Soulshine

“Blame aggressively shifts shame onto someone else… Making someone else the problem allows us to feel better about ourselves, while having the effect of making the other person feel the way we really feel inside.” Darlene Lancer, Conquering Shame and Codependency Addicts love to play the blame game. Most of us are pretty poor at taking responsibility for our own mistakes and dysfunctional behaviors. This resistance is rooted in our poor self-esteem, which makes it nearly impossible for many of us to admit that we were wrong in any way. As a result, it’s often subconsciously important for us to make someone else responsible for our mistakes, as well as for the guilt and shame we feel about having made those mistakes. It’s rare for a codependent to be able to honestly laugh-off his/her mistakes. We don’t know how to laugh at ourselves and we are too paranoid that people will reject us for making mistakes. Our refusal to acknowledge and take responsibility for mistake...

“You never lost Mary Hale. You lost yourself.” Herman to Jimmy , Broadway Serenade Many of us think we know what it’s like to “lose” someone else from our lives. Someone stops calling us, or someone de-friends us on Facebook, or someone simply picks up and walks out of our lives. Then there are those situations where someone is simply tolerating us, and we know it. What we may not know, however, is that they are tolerating us despite ourselves. We never “lost” them, but we did a heck of a good job of alienating them and forcing them as far out of our lives as possible—much to our own regret. In the 1939 film Broadway Serenade , Jeanette MacDonald plays Mary Hale. She’s an up-and-coming singer who’s teamed with her piano playing/composer husband, Jimmy Seymour (played by Lew Ayres). Both are talented. Mary has a great voice and Jimmy has real song-writing skills. But Mary is on her way up because she believes in herself. She’s grounded in good self-love and appreciation,...