Soulshine

“You are the reason I live.” Erasure, Reason (2014) I hate to disagree with Erasure. They’ve been one of my favorite bands since the 1980s. But NO ONE can be the reason why I live, aside from myself and God. No other person outside of ourselves can truly be the reason why any of us live. If we find ourselves feeling that way it’s a big red flag. And that big red flag is trying to tell us that we are doing a poor job of loving ourselves. The only reason we ever feel like we can’t live without someone else is poor self-love. When we are in that state of poorly taking care of our own wants and needs, we will feel very empty inside. We will have an aching inner-neediness that drives us to be obsessed with ending that horrible, desperate feeling by attaching ourselves to someone else. The problem is when we are desperately trying to attach to someone else in order to feel better, we are like leeches sucking the blood or life out of the other person. And deep down we know...

Codependent crazy love is all about a constant rush of anxious needy feelings. This anxious rush compulsively pushes the codependent into accelerating everything about a romantic relationship. Patience and common-sense fly out the window of the codependent’s mind. It’s like the codependent has his/her inner-accelerator pushed to the floor with no intentions of ever hitting the brake pedal. Insanity informs the codependent that this new person is truly Mr. or Ms. Right, and so all caution and all boundaries are thrown to the wind. The codependent is ready to hop in bed and rush to the altar—without really knowing anything of significance about the object of his/her desire. The codependent may know little about Mr. or Ms. Heartthrob, aside from his or her name. The codependent may not know where this person is from, his/her family background, if they are currently or ever have been married, where they work (if they even have a job), what their spiritual beliefs are, or whet...

The codependent personality is always desperate for affection. Even years into recovery this fact remains unchanged for many people. Why? Because we are still lax in our willingness to meet our own emotional needs. Deep down we still want someone else to fill the void. And every person who comes along who shows the slightest interest in us—who smiles at us, who treats us with kindness or who flirts with us-- becomes our latest, greatest redeemer. Yes. We are so desperate for intimacy that we fall right into the trap again and again and again. Every smiling face offers us the hope of avoiding self-care. We want the easy way out. We want to be rescued. And our thinking is skewed in so many wrong ways we can’t possible see straight. First, we are forgetting that only WE can fill-up our emotional emptiness through proper self-care and the aid of a Higher Power. No one else can fill up our empty spaces. We have to invest time in loving who we are and in treating ourselves the way we want...