Soulshine

Ah, it’s another beautiful day in recovery! Well, until we meet someone whose neediness triggers all of our old behavioral patterns. Let’s say we’re having lunch with a friend and she has brought along a coworker. We feel an immediate attraction (attachment) to the coworker. Seems he’s just ended a bad relationship. As we listen to him speak, all of our caretaking sensibilities (or should I say nonsense-abilities) start rising from the grave within our souls. The more he speaks, the more we are convinced we can rescue him—and we aren’t even consciously aware that this is what is actually going on inside of us. As we munch on our sandwich, we begin projecting all of our old codependent neediness onto him. Suddenly he is as codependent and as needy as we want him to be. And we are convinced that we can use what we have learned in recovery to make him OK. We begin spilling out recovery jargon, telling him about the latest Melody Beattie book we’re reading, and helping hi...

Yesterday was one of those days. From the get-go it seemed like the entire universe was working against me. Nothing was flowing right and so all of the slumbering, unresolved frustration and anger inside of me erupted to new volcanic heights. As I was driving along I found myself screaming at life, God and the entire world as I banged on my steering wheel. The initial frustration that surfaced was about the past few months. Over that time, I’ve invested a lot of energy into getting my life together in new, necessary ways. I’ve taken giant steps forward, which is great. But I’ve also met great resistance and there’s been practically no positive response from others that I’ve reached-out to; or at least, it isn’t coming soon enough for me. All of that frustration quickly snowballed into an avalanche of past and present frustration, hurt and anger. Terrible things that happened to me in the past came flooding back and all I could do is remember and ask “Where was God during ...

“Life sucks and then you die.” Anonymous It’s easy to get discouraged in recovery. Bad days are still bad. We take steps forward and then we regress back into old destructive patterns of behavior. We understand there is no such thing as positive instant gratification, and yet we are still desperate for instant intimacy. So we continually find ourselves looking for that person who can make us happy, despite all we’ve learned in recovery. We still look to every face-- on every street corner, in every restaurant, in every social gathering, in the supermarket and even in our doctor’s waiting room.  We understand no one can rescue us, and yet we are still codependently seeking our savior. On those days when life truly sucks, I think it’s especially hard for those of us who lost their youth to codependency. It’s easy to look back and regret that we lost our twenties and thirties-- and all of the attainable happiness that comes with being young-- to a disease we didn’t even k...