Soulshine

Recovery is never short-term. There is no vacation from recovery. It’s a minute by minute, day by day, lifetime process. If we continually think of addiction as an emotional disease, we can better monitor our recovery. Addiction is all about emotional medicating. We can be sailing along through our day and all is good. Then suddenly someone makes a comment that hits on an old unhealed emotional wound from childhood, and we nosedive into being a shamefaced five year old. The feelings we experience seem unbearable so we order a Martini, or we make a quick stop by the bakery, or we head to the shopping mall or casino, or we return to work and drown the pain in busyness. Prior to recovery, we didn’t understand that there were certain emotional triggers that sent us into addictive acting-out. Now that we know, we have to practice vigilant awareness. It helps by being able to identify our discomfort. First off, we need to acknowledge that the discomfort is emotional. Second we ...

Everyone we encounter is a teacher. Everyone has something to teach us about ourselves or about life. And last week, I learned a new lesson about myself from an Ebay seller. I collect old movie posters/lobby cards. I had won a beautiful one on Ebay and it arrived damaged last week. As soon as I saw the packaging, I knew there was a problem. The lobby card had been mailed in a manila envelope and only had one ill-fitting piece of cardboard inside. The cardboard was behind the card so there was nothing protecting the front side (the image on the card) aside from the manila envelope, which had been torn in two places during shipping. Sure enough, when I opened the package the lobby card was damaged in those two spots. I immediately contacted the seller expressing my disappointment about the poor packaging and damaged card, and included photos of the damage. I felt justified in registering my complaint. I had paid for a near mint lobby card, not a damaged one. In addressing the i...

As I’ve emphasized before, addiction is an emotional dis-ease, and the primary emotion that fuels addictive behaviors is shame. So let’s define shame. According to Webster’s Dictionary shame is a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety. Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason say in their book  Facing Shame  that "While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person." I agree with Fossum and Mason. Guilt is an emotional that arises when we realize we have said or done something hurtful or wrong. Guilt is primarily about our behavior, which we can change. It’s true that we can be ashamed of something we’ve said or done, or failed to say or do, but guilt is the primary feeling that motivates us to be responsible for our bad behavior. Shame, on the other hand, is a devastating feeling about our own defectiveness or inadequacy as a person. Shame is ...

I just returned from a fabulous trip to Asia. It was an all-expense paid trip to Hong Kong, Bangkok and Koh Samui. And although I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, I still suffered from some pangs of guilt, which I was acutely aware of as I was experiencing them. The guilt stemmed from the fact that I was enjoying myself at someone else’s monetary expense. It was a gift that deep-down I didn’t feel worthy of receiving. The guilt wasn’t so evident when we did things as a group, but if I was lunching on my own or taking an afternoon sight-seeing trip on my own, I felt guilty about charging things to my room; knowing that I wasn’t going to have to pay for them. I realized that all of this guilt stemmed from my deeply engrained belief that my needs and wants aren’t valid. As a child I never felt that I had the right to have wants and needs. I was brainwashed into believing it was purely selfish to want or need anything. As an adult I’ve mostly coped with that guilt by being self-suffi...

Little girl inside of me, I’m surprised you are still there, patiently waiting for me to see how much you need my care. Little girl your tears are felt, they fall across my face and all of that pain you’ve been dealt, I wish I could erase...Little girl I‘m going to hear all of the things you need from me and from now on I’ll hold you near with love eternally.                               Anonymous, Stepping Stones to Recovery Recovery is very much about learning to own your feelings. We all have emotions and every one of them is necessary. There are no good or bad feelings. Those are judgments we’ve made. Truth is every feeling you experience is essential. Feelings exist for our benefit. Every feeling is present for your benefit. Every feeling provides some form of healing. This is why it’s so important that we stop runn...

A major problem for most codependents is where they place their focus. Unfortunately, most of us were taught as children to place our focus outside of ourselves. And as a result, we developed a stifling emptiness inside of our souls. The day we began to look outside of ourselves for fulfillment was the day that a hole ate through our hearts. It was the day we chose to abandon ourselves. And so we began the quest of finding someone, anyone, to fill up the emptiness we anxiously felt. Day after day we took up the quest to find love and approval outside of ourselves. We looked to mom and dad, siblings, grandparents, friends and teachers to give us the validation that we no longer knew how to give to ourselves. Sometimes we received the approval we sought, but if never managed to fill-up the emptiness of the hole that was rapidly expanding inside of us. As we grew into being teenagers and young adults, we began to feel overwhelmed with the landfill that was expanding insi...

