Soulshine

    Even if we have been in recovery for years, it’s still easy to fall back into the codependent crazies if we aren’t practicing strict awareness. We meet someone new and we may initially feel nothing special about this person. We like them and we enjoy seeing them. But as time passes we can suddenly catch ourselves thinking more and more about them, daydreaming about being with them, wanting to buy things for them, feeling empty and deprived when they aren’t around, wondering about what they are doing—in other words obsessing about them. When we feel the inner-turmoil of obsessing endlessly about the other person, we have fallen back into the codependent crazies and we are out of control. The painful feelings of obsessive love are a warning sign: they can lift the veil of denial and bring us back to reality. If, at this point, we truly open our inner-eyes we now have a choice: we can continue down the insane path of the codependent crazies by keeping our focus solely a...

In her book Facing Codependence , Pia Melody points out the fact that codependents tend to bounce between extremes. We can bounce from low self-esteem to arrogant, from too vulnerable to invulnerable, from good boy/girl to bad and rebellious, from overly dependent to anti-dependent, and from controlling to chaotic. I know what it’s like to bounce between all of those extremes. Before recovery, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing when I allowed myself to swing like a pendulum between extremes. Now I do. I am aware when I go from feeling empowered to totally disempowered. And that’s a really painful bounce for me because the feelings of being disempowered are ingrained from childhood. Mentally, they make no sense to me. I know I’m not truly disempowered, but my feelings don’t agree. In fact, my feelings violently disagree. At least now I know that these feelings of disempowerment are not really about the NOW. They aren’t about the reality of the present moment. They are a...

We vow to put an end to the three obstacles of earthly desire, actions and retribution, and transform the afflictions. We vow to realize the wisdom that sees clearly things as they are. May our desire to put an end to these obstacles be universally realized. Buddhist Chant The average person places many obstacles in his/her daily path. Those of us who suffer with addictive behaviors know that unattainable desires present a serious problem for us. We too often want what we cannot have and we are in serious denial about the fact that we are powerless. It’s our great denial that leads us to believe that we can attain our desires through manipulation of reality. This blindness then leads us down a path of destruction as our focus and our actions become obsessively driven toward attaining the impossible. We desire this particular man or this particular woman and we want them to save us. We want him or her to want us as badly as we mistakenly believe we want him or...

It seems the average person spends more time living inside their head than they do living in the real world. This may be especially true for codependents. Many of us are great at taking nothing and making a huge drama out of it— all inside our heads. We can be in traffic and decide that the driver behind us is following too close. In a split second our brains are creating a horrific scenario. We suddenly envision our car being hit from behind. Our car is smashed and we have whiplash, of course. To make matters worse, the driver who hit us has no insurance. As this sick little story develops through our twisted little thought patterns, we become more and more anxious and angry. And over what? Nothing. It’s all a farce inside our heads. In reality nothing is really wrong. In fact, we suddenly look in our rear-view mirror and see that the driver we were so concerned about is no longer even behind us. Yet we’re upset because we created a head drama out of nothing more than a ...

You stare at me in disbelief You say for you there's no relieve But I swear I'll prove you wrong. Don't stay in your lonely room Just staring back in silent gloom. That's not where you belong Come with me I'll take you where the taste of life is green And everyday holds wonders to be seen. Come with me, leave yesterday behind And take a giant step outside your mind. Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Take a Giant Step  In reality, there’s only one world. Yet nearly all of us have created parallel universes inside our heads. Addicts, in particular, seem to spend way too much time inside their head-worlds. I suppose this is because the real outer-world didn’t feel safe to us when we were children. So we chose to escape from it by withdrawing into a little dream world inside our childhood heads. Unfortunately, with each passing year, our childhood dream worlds slowly eroded into adult nightmare worlds; probably because we became more and more reliant up...

As I’ve said before, life is about choices. Every second of every day we have choices to make. Most of these choices revolve around retaining our personal power or giving it away. When we choose to fight realities that we cannot change, we are actually choosing to give our personal power away. We are choosing to be life’s big fat victim. In doing so, we sit and whine like four year olds, spouting out deeply ingrained mantras like “But it’s not supposed to be this way!” Whine, whine… whine, whine, whine… and whine some more. Poor me. Poor me. Life is soooooo unfair to me! Reality Slap! No life is not unfair to me. I am unfair to me. I am the one who is refusing to accept the reality that I cannot change. I am the one who is freely GIVING AWAY MY OWN POWER, my own key to happiness, by insisting that life be the way that I WANT, instead of being the way that it IS. I am the one who has created my own problem and I am the only one who can choose to solve that problem and thus ma...