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 ...

“I've asked myself How much do you commit yourself? It's my life Don't you forget It's my life It never ends (It never ends)” It’s My Life by Talk Talk How much do we commit ourselves to our own lives is a good question for everyone to ask. After all, that’s what recovery is all about. Those of us recovering from codependency spent most of our lives committing ourselves to everyone else’s life. We grew-up with our eyes always focused outside of ourselves. We lived by “Who can I commit myself to today? Who can I take care of today? Whose problems can I try to solve today?” Our only interest was in “your” life. Then we get into recovery and we learned that “your” life isn’t “my” life. We learned that they were two separate and distinct entities. We then learned to untangle the two. And in doing so, we discovered that our lifeline isn’t inside of someone else; it’s inside of us. Suddenly, all of our focus shifted, and we began the process of looking...

There is a big difference between detachment and disinterest. Many people who suffer from codependency confuse these two terms. Active codependents are so enmeshed in the lives of others that they don’t know where they end and those they are caretaking begin. For the most part, active codependents cast their own problems aside as they choose to own the problems of the people they have taken hostage. The active codependent feels responsible for owning, moaning and groaning over and solving the problems of others. They mistakenly believe that it is their responsibility to rescue others from their problems and that by rescuing others they will rescue themselves from being loveless. In recovery, codependents learn that they need to be responsible for their lives and no one else’s life. This means that we have to learn to separate ourselves from the people we have become enmeshed in. We need to come to an understanding about life-ownership. We are the stewards of our lives—only—an...