Soulshine

Recovery has taught me the difference between codependent love and authentic love. And the difference is eye-opening. For most of my life, all I knew was a codependent love; one in which I “loved” others for the sole purpose of being loved back by them. This codependent love I experienced was filled with anxiety, neediness, insecurity, manipulation, fear, unreasonable expectations, fear of abandonment and the constant urge to cling desperately to the person I “loved.” It was horrible. And it was not love. Love and codependence cannot coexist with each other. They are polar opposites. If we reach out to others from a deep, dark needy emptiness within ourselves, it is not love we are attempting to share. It’s a desperate cry for intimacy, for a sense of belonging with another person, but it is not love. It is codependence. And codependence always has strings attached. It is strictly self-serving. Authentic love flows freely. It does not arise from a deep, dark, needy place ...

“Your destiny is not just to find love; it is to be the most loving person you can be.” Robert Holden, Loveability As an active codependent (for most of my life), I failed miserably at being the most loving person I can be. And even as a recovering codependent over the past 20 years, I have still failed at understanding and thus knowing how to be a truly loving person. To me love has always been about giving of myself to get something back from others. Love, as it was modeled for me as a child, was something you earned. It was the great pay-off; like receiving a paycheck for doing a good job at work. I watched my mother earn the love of everyone around her by looking after all of their needs and doing, doing, doing for everyone. She only stopped doing if she didn’t get her paycheck (the love from others she thought she had earned). If someone didn’t love her for all she was doing, then she’d withhold her love (doing) until they showed some sort of remorse and renewed apprec...

Codependents are very good at causing their own chaos in relationships. We love to take things the wrong way. And so we are on constant guard, waiting for everyone around us to make a misstep. We vigilantly search and wait for anyone to say something, to do something or to even look at us in a way that we can misinterpret as a personal attack on us. We’re waiting so we can scream inside—one more time—“A-ha! Another slam against me!” And we can go about our day playing martyr-- again. Why is it that we are often waiting for someone to hurt us? We say we love people and yet we are always anxiously on alert with these people we “love” just waiting to take anything they say or do in a negative way. Is this love? When we are constantly looking to judge people we say we “love” in a negative light, is this love? No it’s not. We may think we love people but we really don’t. Why? Because we really don’t love ourselves. Lack of self-love forces us to doubt that anyone else in this ...

“Look Inside yourself; Everything you want, you already are.” Rumi When people attend my retreats, I always tell them “all of your answers are inside of you.” I’ve learned through personal experience that this is absolutely true. No one has my answers to my inner-questions except me. I can ask someone for guidance and I can become more aware of the ways in which my Higher Power is speaking to me through other people. But NO ONE-- no other person-- can give me my answers. I have to do the work. I have to go inside of myself and discover the treasure that I have long been ignoring. This is why I believe Rumi’s statement above is so true: Everything we think we are lacking, we actually have already. We just don’t realize it. And we need to be willing to go inside ourselves and find the answers we need to make our lives whole and complete. It may take us years, but that’s OK. It’s worth it. Every answer we discover, every feeling of self-worth and value we reconnect with ma...

The human person has three primary drives. We all possess the drive for 1) Pleasure, 2) Power and 3) Purpose. Our drives for pleasure and for power supplement our drive for purpose. In other words, these two lesser drives aid us in accomplishing our purpose in life, which is to love well. Everyone’s individual and collective purpose is to love well in their lifetime. Obviously then, if human nature was perfect, the Planet Earth would be a utopia of loving people. No one would ever go hungry, no one would place his/her personal gain ahead of anyone else’s, no one would ever be marginalized and no one would ever die alone after having spent years feeling unlovable. But human nature is not perfect. It’s broken. And as a result, we don’t always do a good job of loving well. Some of us are so broken that we never fully understand our purpose in life and we are too fearful to pursue it. Instead, we get stuck in our drive for pleasure or our drive for power. As a striking example, let’...