Soulshine

“Happiness is a byproduct of the way we live our own lives, not the way others live theirs.” Karen Casey , Codependence and the Power of Detachment Detachment is a major buzzword in codependent recovery circles. So what is detachment? It’s the process of realizing that we are enmeshed in the lives of others, admitting that we are powerless over them and then making the conscious choice to separate or detach ourselves from the people whose lives we’ve been trying to live. Part of losing ourselves in those people involves the need to control them. We mistakenly believe that if we can control them and make them be and do exactly what we want, we will finally be happy. This type of codependent thinking, believing that our happiness is the byproduct of how other people live their lives, is modeled perfectly by Hannah, the character from the movie Pilgrimage that I wrote about yesterday. She was so enmeshed in her son Jim, so caught up in the belief that her happiness was ...

“It’s just my imagination running away with me.” The Temptations, Just My Imagination It’s the 4 th of July and that means fireworks. If you want some real fireworks in your relationships, however, just try being suspicious, controlling and distrustful of the people you believe you care most about in your life. Oh my God! Do I remember those days and all of the relationships I destroyed through by obsessive-compulsive thinking. In the past, I could never believe anyone was really interested in me, much less loved me, because I didn’t love myself and wasn’t interested in helping myself. So I’d enter a relationship and everything would be good at first. But the more I saw the person, the more insecure I’d become. I mean, how could this person possibly love icky old me? So I’d start obsessing about who they were looking longingly at if we were eating in a restaurant, or dancing in a club. When we were apart, they’d be on my mind constantly. What were they doing? I know. ...