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 ...

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...

“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 ...

Everyday Dr. Jekyll meets Mr./Ms. Hyde in your mirror. Many of us don’t like to admit this fact. We prefer to look at other people and see the Mr./Ms. Hyde in them, but we almost never consciously see it in ourselves—even when we don’t like ourselves very well. Over the past few years, I’ve had a problem with a certain Mr. Hyde. He was blustery and a natural born bully. He bullied me and I allowed it, for the most part. Bullying happens in many ways. It’s not just a matter of someone using physical strength against their victims, nor is it just a matter of verbal abuse. We can also bully others through the silent treatment, or by discounting what they say. We can act arrogant as if everything they think or say is trivial, stupid or just out and out wrong. This is also bullying. Of course, I thought I was absolutely nothing like the Mr. Hyde I was having problems with. I’m not a natural born bully. I’m not physically the size of what we would normally consider to be a bully. ...

Many people know something is wrong inside of them. They just don’t know what it is. And they—like most people-- are prone to look for an easy outside-of-myself fix. It almost never occurs to any of us to look inside ourselves for the proper fix. So, these people often assume companionship is what’s missing from their lives. They decide that once they find the right lifetime companion, they’ll feel fine with themselves and life will be good. “Yes. That’s it!” they think. “Once I get married, I’ll be OK!” So they find a companion, get married and eventually they discover that there’s still something wrong inside of them. They are still fearful and anxious and feeling far from OK. A new fix is needed, since the marriage fix obviously didn’t take. And often times the next outside fix becomes a newborn child. “Yes. That’s it!” they think. “Once we have a baby, I’ll be OK!” So they conceive, a child is born and eventually they discover that there’s still something wrong inside of them. T...