Soulshine

Growing up, I attended Catholic grade school and high schools. In those schools I was verbally taught the words of Jesus Christ, "Turn the other cheek;" meaning when someone is cruel to you, return their cruelness with kindness. These were the words I was taught, but this was NOT the behavior that I witnessed. The behavior I witnessed from adult Catholics/Christians was "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." I witnessed those same people who were saying "turn the other cheek" choosing instead to return evil for evil when push came to shove-- to seek revenge instead of reconciliation. For many years, I followed their example because their words were worthless. Recovery has taught me that my word and my behavior must parallel each other. As a Christian, I now choose to "turn the other cheek" when people are cruel or unkind to me. Why? Because I know who I am now. And being cruel in return is not the real me. An eye for an eye is...

I bought two of these Japanese ninja dolls back in July. One was for a friend’s birthday and the other for me. I made the sign he’s holding in his hand as a daily reminder that our biggest enemy in life is never outside ourselves. It’s inside of us. Our greatest enemy is our inner-critic. That small but loud constant chatter in our heads that is repeatedly telling us “you’re bad,” “you’re worthless,” “you’re so messed up,” “you’re unlovable,” “you’re ugly,” or “you’re fat.” It’s up to us, through Recovery, to learn how to conquer this inner-enemy. It takes daily effort, but what I’ve learned to do is this: When that inner-critic offers an opinion to me, I tell my inner-critic to “go F**K itself.” I’m finished with giving my personal power away to a voice in my head that represents countless years of sel-abuse. No more. I refuse to abuse myself anymore with negative thoughts about me, and I will no longer be controlled mentally, or emotionally by this nasty, negative inner-vo...

  When we realize that we have re-engaged in unhealthy relationships, we have at least two choices: We can detach, cut the other person off and play the blame game. We can make every mistake their fault and choose to dislike or even hate them. Or we can choose to realize that we are both broken inside, that we both made mistakes and we can detach with love. Detaching with love is necessary. We can't rightfully blame the other person for everything that went wrong in the relationship. It truly takes two to tango. So we have to be willing to admit to our own mistakes and to admit that under the other person's brokenness, we did see beauty in their soul. Sometimes it's also necessary to detach with love because we are making spiritual/recovery progress and the other person isn't. We can't force anyone to be willing to work at recovery and to be wiling to fix themselves. And we cannot fix them. There have been many times when I've heard friends sa...

Recovery is a partnership. It is a partnership between God (Higher Power), ourselves and other people whom we can trust. Recovery is never an act of praying to your Higher Power and then expecting your Higher Power to suddenly zap you with instant wellness, and make everything OK. That's not prayer. That's magical thinking.   We have to first be willing to do whatever work is necessary to make our lives better; to change our patterns of thinking and behavior from negative to positive. Recovery always starts with "me." Once we are willing to do our best to change our character defects into character assets, then our Higher Power can help us.  We first need to do for ourselves whatever we can do to make our lives manageable and functional. What we aren't capable of doing for ourselves, we need to surrender to our Higher Power and allow that Higher Power to handle all that is beyond our control.  We also need to be willing to reach out to others we tr...

Forever bitter, or eventually better? The choice is truly ours. When I first entered Recovery for codependency in 1995, it didn't take me long to feel very bitter and angry toward my parents and our entire nuclear family structure. It was polluted with addictive behaviors. I had learned all of these behaviors from my parents. Back in 1995, I was in my 30s and angry as hell with my parents. I was even angry with my mother, from whom I had learned all of my codependency, even though she had been deceased for two years. I said angrily at a CODA meeting "They screwed-up my entire childhood, teen years and much of my young adult life! I am so angry with them. Why should I have to pay the price of doing all of this recovery stuff for something that I'm not guilty of? It was taught to me! I didn't choose it! I didn't know I even had a choice!" Others at the meeting understood how I felt. And they congratulated me for getting in touch with my feelings and...

It's so true: We only have one life to live-- OURS. And we have a choice everyday. We can choose to work our recovery programs, to consciously change our thinking and behaviors; or we can choose to stop working to improve our lives and regress into the old misery we have so desperately wanted to escape. So how do I want to spend the rest of my life? I want to love myself unconditionally and to stop hating myself. I know learning to love myself unconditionally will help me to accept and love others unconditionally. All of my relationships will improve. I will choose healthier people to engage with and our relationships will be between equals. I am tired of running after people who don't see me. I am always attracted to the most emotionally unavailable and neediest people. After 22 years of Recovery, this is an instinctual battle I have to face every single day. Only through working my CODA program can I consciously choose to no longer engage in relationships with e...

