Soulshine

“You think you’ve bought my love like a toy You better watch your stuff, my pride and joy You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone You better not play with love until you know what you’re doing You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Bell & James, You Never Know What You’ve Got (1978) The older I get the more I realize that it’s really true: You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone. We rarely take time to appreciate the youthful glow our faces radiate or the youthful enthusiasm that spills forth from our souls when we are young adults. But as soon as we start losing these youthful treasures, reality hits and we find ourselves desperately trying to hold on to them or to reclaim them. The same is often true when we think about the people we love and the importance of our relationships. Addictive thinking stripped many of us of having good relationships with ourselves and thus with others. Self-rejection left us being really uncomfortable in...

“Self-judgment is the punishment you give yourself when you fail to meet your own expectations, when you fall short of what you think you are supposed to be.” Don Miguel Ruiz Jr, Living a Life of Awareness Codependents are masters of judging themselves—and others-- harshly. What we don’t understand is the process we go through in condemning ourselves and others. The process works like this: Expectation—Belief—Judgment. Somewhere along the line when we were children, adults placed expectations on us. We accepted those expectations as true and worthwhile. We came to believe in them and we also learned to judge and criticize ourselves harshly when we weren’t able to live up to these expectations/beliefs. We learned to judge ourselves in the same harsh way that the adults who imposed these expectations on us did. For example, we came home with a report card that has a “C” on it, and we were immediately scorned for having made a “C.” We were told “You are so much smarter...

There’s only one essential ingredient to being successful in life: Self-love. That’s the primary ingredient to succeeding in anything, including recovery. Since most of us with addictive personalities grew-up with little to no self-love, we often don’t know how to begin to love ourselves. And yes, it’s easier to say than do, but we can do it. We just have to choose to start rebuilding our self-love. I’ve chosen to begin the process of reclaiming my self-love by identifying my shame. Why begin with shame? Because shame is the one feeling that thoroughly destroys self-love. Shame is so devastating because it centers its warheads on who we are inherently. Shame says “you were born a mistake.” It points its nasty finger in our faces and says “you cannot be lovable because you are gay, or female, or the wrong skin-color, or born out-of-wedlock, or stupid, or ___________.” And we can all fill in the blanks with the many, many other ways in which shame has been telling us we are una...