Soulshine

“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...

Manipulation : to control or play-upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means, especially to one's own advantage; to force change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose. Every codependent is familiar with manipulation. We have all engaged in manipulative behavior for the express purpose of getting from others what we were not willing to give to ourselves—namely love. In fact, for the non-recovering codependent or addict, manipulation becomes a way of life, a survival skill. We need to be needed or loved and so we engage in manipulative behaviors, like people-pleasing and caretaking. We falsify how we really feel about this or that in order to please (manipulate) someone into loving us. We bend over backwards to meet the needs of another person, not because we truly love and care about him/her, but because we want to manipulate him/her into appreciating us and making us feel good about ourselves. But there are other forms of manipulation that we,...