Soulshine

“Loneliness can only be understood, never escaped or overcome—except temporarily.” Darlene Lancer , Conquering Shame and Codependency Loneliness and codependency often go hand-in-hand. For years I tried to bury my loneliness through losing myself in other people. I thought that if I could just fade into someone else, all of my emptiness, all of my loneliness would dissipate. But it never did. When fading into someone else wasn’t alleviating my inner-emptiness, I tried to escape my loneliness through other addictive behaviors. Shopping always worked best for me. Buying anything gave me that TEMPORARY respite from my loneliness and my emptiness. But it was always TEMPORARY—very temporary. The problem here is the solution we addicts so often use. We want to escape from our uncomfortable feelings. Escaping is a solution that never works. Instead of trying to escape from difficult feelings, like emptiness, loneliness or anxiety, we need to welcome these feelings. We need to...

“A life lived in fear is a life half lived.” Spanish Proverb Living a life based in fear is as normal as breathing air for many people. And this is probably twice as true for those of us who have addictive personalities. As children. we embraced one major fear—“I’m not good enough”— and then found ourselves buried under an avalanche of life-destroying anxiety and worry. It wasn’t long before “I’m not good enough” developed into a mile-long laundry list of all the many reasons why we weren’t acceptable people. All of these fears were then further complicated by another major fear: Fear of abandonment. Once we deemed ourselves as unacceptable, it didn’t take us long to realize that we now had deep-dark secrets we needed to hide from others. After all, if people we loved found out just how defective we were, they’d say a swift “Goodbye” and never look back as they quickly ran away from us—or so we imagined to our great detriment. So life became on long series of fear-d...

Now that song comes again and I still remember you saying ”Young boy afraid to risk for love to take a chance No light, no love will ever grow Inside your house of stone.” Now that song comes again (Oh, no, no) I still remember you saying ”Young boy who could not ask for love Your chance has passed No light, no love will ever grow.” I will build a house of stone. House of Stone by Roaring Boys I remember first hearing the song House of Stone back in the early 1980s. The melody wrapped its way around my stony little heart and tugged me down to my knees as the lyrics hit me like a brick upside my head. I knew I had built a house of stone around my heart, but I didn’t know what to do about it. On the one hand, my house of stone protected me-- to some degree-- from the pain of the outside world. But, on the other hand, it kept me from being vulnerable and from connecting with other people. It’s stealth protection meant that I couldn’t let any love in—not even ...

“Woke up this morning Closed in on all sides Nothing doing I feel resistance As I open my eyes Someone's fooling I've found a way to break Through this cellophane line Cause I know what's going on In my own mind. Am I living in a box Am I living in a cardboard box Am I living in a box Am I living in a cardboard box Am I living in a box?” Living In a Box by Living In a Box (1987) I’ve spent most of my life living in a box. As a child, I began constructing cardboard walls. Each and every passing year led me to reinforce these walls. During grade school and high school the walls were so well reinforced that they were practically indestructible. And by the time I reached college, I had closed the top on the box so tight that I could barely breathe inside of it. In many ways the box was an invisible shield around me. It protected me any time I needed to leave my room—my only place of safe-refuge within our house or the world for that matter. So t...