“If I knew how good it felt,  I would have done it a long time ago. It really felt amazing ...  It's about self-esteem and dignity at the end of the day.” Ricky Martin Pop singer Ricky Martin came out of the closet as a gay man a year or two ago. He chose to stop pretending he was someone he wasn’t. It didn’t make him any less of a man, or any less of a talented human being. It may or may not have affected his personal relationships and his career. But none of that is near as important as how it affected him in his own relationship with himself. And on a personal level he says “It really felt amazing.” He got his own self-respect back and that’s irreplaceable because no amount of success could make him happy if he wasn’t happy with himself. It makes no difference what we have been hiding from others. Maybe we’ve been keeping a secret about our sexual orientation, or our addictive habits, or a past mistake, or a personal disability. But no matter what it i...

“Used to be a time when you would pamper me Used to brag about it all the time Your friends seem to think that you're so peachy keen But my friends say neglect is on your mind... Who’s right? What have you done for me lately? Ooh ooh ooh yeah What have you done for me lately? Ooh ooh ooh yeah.” Janet Jackson, What Have You Done for Me Lately? The addictive personality has more than one way of keeping a check list. There’s the Old Check List that keeps tracks of all of the reasons why someone else really isn’t good enough for us; and there’s the laundry list that details all of the ways in which someone has failed to return our love and attention, or rather, our caretaking. Let’s face it: Active codependents don’t do anything out of the pure goodness of their hearts. Everything we do comes with strings attached. We deceive ourselves into believing that we really care about someone and then we proceed to smother that person with total love and attention (and I...

Manipulation : to control or play-upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means, especially to one's own advantage; to force change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose. Every codependent is familiar with manipulation. We have all engaged in manipulative behavior for the express purpose of getting from others what we were not willing to give to ourselves—namely love. In fact, for the non-recovering codependent or addict, manipulation becomes a way of life, a survival skill. We need to be needed or loved and so we engage in manipulative behaviors, like people-pleasing and caretaking. We falsify how we really feel about this or that in order to please (manipulate) someone into loving us. We bend over backwards to meet the needs of another person, not because we truly love and care about him/her, but because we want to manipulate him/her into appreciating us and making us feel good about ourselves. But there are other forms of manipulation that we,...

O God you are my God Have mercy on me for I am a miserable worm I am guilty of being alive, brought into this world by an act of sin And I am equally as guilty of breathing the air that is not mine for the taking Forgive me for being a wretched piece of shit for I was born this way I am guilty, I am guilty, I am guilty… And if you are really a God of Love you will wipe away all of this guilt and shame That I was taught as a child by people with good intentions Who were brainwashed by people with evil intentions People who wanted to control and manipulate others To gain personal power, prestige and wealth in Your Name. Amen. This first stanza above is how I have often felt based in my religious upbringing. It’s how I feel whenever I read certain Psalms. It represents how my parents saw themselves and how they viewed sexuality. I don’t blame them for it. They were not bad people. They were simply taught the wrong things by well-intentioned people who had ...

“I’m depressed. I need a cookie.” Sophia Petrillo , The Golden Girls If you’ve seen the sitcom, The Golden Girls , you know Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty) as the wisecracking mother of Dorothy (Bea Arthur). The great thing about sitcoms is that there’s a lot of hidden truth underneath the wisecracking, and there’s none greater than the truth in the above quote—if you’re used to escaping your uncomfortable feelings through food. Many of us who struggle with body weight do so because we subconsciously—and sometimes consciously—medicate our emotional pain away with food. Sugar and salt are two of the primary addictive substances that are excellent for making us feel better, at least initially. I love sugar. There isn’t any greater comfort food than chocolate chip cookies or cheesecake (I hear the Golden Girls applauding). But the problem with sugar is that it always bottoms-out. We experience our sugar-rush and then there’s the big blood sugar drop soon after. The high...

“I’m sick of people worryin’ about what I do.” Mae West, I’m No Angel It’s easy to say “Amen!” to this superb quote from Mae West. We all know what it feels like to have people watching, worrying and judging our every move. It gets tiresome when others are always overstepping their boundaries by focusing their attention on our lives and our behavior. And it doesn’t take long for us to build-up tremendous resentments over having people constantly taking our inventory. Now here’s the catch: Most of us spend just as much time focusing on other people’s lives and on taking their inventories as well. We are every bit as guilty—if not more so—of the same crime. Think about it. While we’re resenting the fact that a certain coworker keeps count of every second we’re away from our desk on a break, we are equally guilty of keeping a mental log of how often this same coworker is late for work in the morning. We do unto others what we despise having done to us, and yet we often are...