Soulshine

Notice in this quote it says kindness is a simple way to tell "another" struggling soul that there is love in the world. "Another" implies, to me, that we too are struggling. And certainly as codependents or addicts, we are. This is why kindness needs to begin with us. We first need to learn to be kind to ourselves. It's important to share words of kindness, love, compassion and forgiveness with ourselves. It's also important that we begin to do nice things for ourselves. We can say "no" to helping someone when our plate is too full. We can spend the money on a massage for ourselves. We can take the time to prepare a nice cup of tea for ourselves. And we can learn to better accept kindness from others when it is offered to us. By treating ourselves with kindness, we prove to ourselves that we do have value and worth. And by being kind to ourselves, we build up the spiritual-mental-emotional resources to then be able to offer kindness ...

“Love says, ‘I love you no matter what.’ Love says, ‘You’re fine the way you are.’ …If you think he’s supposed to be different From what he is, you don’t love him. In that Moment you love what he’s going to be when You’re through manipulating him. He is a throwaway Until he matches your image of him.” Byron Katie, A Friendly Universe Codependents like to remake/remodel people in their own image and likeness. We attach ourselves to people we believe we can fix, or manipulate into being what we want them to be. We are never in love with the person just as he or she is. We are infatuated with what we can make them into in order to ensure our own happiness. Before recovery I consistently struck up relationships with people who were needier than I was. My pattern of thinking was simple: This person is so needy that they won’t be able to resist me. I’ll shower them with attention and do all of the things for them that they should be doing for themselves. After I ...

“The more you love yourself, the more you are able to love others.” Robert Holden, Loveability In his book Loveability , Robert Holden points out the fact that at the beginning of every new relationship there is a grace period. During that initial phase “you feel so happy and so blessed to have met each other that any doubts about your loveability are temporarily suspended.” How true! Whether or not this grace period lasts depends on how we view ourselves. As Holden makes clear, it depends on whether we live by the basic truth “I am loveable,” or the basic fear “I am not lovable.” The average codependent lives by the basic fear “I am not lovable.” And so this means that our grace period in any new relationship is fairly short. It doesn’t take long for us to get inside our heads and to start feeling inferior, needy and clingy. This happens because, as Holden points out, the less we love ourselves:             -t...

“I do not explain, defend or justify my life to anyone. I am my own creation, intent on being myself.” Dr. Chris Michaels Many codependents spend a lot of time explaining, defending and justifying their lives—even their existence—to others. Someone criticizes something we said or did and a panic alarm goes off inside of us. We then bend over backwards to whitewash ourselves. We back pedal on our beliefs or our values and desperately repaint ourselves in the color that this critical person wants us to be. Before recovery many of us were like chameleons. Every hour of every day often led to a change in our color or in our song and dance. It was always more important to us to sing the song someone else wanted us to sing, or to dance the dance that made other people happy. Yup, we were champions of giving our personal power away to everyone we thought was better than us. And by the time we entered recovery, many of us didn’t know our own voices anymore. We had complet...