Soulshine

Dear Higher Power, Thank you for granting me awareness. I AM NOT A VICTIM! I am not a victim of my parents. I am not a victim of my family. I am not a victim of past or current relationships. I am not a victim of my employer or coworkers. I am not a victim of twisted religious teachings. I am not a victim of the world, or "friends" or life. I am only a victim of my own self-destructive thoughts. I have shot myself through the soul with my own negative thinking. I own the fact that I have done a poor job of guarding my thoughts. I have allowed negative overthinking to devour my self-love. I have allowed constant self-criticism to poison my heart and soul. And I have consistently projected my own negative thoughts about myself onto others, often falsely accusing them of victimizing me. With all humility, I acknowledge that no one has victimized me more than I have victimized myself.  I have daily destroyed myself with my victim-mentality. Today, I a...

I bought two of these Japanese ninja dolls back in July. One was for a friend’s birthday and the other for me. I made the sign he’s holding in his hand as a daily reminder that our biggest enemy in life is never outside ourselves. It’s inside of us. Our greatest enemy is our inner-critic. That small but loud constant chatter in our heads that is repeatedly telling us “you’re bad,” “you’re worthless,” “you’re so messed up,” “you’re unlovable,” “you’re ugly,” or “you’re fat.” It’s up to us, through Recovery, to learn how to conquer this inner-enemy. It takes daily effort, but what I’ve learned to do is this: When that inner-critic offers an opinion to me, I tell my inner-critic to “go F**K itself.” I’m finished with giving my personal power away to a voice in my head that represents countless years of sel-abuse. No more. I refuse to abuse myself anymore with negative thoughts about me, and I will no longer be controlled mentally, or emotionally by this nasty, negative inner-vo...

Self-love is a tough one for most everyone who enters a Recovery program. So many of us as children were taught, or programmed, to loath ourselves. We were constantly criticized by our parents and rarely, if ever, received positive recognition. We were taught by them that we were not valuable, that we did not count and that we were basically unlovable.  Growing up in my own household as a child, I learned I was lovable if I did all of the right things to please my parents, but otherwise, I was NOT lovable. Love had to be earned and it could be withdrawn at any second of any day. This led to a fear of abandonment as well as self-loathing inside of me.  Life became a hell of emotional instability for me. One day I might be lovable in the morning, but by afternoon, I was getting the silent treatment or hearing words like "I'm ashamed to even call you my son!" As an adult I firmly believed I needed someone who could love me unconditionally into loving mysel...

In his book The Power of Kindness , Piero Ferrucci speaks of “the soul wound.” Coined by Thomas Yeomans, the soul wound is “what we feel when as children we are not seen for who we are—a soul full of marvelous potential for love, intelligence and creativity—but instead perceived as a difficult, headstrong child, or a lovely showpiece, or as a great nuisance—or not seen at all.” Those of us who grew-up in addictive households known the pain of the soul wound and it is something that we have carried with us into adulthood and into the rooms of recovery. This is the primary wound that our inner-critics zero in on. It’s the wound that bleeds with the belief that we are a nuisance, or worthlessly stupid, or hopelessly unlovable. And it fuels the merciless voices of our inner-critics. I’m often amazed at how active my inner-critic is every day. When it isn’t hammering me, it is hammering someone else in the same manner in which it hammers me—shamelessly. More and more I am aware of...

The Christian Gospel of Luke contains the story of the Prodigal Son. The story revolves around a man and his two sons. The younger son is lacking in conscience and thinks only of himself. One day he asks his father for his inheritance, the father obliges and the son runs off and squanders all of the money. Once he’s broke, he contrives a scheme to return to his father and beg him to allow him to become a hired hand. Instead, the father fully forgives the unrepentant son because the father’s love is so great that it looks beyond the young man’s behavior. The father dresses his son in the finest robes, puts rings on his fingers and arranges for a grand party to welcome the son home. The older son, once he learns of what has happened, is furious with his father and his brother. Because the older son is highly critical of his brother I want you to imagine the older brother as the inner-critic of the younger brother. Seems so many of us struggle with an inner-critic, and in m...

“All we’ve ever wanted Is to look good naked Hope that someone can take it God save me rejection From my reflection, I want perfection.” Robbie Williams , Bodies All my life I have struggled with body-image. As a kid it was no problem. I don’t remember thinking anything negative about my body—until I hit 7 th Grade, that is. Around the age of 12 I learned to medicate my emotional pain with Payday candy bars, Lay’s Potato Chips and lots of sugary sodas. I wasn’t an active kid, aside from walking to and from school, and so it didn’t take long for me to start my compulsive over-eating journey toward becoming “fatty, fatty two-by-four.” And as fate would have it, just as puberty was beginning to make me self-consciousness personified, I had to face all of the family and public scorn that came with suddenly being fat. At one point, I got so self-conscious that I did everything within my little pubescent range of thinking to hide the fat. I wore bulky sweaters—even ...