Soulshine

“Your destiny is not just to find love; it is to be the most loving person you can be.” Robert Holden, Loveability As an active codependent (for most of my life), I failed miserably at being the most loving person I can be. And even as a recovering codependent over the past 20 years, I have still failed at understanding and thus knowing how to be a truly loving person. To me love has always been about giving of myself to get something back from others. Love, as it was modeled for me as a child, was something you earned. It was the great pay-off; like receiving a paycheck for doing a good job at work. I watched my mother earn the love of everyone around her by looking after all of their needs and doing, doing, doing for everyone. She only stopped doing if she didn’t get her paycheck (the love from others she thought she had earned). If someone didn’t love her for all she was doing, then she’d withhold her love (doing) until they showed some sort of remorse and renewed apprec...

“God grant me serenity to ACCEPT the things I cannot change…” Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer Acceptance can be hard for many codependents to swallow. Some of us are so tuned-in to the idea that we can make another person love us; that we can somehow earn love and acceptance. And we are especially adept at falling in love with people who are totally unavailable to us. At first our efforts at earning love seem to reap rewards. We people-please the other person or we caretake his/her every need; and they respond positively to us. As a result, we begin to dream of spending the rest of our lives with this person and we quickly build a Disney-style fantasy in our heads and hearts. We invest a great deal of time and effort into getting the love we want from this person of our choosing, but we rarely experience the reciprocal love from them that we so desperately want. Over time the beautiful dream begins to become a nightmare. We feel our grip on the other perso...

“I thought I was in love with you, but then I realized that I was in love with how much you were in love with me.” Anonymous The emotional neediness of many codependents drives them to lavish others with praise, gifts, attention and a false concept of love, especially in romantic relationships. Too many codependents are starved for romantic fulfillment and so it’s easy for them to overwhelm the target of their romantic affections. Initially those on the receiving end of all that romantic attention are sometimes knocked for a loop. They are so overwhelmed by all of the attention they are receiving from the codependent that they at first think that they, too, are equally head-over-heals for this person (the codependent). But once they get their feet back on the ground, they begin to get some inner-clarity. And often times they come to an understanding that they really aren’t head-over-heals for the person who is showering them with affection, but rather, they are head-o...

Today I’m becoming aware that my feelings of safety and belonging are often tied to my (false) belief that I need to earn approval from others. Of course I can easily see that this is all tied into my long history of being the “good boy.” I was taught at an early age that I needed to earn a good approval rating from everyone else in this world. It was the only way that I was going to be acceptable. Certainly I learned that I couldn’t be acceptable by simply being me. I had to earn it. I had to do all of the proper people-pleasing tricks so I could get a nice pat on the head and have people say “Oh, isn’t he sweet” or “What a nice boy.” I look back now and realize that I’ve spent most of my life being more of a Poodle than a person. Even to this day, if I don’t follow all of the rules, as determined by others, I feel like I am in someway worthless and unlovable. People object, I don’t get my pat on the head and, as a result, I have my safety blanket yanked away from within...

“Every minute, every hour I'm gonna shower you with love and affection Look out, it's comin' in your direction and I'm I'm gonna make you love me Oh, yes I will, yes I will I'm gonna make you love me Oh, yes I will, yes I will.” I’m Gonna Make You Love Me   (written by Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff & Jerry Ross) Performed by The Supremes & The Tempations I remember the days long ago when “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” was not only my theme song, but my daily mantra. After all, there had to be some unsuspecting fool out there who I could shower with love and affection enough to make them love me. And, of course, I thought that in the process, as long as they were having to love me for all I did for them, they’d have to let me rearrange them and make them into who I really wanted them to be, too. So I tried and tried through caretaking and people-pleasing to make people love me, but it never worked. Every person I took emotionally h...