Soulshine

One of the best lessons we get in recovery is to keep our focus on ourselves. Other people don’t make us miserable. It’s our focus on other people that makes us miserable. The average codependent learns at a young age to completely take their focus off of themselves. As children, many of us learned we weren’t worthy of having needs and wants; and some of us learned that we were so worthless that it was simply too painful to focus any attention on ourselves. So we began the dysfunctional process of making everyone else’s lives our business. We focused our eyes completely on others and we began to judge them based on the harsh criteria that we were taught to judge ourselves by. We watched for every mistake, every misstep that most everyone around us made and we made it our business to judge and to criticize them. Many of us learned to focus on one person that we encountered daily—at home, or school or work—and we began giving our personal power over our own serenity away to...

“Self-judgment is the punishment you give yourself when you fail to meet your own expectations, when you fall short of what you think you are supposed to be.” Don Miguel Ruiz Jr, Living a Life of Awareness Codependents are masters of judging themselves—and others-- harshly. What we don’t understand is the process we go through in condemning ourselves and others. The process works like this: Expectation—Belief—Judgment. Somewhere along the line when we were children, adults placed expectations on us. We accepted those expectations as true and worthwhile. We came to believe in them and we also learned to judge and criticize ourselves harshly when we weren’t able to live up to these expectations/beliefs. We learned to judge ourselves in the same harsh way that the adults who imposed these expectations on us did. For example, we came home with a report card that has a “C” on it, and we were immediately scorned for having made a “C.” We were told “You are so much smarter...

Do we ever really see another person just the way he/she is? I doubt it because we spend so much time projecting our own inner-garbage all over everyone else. Think about all of the people you encounter, one way or another, over the course of one day. How much of your own inner-turmoil do you project onto those people? Any time we make a negative judgment against someone else, we are most likely projecting our own negative judgments against ourselves onto those people. Everyday we see people we don’t know and who we will never see again, and yet we spray all of our inner-garbage all over them. In our heads, we criticize how they are dressed, the fact they have tattoos, the way they walk, the people they are choosing to walk with, the bumper-stickers on their cars, the way they eat their French fries, and the stories they have to tell. Why? Because each of those people we choose to criticize is rubbing us the wrong way. And they are rubbing us the wrong way because they are hit...