I See Me Inside of You--- And I Don’t Like It!
One of the best lessons we get in recovery is to keep our focus on ourselves. Other people don’t make us miserable. It’s our focus on other people that makes us miserable. The average codependent learns at a young age to completely take their focus off of themselves. As children, many of us learned we weren’t worthy of having needs and wants; and some of us learned that we were so worthless that it was simply too painful to focus any attention on ourselves. So we began the dysfunctional process of making everyone else’s lives our business. We focused our eyes completely on others and we began to judge them based on the harsh criteria that we were taught to judge ourselves by. We watched for every mistake, every misstep that most everyone around us made and we made it our business to judge and to criticize them. Many of us learned to focus on one person that we encountered daily—at home, or school or work—and we began giving our personal power over our own serenity away to...