Soulshine

“It’s easier for me to focus on your problems than on my own.” Reba McEntire, Reba I was watching an episode of the TV show Reba recently where the title character blurted-out the line above. It’s a line every codependent can relate to because we are all guilty of focusing our attention on other people and their problems so we can avoid our own. In this particular episode, Reba is focused on the marital problems her daughter, Cheyenne, and son-in-law, Van, are experiencing, and she’s determined to fix their problems. Sound familiar? YES!!!! Likewise, we codependents are very good at focusing on the faults and failures of everyone around us. Sometimes we find ourselves very irritated by a particular person we live with or work with, and we spend way too much time renting out negative space in our heads to this person. Every time we turn around we are dwelling on something they have said or done that has rubbed us the wrong way. We may stew all day on this person and the...

In his book Loveability , Robert Holden says “the basic fear ‘I am not loveable’ can play itself out in so many ways… ‘There is something wrong with me,’ ‘I am unseen,’ ‘I am not understood,’ ‘I am incapable,’ ‘I am not safe,’ ‘I am not interesting,’ ‘I am all alone,’ or ‘I don’t matter.” Over the course of my life I have experienced all of these fears. Likewise over the past 18 years of my recovery, I have encountered countless numbers of people who have suffered greatly from the same fears. Anytime we believe we are not good enough to be loveable—not even to be loveable to our parents or God—our thinking will begin to nosedive off a cliff into total self-annihilation.  For me, believing I was “not good enough” led me to believe that I needed to be invisible. It seemed logical to me that if people couldn’t see me, they also couldn’t defile or hurt me: They couldn’t criticize or bully what they could not see. So I worked hard as a child to be silent, to breathe quietl...

Most everyone wants approval from others. And it can be very emotionally painful for some of us if approval is withheld. I didn’t realize how a devastating feeling from the past can arise from needing approval in the present moment until just last week. I was helping-out with a week-long retreat for Catholic nuns. The first of my two talks was one I call “Have I Loved Well.” In that talk I speak of the fact that when our day comes and we stand before God, He isn’t going to ask us how much money we made, or if we were good at bridge, or how well we ate. He’s only going to ask us one question “Did you love well?” As soon as I made that statement, one of the nun’s raised her hand and said “Oh, I don’t think you understand nuns. We don’t have bank accounts, and we don’t play bridge.” It threw me initially because 1) I made no mention of bank accounts. Sure, nuns may not have individual bank accounts, but they still have to “make money” to support their communities;   and ...