Soulshine

Recovery is a partnership. It is a partnership between God (Higher Power), ourselves and other people whom we can trust. Recovery is never an act of praying to your Higher Power and then expecting your Higher Power to suddenly zap you with instant wellness, and make everything OK. That's not prayer. That's magical thinking.   We have to first be willing to do whatever work is necessary to make our lives better; to change our patterns of thinking and behavior from negative to positive. Recovery always starts with "me." Once we are willing to do our best to change our character defects into character assets, then our Higher Power can help us.  We first need to do for ourselves whatever we can do to make our lives manageable and functional. What we aren't capable of doing for ourselves, we need to surrender to our Higher Power and allow that Higher Power to handle all that is beyond our control.  We also need to be willing to reach out to others we tr...

Most addictive personalities have difficulty with trust. We grew-up in families where trust was discouraged, or simply not possible to maintain. As a result we now struggle with the very concept of being able to trust anyone or anything. In recovery the first person we need to learn to trust is ourselves. That’s a hefty assignment for most of us, but an extremely necessary one. We can start by beginning to believe in our own personal value. Everyone has value in this world. There are no exceptions to that one fact. Once we start seeing ourselves as lovable, valuable and unique individuals, we can choose to move forward by trusting ourselves to make life-giving decisions. We will see that we are equal with everyone in this world in that we all have a purpose for being here. We will see that we all share the same purpose of fully growing into being the persons we were created to be. And, as we begin to grow mentally, emotionally and spiritually through our recovery programs...

I have said before that expectations are preconceived resentments. This is a lesson that many codependents need to learn over and over again. After all, we are good at assembling numerous expectations in our heads, primarily about what other people should or should not be doing. It’s habitual behavior and we need to be aware of our tendency to fall into the Preconceived Resentment Trap. It’s January and in the United States it’s cold and flu season. If I come down with a cold or flu, it’s easy for me to not want to be responsible for myself. After all, we codependents aren’t masters of taking good care of ourselves to begin with, and so it’s easy for us to shift our expectations toward everyone else in the family. So let’s say we have a cold. We’re sniffling and coughing, feeling achy and miserable and wanting someone to rescue us. We notice a pain in our throat, and we realize that we don’t have anymore cough drops. So we sigh and think how wonderful it would be if our s...

When I give spiritual talks involving recovery, people sometimes raise their hands and say “That’s great, but it doesn’t work.” I listen to their story and then I say “Let’s clarify something: Is it that it (recovery) doesn’t work, or that you didn’t work it?” Silence ensues and then the person usually says sheepishly “I didn’t work it.” Information and awareness are great to have. They are necessary. We can’t begin to understand ourselves or our old ingrained patterns of behavior until we have awareness of how we have been hurting ourselves and others, and information about healthier patterns of behavior. But information is just information and it’s easily forgotten if we don’t put it to good use. Recovery is a lifetime process. There’s no end to it until we breathe our last breath. It works when we work it. Working a recovery program for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, a few months or even a few years isn’t going to cut it. The moment we stop working it, we gradual...