Soulshine

Anyone in recovery is most likely suffering from the wounds caused by toxic parents. Toxic parents are those who shame, belittle, embarrass, humiliate and abuse their children. Abuse can include mental, emotional, physical and sexual. Many of us, when we first enter recovery, are inwardly blind to the fact that our parents were indeed toxic. We say things like “Oh, sure my Dad beat me sometimes, but it was for my own good,” or “Yeah, my Mom used the silent treatment and withheld affection to get what she wanted from me, but she was just doing it for my own good.” We use denial to minimalize the painful and damaging treatment we received from our parents. Recovery is all about getting past the denial. Pain is pain. Suffering is suffering. There’s no minimalizing it. When I first entered recovery and heard other people’s stories I often said to myself “Well, I never suffered anything that bad.” In doing so I minimalized and continued to repress my inner-pain. I lied to myself a...

“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 was talking with someone last night who had developed an energy-draining disease. He was bitter with God, himself and life. And he was playing the victim. Life had done him wrong. It had placed him in the path of an insect that could infect him with an incurable disease. Likewise God had done him wrong by allowing this to happen. No one escaped blame for his ailment, including himself. So I asked him “Can you accept the fact that you now have this disease? Instead of fighting reality through bitterness and blame, can you ask God to help you to take your power back from this disease by accepting that you have it and that you can’t change things back to the way they were before?” He looked pensive, but I could tell that he was beginning to understand. I went on to say that life may be different now, it may be less pleasant in certain ways, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t work with the illness. We can befriend it and see what it has to teach us about the true value of ...