Before Recovery, I always attracted people who couldn't possibly love and accept me for who I am. Looking back, I realize the real reason why I attracted and was attracted to those people; because I was unable to love and accept myself for who I am. Recovery has taught me that I have to have a good, loving relationship with myself-- I have to love and accept myself warts and all-- if I want to fix my radar when it comes to relationships. The more I come to love and accept myself, despite all of my perceived/real faults and failings, the more I am attracted to people who also love and accept me for who I am. And the less I am attracted to people who don't accept and love me for who I am because they are unable to love and accept themselves for who they are. Loving and accepting people for who they are doesn't mean that we have to love or accept all of their beliefs, attitudes and behaviors; nor do they have to accept all of our beliefs, attitudes and behaviors.  W...

    All I ever wanted my whole life is to be loved and accepted for who I am. Isn't that what we all want? To know that we are loved and accepted despite our flaws, our failings and our personal imperfections? We've wanted unconditional love and acceptance since we were in our mother's womb. But many of us have never felt loved and accepted for who we are. And sometimes we wonder if the people who do say they love us are only loving us because of what we do for them, what we do to please them, or to get something they want from us; as opposed to loving us exactly for who we are-- for simply being our God-given selves. I want to be loved and accepted for who I am, flaws and all. I know that love and acceptance of me has to begin with me. That's what recovery is all about: reclaiming, accepting and loving our true selves. And through recovery, I have certainly learned to accept and love myself much better-- not perfectly-- but much better than I did before recov...

    Nothing changes in our lives until we do. Recovery is the choice we have made in an effort to change our lives for the better. But it is an EFFORT. And it's easy to find ourselves balking at investing in that effort during the recovery process. We can say to ourselves "Why me? My friends don't have to work the 12 Steps. They don't have to go to meetings. They don't have to spend time with a sponsor. They don't have to see a therapist." Sometimes we continue with thoughts like "This isn't my fault that I'm an addict. I didn't ask for it. This is my parents' fault. Why should I have to suffer and work the 12 Steps?" When we find ourselves falling backwards into this mind set, we need to be very careful. We have the right to grieve the fact that we are addicts and that we learned the behavior as children. True we didn't know any better when we started mimicking the behaviors of our parents. It may be their fault, bu...

      Over the past 15 years I’ve come to value the power of setting boundaries. For many a year, I’ve joked about going home for my “annual dysfunctional family Christmas.” Family gatherings, for any reason (holidays, weddings, etc.), were often painful because I either didn’t know how to set boundaries, or didn’t feel worthy of setting them, much less having them respected. But in recent years that has changed. I decided a few years back that I would no longer be party to negativity at family gatherings. Our family has long been divided by religious beliefs, political leanings and various levels of self-righteousness, as many families are; and I no longer wanted to participate. So I set the boundaries that I would no longer participate in political or religious conversations. Instead, I urged that we talk about those things that unite us and bring harmony, instead of those things that divide us. Of course I couldn’t enforce these boundaries on anyone but mysel...

God helps those who help themselves is a very old adage, and it’s very true. No one can help us in our recovery until we are first willing—and determined—to help ourselves, not even God. Why? Because no one can do for us what we must do for ourselves. A good therapist can listen and empathize with us, and can point us in the right direction. A good sponsor can also listen and empathize and provide us with important tools to aid us in our recovery. And a good support group can provide us with a sense of belonging and with new self-awareness. But we will fail miserably if we expect that they should do more for us. Many people enter recovery and expect to be taken care of by others. They either have no understanding of self-care or they have no intentions of doing it. Instead, they think that they need only whine, cry and demand that others do their recovery for them. But recovery does not work this way. Recovery only works when we realize that we have one life to live and ...

I spent the last two weeks of October on vacation in Los Angeles. Every year I go and spend time with my roller-coaster buddy, and I was expecting to do the same this time; but it didn’t work out that way. When I arrived, I learned that he would only be available to me for a day. Before recovery, I would have gone into a terrible tailspin at this point. The fatalist in me would have been devastated and the victim in me would have taken over immediately: “Oh, woe is me! My whole vacation is ruined before it’s even started! Nobody loves me! I might as well go back home! Boo hoo, boo hoo, boo hoooooooooooooooooooo!” But it didn’t happen that way this time. Sure I was initially disappointed and I allowed that disappointment to be present. But I was also aware of my expectations and I wasn’t about to give my personal power away to them or the disappointment. Sure, I expected that my friend should be available to me. But I no longer allow such expectations to spoil my happiness. Af...

Sometimes in CODA meetings we allow ourselves to be bothered by someone else who attends the same meeting. We then fixate on that person until we decide that we aren’t going to the meeting anymore because that person bothers us. This is a cop-out on our behalf. It is actually our subconscious choice to ditch recovery in favor of relapsing.                          Why? Because no one can truly bother us unless we choose to allow them to do so. The first recovery lesson we receive In Step One is that we are “powerless over other people.” It’s the addictive part of us that wants to control and change other people to please ourselves. If I am bothered by someone in a meeting it’s because I’m refusing to admit that I am powerless over them. If something about them bothers me, I am choosing to let it bother me. And if I’m thinking about leaving the meeting permanently...

