Soulshine

God helps those who help themselves is a very old adage, and it’s very true. No one can help us in our recovery until we are first willing—and determined—to help ourselves, not even God. Why? Because no one can do for us what we must do for ourselves. A good therapist can listen and empathize with us, and can point us in the right direction. A good sponsor can also listen and empathize and provide us with important tools to aid us in our recovery. And a good support group can provide us with a sense of belonging and with new self-awareness. But we will fail miserably if we expect that they should do more for us. Many people enter recovery and expect to be taken care of by others. They either have no understanding of self-care or they have no intentions of doing it. Instead, they think that they need only whine, cry and demand that others do their recovery for them. But recovery does not work this way. Recovery only works when we realize that we have one life to live and ...

Disney’s Pinocchio takes on the theme of developing an informed conscience. If we are to be honest with ourselves and with others—as recovery requires us to be-- we need to know how to judge right from wrong and how to be responsible for the negative consequences of our own behavior. In many ways Pinocchio represents the typical child. We witness his birth shortly after Geppetto, his creator, wishes on a star for Pinocchio to become a real boy. The Blue Fairy appears and grants his wish. Pinocchio becomes animated and alive and yet he is not yet a real boy. Why? Because he has yet to develop a conscience. So Jiminy Cricket is called upon to act as a conscience for Pinocchio. We all go through the human process of developing an informed conscience. At a young age we begin the process of learning the difference between right and wrong, kind and mean-spirited, sharing and hoarding. Some of these moral choices are taught to us, but many of them we must learn for ourselves through...

“Blame aggressively shifts shame onto someone else… Making someone else the problem allows us to feel better about ourselves, while having the effect of making the other person feel the way we really feel inside.” Darlene Lancer, Conquering Shame and Codependency Addicts love to play the blame game. Most of us are pretty poor at taking responsibility for our own mistakes and dysfunctional behaviors. This resistance is rooted in our poor self-esteem, which makes it nearly impossible for many of us to admit that we were wrong in any way. As a result, it’s often subconsciously important for us to make someone else responsible for our mistakes, as well as for the guilt and shame we feel about having made those mistakes. It’s rare for a codependent to be able to honestly laugh-off his/her mistakes. We don’t know how to laugh at ourselves and we are too paranoid that people will reject us for making mistakes. Our refusal to acknowledge and take responsibility for mistake...

“I do not want to go through life like my mother… Afraid that I am not really loved.” Cassandra Mortmain, I Capture the Castle Codependents fear never being loved. We have never loved ourselves and we have never allowed anyone else to love us. We have tried to bargain with others for love, we have tried to earn love through caretaking and we have tried to win love through people-pleasing. And we have usually done these things with all of the wrong people; with those who were totally unavailable to give us what we so deeply, desperately longed for—Love. In recovery, we must learn to take responsibility for the inner-emptiness we have created; the loveless void we have nursed in every wrong way. We begin taking that responsibility by admitting we are powerless over our own self-hatred, over our inability to love ourselves. We surrender that inability to our support group, the universe or a Higher Power. But we can’t simply stop there and expect that now everything i...

"His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God... and he must be about His Father's business: beauty... and to this conception he was faithful to the end."                                                            F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby It makes no difference where we have come from, who are parents were or how our past has shaped us. We are not prisoners to any of it, or anything. As adults, we have stewardship-- ownership-- of our own lives. We are all sons and daughters of God an...