Soulshine

“Love says, ‘I love you no matter what.’ Love says, ‘You’re fine the way you are.’ …If you think he’s supposed to be different From what he is, you don’t love him. In that Moment you love what he’s going to be when You’re through manipulating him. He is a throwaway Until he matches your image of him.” Byron Katie, A Friendly Universe Codependents like to remake/remodel people in their own image and likeness. We attach ourselves to people we believe we can fix, or manipulate into being what we want them to be. We are never in love with the person just as he or she is. We are infatuated with what we can make them into in order to ensure our own happiness. Before recovery I consistently struck up relationships with people who were needier than I was. My pattern of thinking was simple: This person is so needy that they won’t be able to resist me. I’ll shower them with attention and do all of the things for them that they should be doing for themselves. After I ...

One of the most essential lessons that recovery teaches us is this: We are not responsible for the problems of other people, nor are we responsible for fixing them (other people or their problems). So many codependents are masters of the fine art of caretaking and that makes detachment from others and their issues especially difficult. Even after years of recovery, we may still feel tinges of guilt when others bring us their problems and we aren’t able to do anything. That’s OK. We can allow ourselves to feel the guilt (which is really about us wanting to boost our self-esteem by being needed), and we can let go of it. In the past, we wanted to fix everything for everyone for all of the wrong reasons. It was all about us and our need to be loved and needed. As we learn to love ourselves better, the urge to win the love of others through caretaking begins to subside. But we may still be faced with lingering doubts about whether or not we are doing enough when others we lov...

“I spend too much time thinking and doing, I need fun, fun, fun in my life and I need life, life, life in my fun.” The Drums, I Need Fun in My Life The average codependent is seriously lacking fun in his life, much less life in his fun. Even if we’ve been in recovery for a while we can find ourselves still spending way too much time thinking and doing serious stuff that has nothing to do with our lives. After all, our lives revolved around everyone else’s life for so long. All of our focus was on the lives and problems of everyone we encountered. We searched-out drama everywhere, and when we couldn’t find any drama to fix in someone else’s life, we worked hard to create as much chaos as it took to keep us from facing ourselves and living our own lives. Where’s the fun in focusing on drama or creating chaos? Where’s the fun in focusing on everyone else’s problems 24/7? Where’s the fun in our futile attempts to fix everyone by falsely owning all of their pro...

“You knew all along What I never wanted to say Until I learned to love myself I was never ever lovin' anybody else Happiness lies in your own hand It took me much too long To understand how it could be Until you shared your secret with me.” Madonna, Secret Until you learn to love yourself, you will never love anyone else is a “secret” that every codependent must learn, and the sooner the better. I know it seems like a vulgar idea. The very thought of loving myself seemed hopelessly twisted to me early-on in my recovery. But it is totally essential. I wasted much of my life hating me. My self-hatred kept me running from myself and into the arms of anyone who would have miserable, worthless me. It took me on an endless bad trip into the lives of countless toxic people, who also hated themselves. And that bad trip didn’t end until I realized it was impossible for two people who hate themselves to build any type of redeeming relationship. Toxic person pl...

“The hardest thing for me was understanding that letting go didn’t mean letting go of people, places and things,” Darlene’s friend said. “It was letting go of my ideas about how life should go.” Melody Beattie, Choices Letting go is not about giving up on life or about abandoning people, places or things that we love. Letting go is about accepting everything about life that we have no power to control or change. It’s about accepting reality as it is, not as we want it to be, or how we think “life should go.” Reality is also about accepting people exactly the way they are and about discerning boundaries. Boundaries tell us where we end and others begin. People in recovery rarely enter with good boundaries. We are so enmeshed in others that we can’t separate our lives from theirs, or our problems from the problems of those we care about. Here is a good litmus test for setting boundaries in terms of what problems are ours to own and what problems are not: My problems direct...