Soulshine

“I’m sorry I met someone because I know how much you hate it when I’m happy… You’re happiest when I’m miserable ‘cause then you don’t have to look at how miserable you are.” Grace Adler, Will & Grace (2002) Will Truman (Eric McCormack) and Grace Adler (Debra Messing) bounced back and forth within a love/hate friendship for eight seasons on the TV series Will & Grace . Both characters were codependently needy, and they spent many an episode trying to control or fix each other. As I was watching an episode from Season Five, the above quote really made my ears perk up. It made me think back over my life and of how I, too, was often happiest when someone I’d grown close to was miserable. It doesn’t make sense on the surface unless you understand codependent caretaking. Before recovery, I was a professional codependent caretaker. In other words, I came alive in a relationship when the other person was suffering through something they were powerless over. It gave me the ...

“He doesn’t belong either in your head or in your bed. He just serves your addiction to pain... I think you’re the one who’s committed to hurting you. He’s just a screen on which you project your cruelty to yourself.” Maria Bello, Whatever… Love is Love Most every codependent I’ve ever known has been unknowingly addicted to pain. So many of us were taught to be cruel to ourselves. As small children, when adults hurled nasty, shaming words our way, we allowed ourselves to be verbally and emotionally stoned to near-death. We took their harsh criticisms very personally and we learned to endlessly repeat every ugly word we absorbed. We then beat ourselves up with these same shaming criticisms until we developed a need for them. This is how our addiction to pain began. As we grew into adulthood, we then searched-out new people who could serve our addiction to pain. We often chose friends and lovers who treated us as badly as our parents had. These new people became the screens o...

“Your soul can see that this moment NOW is full of gifts for you. Meanwhile, the ego is waiting for a better now.” Robert Holden Seems many of us need to learn to see life more clearly through the eyes of our souls. Robert Holden is certainly right. Our souls see the magic, the miracles, the blessings in each and every moment. But then, sadly, there’s a part of us that’s never satisfied. Whether it’s the ego or not, I can’t say. But I know I have a voice inside of me that’s rarely satisfied. That dissatisfied voice inside is always complaining about all of the things that it wants but cannot have. It complains that it wants love from this person or that person—a love that is never felt—and so the voice is miserable in its longing for what it can’t have. And in the process of its whining, I am made miserable. The disenchanted voice whines about many things. Life never seems to be what it wants life to be because this voice always wants all of the wrong things. At the ...

“Misery is God’s way of telling you that this isn’t the path you should follow.” Rev. Candace Chellew-Hodge Personal misery has much to tell and teach us. Yet, even in recovery, we sometimes don’t want to listen to our misery. We are so accustomed to wallowing in it. Misery is how many of us define ourselves. We wouldn’t know how to behave without feeling miserable in some way. And so if things start changing too much for the better during recovery, we may find ourselves engaged in a game of self-sabotage. Before recovery we didn’t understand that we were trapped in bad patterns of behavior. All of our attempts to manipulate and control others backfired and increased our misery, but we were blind to the fact that control wasn’t the solution to our problems. So we kept loading our pistols with control tactics and we kept having these tactics blow-up in our faces. Our misery intensified and yet we still weren’t willing to listen to it and ask it what it was trying to tell us...

Sometimes we’re just tired. We’re tired of life. We’re tired of the same old daily grind. We’re tired of falling back into the same old patterns of behavior that rekindle our misery. And we’re tired of feeling frustrated, marginalized and hopeless. We find ourselves emotionally crawling on our knees, wondering why life isn’t getting better. When we get into this sort of funk, we know it’s time for an emotional cleansing. We’ve been holding-in all of our feelings, we’ve been feeding off their toxicity and we are on the brink of spiritual death. At times like this we need to let it all out. There’s no point in trying to control it or hold it in any longer. So we scream, beat our hands against the floor and feel the full rush of our frigging bottled-up pain. As it explodes out of our system, we curse our Higher Power and divorce ourselves from it. We need a fresh start. We need to divorce ourselves from everything and every pattern of behavior we’ve relied upon—and we need to...