Soulshine

Recovery has taught me the difference between codependent love and authentic love. And the difference is eye-opening. For most of my life, all I knew was a codependent love; one in which I “loved” others for the sole purpose of being loved back by them. This codependent love I experienced was filled with anxiety, neediness, insecurity, manipulation, fear, unreasonable expectations, fear of abandonment and the constant urge to cling desperately to the person I “loved.” It was horrible. And it was not love. Love and codependence cannot coexist with each other. They are polar opposites. If we reach out to others from a deep, dark needy emptiness within ourselves, it is not love we are attempting to share. It’s a desperate cry for intimacy, for a sense of belonging with another person, but it is not love. It is codependence. And codependence always has strings attached. It is strictly self-serving. Authentic love flows freely. It does not arise from a deep, dark, needy place ...

I’ve long believed that the root problem for all addicts is extreme lack of self-love. We are very mean to ourselves, and this self-loathing and self-hatred destroy our souls. When we can no longer bear the pain, we then turn to some addictive behavior as a means of temporarily rescuing ourselves from our own self-abuse. The remedy for this situation is obviously a healthy dose of self-love, but that’s not easy to accomplish when we’ve spent years self-destructing through self-criticism. So a necessary first step is the daily practice of being kind to ourselves. Self-kindness is the first step toward healing. And being kind to ourselves can be expressed many forms. We can start by speaking words of kindness to ourselves. We are long used to sharply criticizing everything we say, think or do. We criticize our bodies, our personalities, our abilities, our loveability and our self-worth. It’s time we replaced our very harsh criticisms of ourselves with compliments and other word...

If we did less judging and more loving the world would be a holier place. And if we want to be less judgmental and more loving of everyone, we need to begin by being kinder to ourselves. Today is the last day of 2014. Let’s take a few moments and look back over the year. How well did we love ourselves and others? Did we do a good job of choosing to be kind as opposed to being critical? Did we listen with compassion and express understanding when people needed validation? Did we place ourselves into the hearts and minds of others in order to empathize with them, even when they were difficult or even ugly with us? Or did we immediately go on the defensive, take things personally and go into attack mode? Did we make love our priority? The answers to all of these questions depend on how we treated ourselves. If we made loving ourselves a priority in 2014 then we most likely did a better job of loving others as well. The choice to love ourselves better enabled us to be less judgme...

“I now find myself eating for all the same reasons I drank:  I’m lonely, I’m afraid.” Craig Nakken , The Addictive Personality Many people mistakenly belief that addiction itself is the primary problem. It is not. Addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem. The deeper problem is self-hatred. Most every addict suffers from a severe amount of self-loathing. In fact, self-love is a tern that is completely foreign to people who are caught in the throes of addictive behaviors. No one over-indulges in alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex, shopping or any other addictive behavior for no reason. The reason is clear to me. It is lack of self-love. That lack of self-love leads to lack of self-esteem and lack of self-worth. We are then left fearful and lonely. We fear that others will find out how miserably imperfect and unacceptable we are and so we isolate as much as possible to avoid rejection. As we separate ourselves from people and healthy relationships, we begin bui...

“Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. Healing means that the damage no longer controls our lives.” Anonymous Healing and forgiveness go hand in hand. We never have complete healing of the damage that’s been done to us until we reach a point of acceptance, of letting go and of forgiveness. Acceptance means we admit we can’t change what happened   and that we don’t have to be the lifetime victim of what happened. Letting go of the damage frees us from our victim mentality and provides us with internal-peace.   Letting go allows us to take our power back from the damage and the person who inflicted it. Once we let go, we’ll find we no longer feel resentful toward that person. Instead, we feel empowered to stand up to that person and to take our power back from him/her in positive ways. So, I’m not talking about revenge here. I’m talking about coming to the realization that the person who hurt us is in some unhealed-way hurting too. His/her unhealed bro...

There is photo that has recently gone viral on the internet. The photo shows two Middle Eastern men. The two men are holding individual small signs in their hands. The man on the left has a sign that says “I’m Jewish and I’m from Israel ,” and the man on the right has a sign that says “I’m Muslim and I’m from Palestine .” Together both men are holding a larger sign that says “Why can’t we all just get along.” And there’s a peace symbol at the top of the large sign. After studying the photo, I thought about how easy it would be to substitute so many other words onto their small signs. Instead of saying “I’m Muslim” and “I’m Jewish,” the small signs could also say "I'm White” and “I'm Black”-- Why can't we all just get along." Or they could say "I'm Gay,” “I'm Straight." Or "I'm American,” “I'm Iranian." Or "I'm Democrat,” “I'm R epublican."—“Why can’t we all just get along.” The list could go on an...

It’s Valentine’s Day and I’ve bought myself a bouquet of red roses. Why? Because nobody else is going to do it. And because I have to love myself enough to even care enough to do it. If I don’t care enough about me to gift myself with flowers, why should I even hope that someone else would do so, or mope around because no one has done so. If you’re not getting the love you want or expect, it’s because you are not giving yourself the proper love and respect that is essential to projecting a healthy image of yourself to the world around you. What you give to yourself, you essentially give to the world—and the world gives back to you. If I treat myself with kindness, I will treat others with kindness and others will return the kindness to me. If I treat myself with hostility, I will treat others with hostility and those same others will return hostility to me. In the same way, if I treat myself as unlovable, I will project my belief that I am unlovable to the world around me. And...