Soulshine

No one can help us until we are first willing to help ourselves—not even God or our Higher Power. I grew up hearing “God helps those who help themselves,” and I’ve learned through recovery that this is certainly true. Neither God nor anyone else could help me until the day I finally cried out “I need help! I don’t know what’s wrong with me! Why can’t I build good relationships? God help me!” I finally decided on that day that I had to seek therapy. For years I had refused because my parents had raised me to believe it was taboo. My mother was very much like the Mary Tyler Moore character in the 1980 film Ordinary People . She was horrified over the idea that anyone in our family could be considered crazy enough to need a therapist. It was shameful to her, after all, what would the neighbors say? Well in October of 1995, I decided I didn’t care anymore what the neighbors might say. Screw them. I needed help and I was going to seek it out. So I did. And once I was ready to help...

  ”You won't say you have a problem, But it feels like you want SOMEONE… I should've guessed that you would only ever hurt YOURSELF I should've guessed, ain't nothing that I could do would stop YOU ” RAC featuring Speak, I Should Have Guessed (2014) We often want to stop those we love from hurting themselves.   A sibling, or a friend or an adult child is hooking up with someone who is toxic for them. We see all of the red flags, but our loved one is totally clueless. So what do we do? In recovery we learn to get out of the way. We learn to separate our lives and our problems from those of others. And we learn that we can’t save anyone from themselves. If a friend is suddenly gaga—and seemingly clueless-- over a man who is recently divorced, between jobs and liking his Corona, we may feel our stomachs churning for this friend. All of the red flags are waving like crazy before our eyes, while the words coming from our friend’s lips are “I think he’...

“I’m never afraid. I Never look down. I always look up. That’s why I’m a very remarkable fellow! It’s wonderful the things I feel… Sometimes I could reach out and touch a star!” Chico, 7 th Heaven (1927) Positive thinking makes a tremendous difference in our lives. It’s all about perspective. And growing up in an alcoholic household didn’t allow me the chance to develop much in the way of a positive perspective. I spent most of my childhood feeling pretty hopeless. And the older I got, the less hope I had that things were going to get better. My teen-age years were far worse than my preteen years. Certainly, I learned to look down a lot, and if I felt remarkable in any way, it was remarkably worthless. I had learned to give all of my power away to my parents and that started a trend. Likewise, I gave my power away to mean-spirited teachers, peers and even complete strangers. I had learned to be the perpetual victim, who freely gave his power away because he felt ...

Ah, it’s another beautiful day in recovery! Well, until we meet someone whose neediness triggers all of our old behavioral patterns. Let’s say we’re having lunch with a friend and she has brought along a coworker. We feel an immediate attraction (attachment) to the coworker. Seems he’s just ended a bad relationship. As we listen to him speak, all of our caretaking sensibilities (or should I say nonsense-abilities) start rising from the grave within our souls. The more he speaks, the more we are convinced we can rescue him—and we aren’t even consciously aware that this is what is actually going on inside of us. As we munch on our sandwich, we begin projecting all of our old codependent neediness onto him. Suddenly he is as codependent and as needy as we want him to be. And we are convinced that we can use what we have learned in recovery to make him OK. We begin spilling out recovery jargon, telling him about the latest Melody Beattie book we’re reading, and helping hi...

After having a sandwich at a local eatery today, I stopped in a small grocery and got a double dark chocolate protein bar for dessert. There were some tables outside the grocery, so I sat down at one. A man came out of the grocery, looked up at the sky and asked me “You think it’s gonna rain today?” The skies had been overcast all day and so I said “Yeah, we’ll probably get a little rain.” Before I could even take a bite out of my protein bar, he started talking about weather-related conspiracy theories. I don’t mean global warming here. I mean ideas along the lines of governments manipulating weather patterns to purposely cause catastrophes. I personally don’t believe in these theories and I tried to say so, but it took a while. I could barely get in a word. When I did get a chance to disagree, he backed off and went into other conspiracy theories. Ten minutes or so later, he headed on his way. I sat and realized that it wasn’t too many years ago when I would have fe...

