Soulshine

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” Soren Kierkegaard Being who we are is essential to our happiness. And yet, so many codependents have no idea of who they really are. We rejected and lost our real selves years ago. We buried them under a false self; often times an “ideal” self that reflected the person that our parents or others wanted us to be. For some of us this ideal self was fueled by perfectionism. The real self underneath ached with inadequacy. It was the frog underneath the prince we were attempting to project to the world around us; or the raggedy Cinderella underneath the princess we wanted the world to see. We were two people in one and that drained a lot of energy out of us. It’s exhausting to live with two personas. First off, it takes a lot of energy to suppress our real selves. We are constantly on-guard that some part of our unacceptable real self with accidently pop-out and be seen by others. But it’s equally as exhaus...

“What’s the sense of trying to be something that you’re not?” Mae West , Night After Night In the 1932 film Night After Night , George Raft plays the role of a “mug” named Joe, who runs a speakeasy and who’s decided that he’s not good enough being who he is. Every night his establishment is filled with “swells” or rich people of “proper breeding.” And Joe decides he wants to be a “swell.” So Joe hires a tutor, a professor, to come in everyday and teach him how to be a classy gentleman. We then learn Joe’s real motivation for wanting to remake himself into something that he’s not: Turns out he’s head over heels for a high class “dame” named Jerry Healy. As the movie progresses, Joe learns that his high class “dame” isn’t any classier inside than he is—or for that matter—any of the other “dames” that he’s ever dated, including Mae West’s character, Maudie. This realization brings him back to understanding that he is—and always has been—good enough just the way he is. ...

“All we’ve ever wanted Is to look good naked Hope that someone can take it God save me rejection From my reflection, I want perfection.” Robbie Williams , Bodies All my life I have struggled with body-image. As a kid it was no problem. I don’t remember thinking anything negative about my body—until I hit 7 th Grade, that is. Around the age of 12 I learned to medicate my emotional pain with Payday candy bars, Lay’s Potato Chips and lots of sugary sodas. I wasn’t an active kid, aside from walking to and from school, and so it didn’t take long for me to start my compulsive over-eating journey toward becoming “fatty, fatty two-by-four.” And as fate would have it, just as puberty was beginning to make me self-consciousness personified, I had to face all of the family and public scorn that came with suddenly being fat. At one point, I got so self-conscious that I did everything within my little pubescent range of thinking to hide the fat. I wore bulky sweaters—even ...

“Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.” Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection   As recovering codependents, one of the most difficult things we must do is own our life story. For many years, I distanced myself from my story in the same way that I distanced myself from myself and from owning my own life. The strong desire I had to escape from myself meant that I had to escape from my story as well. And my method for escaping myself and my story was to enmesh in someone else and to come to own his identity and his story. Owning our story means many things to me. First, it means we have to come face to face with ourselves and decide that we will no longer run from who we are. In doing so, we have to look past our denial—all of it. We have to acknowledge and accept that we are worthy, good and lovable (though flawed) people. We have to be able to look in the mirror and say “I love and accept you just the...