Soulshine

    It’s that time of the year again. The parties and shopping are well underway and so is the urgent need to be happy. Christmas has always been a difficult time for me mentally and emotionally. It’s the one season of the year in which everyone desperately wants to feel loved; and yet many of us who grew up in dysfunctional households don’t know how to accept love, or allow ourselves to be loved. We didn’t receive the love we needed as children and consequently we never learned to love ourselves. This is the real problem. Recovery has taught me much about me and self-love. Looking back now, I see that over the many years and Christmas seasons of my life I was in fact loved by many people. But I never acknowledged that love because I didn’t have the inner-tools to accept that love. I didn’t know how to accept it because I didn’t know how to love and accept myself. So I learned to play the victim of the holiday season. I ached inside and moaned and groaned to myself e...

Recovery has taught me the difference between codependent love and authentic love. And the difference is eye-opening. For most of my life, all I knew was a codependent love; one in which I “loved” others for the sole purpose of being loved back by them. This codependent love I experienced was filled with anxiety, neediness, insecurity, manipulation, fear, unreasonable expectations, fear of abandonment and the constant urge to cling desperately to the person I “loved.” It was horrible. And it was not love. Love and codependence cannot coexist with each other. They are polar opposites. If we reach out to others from a deep, dark needy emptiness within ourselves, it is not love we are attempting to share. It’s a desperate cry for intimacy, for a sense of belonging with another person, but it is not love. It is codependence. And codependence always has strings attached. It is strictly self-serving. Authentic love flows freely. It does not arise from a deep, dark, needy place ...

I spent the last two weeks of October on vacation in Los Angeles. Every year I go and spend time with my roller-coaster buddy, and I was expecting to do the same this time; but it didn’t work out that way. When I arrived, I learned that he would only be available to me for a day. Before recovery, I would have gone into a terrible tailspin at this point. The fatalist in me would have been devastated and the victim in me would have taken over immediately: “Oh, woe is me! My whole vacation is ruined before it’s even started! Nobody loves me! I might as well go back home! Boo hoo, boo hoo, boo hoooooooooooooooooooo!” But it didn’t happen that way this time. Sure I was initially disappointed and I allowed that disappointment to be present. But I was also aware of my expectations and I wasn’t about to give my personal power away to them or the disappointment. Sure, I expected that my friend should be available to me. But I no longer allow such expectations to spoil my happiness. Af...

Seems most of us enter recovery with a very dire need to control life. The concept of flowing with life is totally foreign to us. We are so used to scripting every moment of every day in our heads. We decide what we think others should or should not do in order to please us. Thoughts like “No one should bother me today,” “He should have called me,” “She should want to see the movie I want to see” run through our heads second by second. These are all controlling thoughts. They are designed to ensure our personal happiness—and yet they do just the opposite: They make us miserable because we can rarely enforce them and make them reality. Every day we have a choice. We can script out our day and set ourselves up on a course of manipulation (control) and disappointment, or we can let go and ease into the flow of the day as determined by our Higher Power. I have learned to stop scripting not only my work days but also my free days and vacation days. Sure, I take time to plan what I...

Have you ever gone to a party expecting to meet Mr. or Ms. Right? I have. We enter the party and we’re already anxious because we are bearing a very heavy and unreasonable expectation. It’s an expectation rife with other expectations: Since we’re going to meet HIM or HER we must be on our best behavior, meaning we must be charming and witty; we must look “just right;” and we can’t make any mistakes or else HE or SHE will reject us. WOW!!! What a tall order! No wonder we’re anxious and quickly getting more and more uncomfortable in our skin as we scope-out the party looking for HIM or HER. As we look around, we lock-in on someone. HE/SHE has to be the one! We may have the courage to approach this person or we may not. If we don’t have the courage, we may spend the whole night pining over this person one moment and then beating ourselves up the next for being too cowardly to approach HIM or HER. If HE/SHE leaves before we do, or even if we leave first, we then spend days rippin...

“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...