Soulshine

Recovery is never short-term. There is no vacation from recovery. It’s a minute by minute, day by day, lifetime process. If we continually think of addiction as an emotional disease, we can better monitor our recovery. Addiction is all about emotional medicating. We can be sailing along through our day and all is good. Then suddenly someone makes a comment that hits on an old unhealed emotional wound from childhood, and we nosedive into being a shamefaced five year old. The feelings we experience seem unbearable so we order a Martini, or we make a quick stop by the bakery, or we head to the shopping mall or casino, or we return to work and drown the pain in busyness. Prior to recovery, we didn’t understand that there were certain emotional triggers that sent us into addictive acting-out. Now that we know, we have to practice vigilant awareness. It helps by being able to identify our discomfort. First off, we need to acknowledge that the discomfort is emotional. Second we ...

“When you make someone your source of love, they will also be a source of pain.” Robert Holden , Loveability Most every codependent knows the horrors of attachment and dependency. An active codependent can easily attach to any person who shows the slightest bit of interest in him/her. The hope is that this is the person who is going to make me feel lovable and acceptable—FINALLY! He/she is going to love me into being OK with myself and we will live happily ever after because I’m going to meet his/her every wish and need and vice-versa! So the codependent attaches him/herself to the other person almost literally. Every thought, every hope, every dream, every moment revolves around this one person who has been thrust into the role of eternal savior. The attachment then leads to a strong dependency upon the other person. As the attachment/dependency grows, the initial fascination and joy turn into a deep aching to constantly be in contact with the other person. Fear an...

“You are the only person who thinks in your mind! You are the power and authority in your world.” Louise Hay It’s true that we have power over our minds, although that power can sometimes be limited by brain chemistry. I suffer with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which is caused by a lack of proper serotonin production. As a result, I sometimes am powerless to override negative thinking with positive thinking. Over the past six months I have been free of any drugs that help your brain to produce serotonin, like Zoloft or Prozac (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). I wanted to see if I could now manage my serotonin through diet, exercise and an increased awareness of my obsessive (irrational) thinking. The first four months went really well. I got all of my feelings back and was able to cry again. One of the downsides of selective serotonin reuptake drugs is that they suppress your feelings. So I was initially happy to feel again—until some of the feelings got...

“A life lived in fear is a life half lived.” Spanish Proverb Living a life based in fear is as normal as breathing air for many people. And this is probably twice as true for those of us who have addictive personalities. As children. we embraced one major fear—“I’m not good enough”— and then found ourselves buried under an avalanche of life-destroying anxiety and worry. It wasn’t long before “I’m not good enough” developed into a mile-long laundry list of all the many reasons why we weren’t acceptable people. All of these fears were then further complicated by another major fear: Fear of abandonment. Once we deemed ourselves as unacceptable, it didn’t take us long to realize that we now had deep-dark secrets we needed to hide from others. After all, if people we loved found out just how defective we were, they’d say a swift “Goodbye” and never look back as they quickly ran away from us—or so we imagined to our great detriment. So life became on long series of fear-d...