“You Belong To You and not to me Love shouldn’t take away your liberty You Belong To You and no one else Let Love be a heaven and not a hell” Johnny Hates Jazz, You Belong to You (2013) This song lyric by Johnny Hates Jazz is music to every RECOVERING codependent ear. One of the first great lessons of recovery is that we don’t belong to someone else. Many of us spent years searching for that special person that we could belong to, that we could enmesh into and that we could loose ourselves in. Those were the days when all of our focus was outside of ourselves. Back then we thought our salvation existed within someone else. We expected that someone else was responsible for our lives and our happiness. All we had to do was find that special person and they would be our permanent fix. They’d magically transform everything about us. Suddenly everything that was so wrong with us would become so right. Ah, yes! Life would be so good! NOT!!! Every time we thought we’...

“One evening King David rose from his bed and strolled about on the roof of the king’s house. From the roof he saw a woman bathing; she was very beautiful. David sent people to inquire about the woman and was told, ‘She is Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam, and wife of Uriah the Hittite .’   Then David sent messengers and took her. When she came to him, he took her to bed. ” 2 Samuel, The Hebrew Bible There are interesting parallels between the Hebrew story of King David and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story of Jay Gatsby. Both men see themselves as sons of God, destined for greatness. David conquers the Goliaths of his world and Gatsby conquers the Goliaths of his world. It seems easy for the two of them to conquer the men of their respective worlds. Maybe that’s because it’s part of God’s vision for their lives and the purpose that each one of them is meant to serve. But neither one of them is able to conquer the Goliaths they face of the opposite sex. In fac...

“Every time we take on someone else’s responsibility, we are keeping them stuck, and in the process making a hostage of both of us. It is not easy to let the addict mature, but we must. We are harming him or her every time we step in and bring order to the chaos he or she created.” Karen Casey , Codependence And The Power of Detachment Codependents often struggle with an inner-need to rescue other people from their problems. The motivation for a codependent is simple: If I can rescue this person, he/she will need and love me. What the active codependent fails to understand is two-fold. First, no one is going to love us based in what we “do” for them. People either love us for who we are, or they don’t. Second, it’s impossible to rescue another person from him/herself and his/her problems. It’s especially impossible to rescue another addict from his/her problems. Active addicts don’t really want to be rescued from their addictions. They often do want to be rescued from t...

Manipulation : to control or play-upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means, especially to one's own advantage; to force change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose. Every codependent is familiar with manipulation. We have all engaged in manipulative behavior for the express purpose of getting from others what we were not willing to give to ourselves—namely love. In fact, for the non-recovering codependent or addict, manipulation becomes a way of life, a survival skill. We need to be needed or loved and so we engage in manipulative behaviors, like people-pleasing and caretaking. We falsify how we really feel about this or that in order to please (manipulate) someone into loving us. We bend over backwards to meet the needs of another person, not because we truly love and care about him/her, but because we want to manipulate him/her into appreciating us and making us feel good about ourselves. But there are other forms of manipulation that we,...

“You knew all along What I never wanted to say Until I learned to love myself I was never ever lovin' anybody else Happiness lies in your own hand It took me much too long To understand how it could be Until you shared your secret with me.” Madonna, Secret Until you learn to love yourself, you will never love anyone else is a “secret” that every codependent must learn, and the sooner the better. I know it seems like a vulgar idea. The very thought of loving myself seemed hopelessly twisted to me early-on in my recovery. But it is totally essential. I wasted much of my life hating me. My self-hatred kept me running from myself and into the arms of anyone who would have miserable, worthless me. It took me on an endless bad trip into the lives of countless toxic people, who also hated themselves. And that bad trip didn’t end until I realized it was impossible for two people who hate themselves to build any type of redeeming relationship. Toxic person pl...