with my judgments about myself… Who is the ‘I’ that judges that ‘I am not good enough,’ that fears that ‘I am unlovable’ and that whispers ‘I hate myself? It’s not your unconditional self.” Robert Holden , Loveability How comfortable are you standing in front of a mirror and looking intently at yourself? If you’re like me, you don’t look anymore intently than you have to. I look at myself just long enough to make sure my hair is in place and that my clothes aren’t “making me look fat.” I put “making me look fat” in quotations because those aren’t my words. They belong to someone else. They belong to someone who years and years ago told me I was fat and that I needed to make sure that my clothes didn’t enhance the fact. In other words, when I look in the mirror every day, I don’t see me. I see the judgments that have been placed on me by other people. And, unfortunately, thes...