Soulshine

It may be a recovery cliche, but it is certainly true: Codependent people do not make friends, or lovers, they take hostages. Whenever we experience that truly needy feeling, that desperate desire to cling to someone, to have ALL of their attention, we have taken them hostage in our minds and hearts. This is when we need to find our way out of the fog by surrendering to our Higher Power and by attending a CODA or Al-Anon meeting. The spirit we experience within the group will help to bring us back to mental and emotional balance, to sanity.

“Who am I to judge?” Pope Francis Codependents, like most all addicts, spend a great deal of time playing prosecutor, judge and jury. Most of our attention is focused on ourselves. This is actually one situation where we do focus our attention on us—unfortunately. When it comes to negative energy, we have an abundance of it for ourselves. We are critical, merciless and unforgiving with our every fault or failing. Of course, this pattern of negative behavior causes us eventually to be just as easily critical, merciless and unforgiving towards others. I’ve come to believe that the people in this world who are most critical of others must either be codependent/addictive thinkers, or those who are totally obsessed with following rules, or both. And I’d like to see this all change. We need to make this world a kinder place. That means that we need to focus on being kind to ourselves, first and foremost. Once we can empathize with ourselves, we will stop being so self-criti...

Last night I was watching Scared Shrekless . The first “horror” story in this Halloween movie is called “The Bride of Gingy.” And Gingy’s bride is nothing short of an overly-clingy codependent nightmare. If you are familiar with the Shrek movies, you know that Gingy is the gingerbread man. In “The Bride of Gingy,” Gingy goes to see the village baker because he is lonely and wants a sweetheart of his own. So the village baker agrees to make a gingerbread girl for Gingy. As the baker begins to mix-in the proper amount of sugar, according to his recipe, Gingy insists that the baker include 10 times more sugar than the recipe calls for using. He wants his bride to be truly sweet. Within a short time, Gingy meets his dream girl, Sugar. Suddenly we see them skipping hand in hand through flower-filled fields while the song “Happy Together” by The Turtles plays in the background. But “happily ever after” is not how this story ends. Next we see Gingy and Sugar together in his gin...

I remember talking with someone who was feeling smothered in her relationship with a man. The man had moved in with her and they were even contemplating marriage. But she started feeling trapped. Every time she wanted to do something without him, like get together with friends or even go to a support group meeting, her boyfriend was upset. He felt threatened by anyone outside of the two of them, and would go so far as to say things like “Why do you need to talk with him?” or “Why do you need to hang-out with her? We only need each other. We don’t need anyone else in our lives.” In other words, this boyfriend was extremely needy, fearful and codependent. So I explained to her that his behavior and statements were huge red flags. For whatever reason, he was not giving love to himself, so he had made her his sole source of love. As a result, he was sucking every bit of love, attention and life out of her. And apparently his neediness was so great that he needed her 24/7. This great ...

Setting boundaries is essential for everyone’s health. When we fail to set proper boundaries, we abuse ourselves and we abuse others by enabling them to stay stuck in unhealthy behaviors. Unhealthy codependents typically build their self-worth on their ability to do for others what those very others should be doing for themselves. This is called enabling. We do it under the guise of being helpful, but the only “help” we are giving to the other person is the “help” to stay stuck in their victimhood or addiction. Enabling results from good intentions and poor boundaries. We enmesh with others and we choose to own their problems. We then think we are justified in fixing their problems. Subconsciously, we also are eager to earn their praise and gratitude for having fixed their problems for them, so we engage in our great powers of enabling. In her book Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children , Allison Bottke has a wonderful checklist for identifying enabling ...

I just returned from a fabulous trip to Asia. It was an all-expense paid trip to Hong Kong, Bangkok and Koh Samui. And although I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, I still suffered from some pangs of guilt, which I was acutely aware of as I was experiencing them. The guilt stemmed from the fact that I was enjoying myself at someone else’s monetary expense. It was a gift that deep-down I didn’t feel worthy of receiving. The guilt wasn’t so evident when we did things as a group, but if I was lunching on my own or taking an afternoon sight-seeing trip on my own, I felt guilty about charging things to my room; knowing that I wasn’t going to have to pay for them. I realized that all of this guilt stemmed from my deeply engrained belief that my needs and wants aren’t valid. As a child I never felt that I had the right to have wants and needs. I was brainwashed into believing it was purely selfish to want or need anything. As an adult I’ve mostly coped with that guilt by being self-suffi...

“But now I know That the world still turns And the sun still burns And that’s what I’ve learned without you And the days roll on And my heart gets stronger too Don’t think I didn’t love you Just because I made it through But I learned to love myself Without you.” Reba McEntire, Myself Without You Throughout most of my life I have been a fiercely independent codependent. The only times I ever wavered from being fiercely independent were when I met someone who pushed all of my buttons in all of the right ways; meaning a person who had just the right addictive personality to match mine. Anytime my addictive “yin” met an addictive “yang,” I’d swing almost immediately from the extreme of being fiercely independent on myself to the opposite extreme of being miserably dependent on that other person. Of course, once we both sucked all of the life out of each other and the relationship ended, I’d go defiantly back to being fiercely independent; even though my...

“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...