Recovery is never short-term. There is no vacation from recovery. It’s a minute by minute, day by day, lifetime process. If we continually think of addiction as an emotional disease, we can better monitor our recovery. Addiction is all about emotional medicating. We can be sailing along through our day and all is good. Then suddenly someone makes a comment that hits on an old unhealed emotional wound from childhood, and we nosedive into being a shamefaced five year old. The feelings we experience seem unbearable so we order a Martini, or we make a quick stop by the bakery, or we head to the shopping mall or casino, or we return to work and drown the pain in busyness. Prior to recovery, we didn’t understand that there were certain emotional triggers that sent us into addictive acting-out. Now that we know, we have to practice vigilant awareness. It helps by being able to identify our discomfort. First off, we need to acknowledge that the discomfort is emotional. Second we ...

I live and breathe 12 Step spirituality and I am never ashamed of it. I willingly tell people that I was raised in an alcoholic home, that I wrestle with codependency and other addictive issues and I am NOT ashamed. I acknowledge my personal baggage, I own it and I work at taking my power back from it. That is something to be proud of. I remember the first day I learned from a therapist that I suffered from an addictive personality, specifically codependency. I asked myself “Should I tell others? What if people put me down or abandon me because of it?” Then I realized that these were shame-filled, fearful thoughts. So I thought “Seems to me that shame has always been the real problem. If I am ashamed of being codependent, I will hamper my recovery, so I chose right now to be proud and grateful that I am helping myself.” And I decided to tell others. That was 1995, and I have never looked back with regret. Most every recovery group title ends with “Anonymous,” and that’s OK. B...

My CODA group is currently reading the book Conquer ing Shame and Codependency by Darlene Lancer. Recently one of the members mentioned to me that he found the book difficult to read. I believe I understand where he was coming from, although he may not yet understand that fact about what’s going on inside of himself. Often times when we find a recovery book 1) doesn’t resonate with us, or 2) is difficult to read, it is a clue as to what is really going on inside of us subconsciously. I believe in both of these instances, our denial is being unearthed and disturbed. When a recovery book doesn’t resonate with us at all, we are most likely so bound-up by our denial that the book seems totally foreign to us. We say to ourselves, “Well, this isn’t me at all” as we read about the fact that codependents engage in caretaking and other manipulative behaviors. So we put the book aside and allow it to gather dust. This has been the beginning of the story for many people who I have talked w...

Addiction is an emotional dis-ease. It’s all about running away from our uncomfortable emotions (shame, in particular) and thus running toward addictive acting-out to drown those emotions into a comfortable state of numbness or euphoria or a false sense of happiness. I was recently watching Sandra Bullock playing the role of “Gwen” in the film 28 Days . Gwen is either drunk or drugged-out all of the time. She’s constantly running from her shame through alcohol (or drugs), which causes her to do more shameful things, which causes her to feel worse about herself, which causes her to then drown herself in more alcohol and drugs. It’s an endless cycle of Gwen running from her feelings about herself. Unfortunately, Gwen also has a partner-in-crime: Her fiancé Jasper. Jasper is equally as trapped in addictive acting-out. As the movie progresses, we learn that Jasper is actually a substitute for Gwen’s mother. Her mother was a hopeless alcoholic who died from her disease when Gwen w...

“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...

Guilt and shame are big problems for many addicts, including codependents. We feel guilt and shame about many things. Some of us feel the general guilt/shame of not being good enough; some of us feel body guilt/shame; and some of us feel an overall existence guilt, as if we don’t have the right to exist at all. Guilt/shame over not feeling worthy (or good enough), guilt/shame over our appearance (body) and existence guilt all go hand in hand. If we don’t feel good enough, that feeling can be rooted in many things; like not being a good enough son or daughter, or not being a good enough student, or not being a good enough person. Body guilt/shame is obviously about physical appearance. It might be that we feel we don’t have pretty enough hair, or we have feet that are too big, or we are too short, or we are too fat, or maybe we believe we just have an oddly shaped body that isn’t acceptable in the eyes of the world. All of these things combined can give us an over-arching exi...

“When true love is lost, life can bleed of all meaning. We are left blank, but the possibility of destiny remains. What we are meant for may yet be discovered.  And…that journey to find our destiny may defeat even time itself.” From the film Winter’s Tale (2014) Life without love certainly does bleed of all meaning. I’ve often thought about the words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians “If I have faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” Life without love is pure nothingness. And this is why life is often so painful and devastating for people who suffer from codependency and other addictions. Early in life, addicts lose all perspective of self-love. They thus completely lose their grounding in life. They lose the roots of who they are: Love itself. And they gradually become a living, breathing form of nothingness (the sense of being left blank). And in their nothingness, they look desperately outside themselves for validation, for love, for approval and...