Soulshine

It's so true. My mirror has had two faces most of my life: 1) My actual physical face and 2) the face that was merely a representation of all of the negative judgments I continually made against myself. The face I have primarily seen in any mirror since childhood is the face of harsh self-judgment that I projected onto my outer appearance. I've rarely seen my REAL face; the one that is beautifully free of all self-judgments. I've seen my face/body of harsh self-judgments since grade school, when I first began over-eating to medicate away the emotional pain of growing up in an alcoholic/ codependent household. In those days, all I saw reflecting back at me in the mirror were the horrible judgments I made against myself for becoming fat.  Most of those judgments weren't even mine. They had been shoved down my throat by family and kids at school: "Fatty, fatty, two by four," "Hey, fatso," and "You're going to be fat all of your life,...

“Take a look in the mirror, look at yourself But don’t look too close ‘cause you just might see The person you hate the most.” Natalie Cole, Take A Look Sad to say, but when the average addict looks in the mirror, they more often than not see the person that they hate the most. Or so they think. Truth is that the person they think they are seeing in the mirror isn’t really THAT person at all. No, they aren’t seeing themselves. They are only seeing all of the negative, hateful judgments that they have made against themselves. I don’t know anyone who has liked looking in the mirror less than me. From the time I was a child, when I looked in a mirror, I saw all of the judgments that my parents and others had made against me. I accepted and then adopted those judgments as my own. And I used them again and again to persecute myself every time I had to face a mirror. Recovery has taught me a good lesson, though. That lesson is summed up in a further lyric from the song Ta...

“No day is the same as any other, and every morning holds its own special miracle, its magic moment in which old universes are destroyed and new stars created.” Paulo Coelho , Love (Selected Quotations) 2015 Codependents can be notorious for judging themselves—and others—harshly. We look in the mirror and we don’t see our authentic selves; we see all of the mean judgments we’ve made against ourselves. Then we go about our day projecting our harsh self-judgments onto most everyone else we encounter. Sometimes we can be like the Pharisees in the Gospel story about Zacchaeus. The Pharisees have already judged Zacchaeus to be a “sinner” because of his profession as tax collector for the Romans. Yet, what do they really know about Zacchaeus? Do they really know the workings of his heart? No. But more often than not, neither do we know the workings of another’s heart when we judge them harshly. Jesus Christ comes along and instead of judging Zacchaeus, he reaches out to him...

“Say you'll share with   me one   love, one lifetime...   Lead me, save me   from my solitude... Say you want me   with you,   here beside you...   Anywhere you go   let me go too -   Christine   that's all I ask of you” The Phantom , Phantom of the Opera I saw the new Broadway rendition of Phantom of the Opera last night. I always find myself initially pulling for Raoul, while empathizing with the Phantom. And it’s my empathy for the Phantom that eventually leads me to pull for him toward the end, even though I already know what the outcome will be. I realized last night that my primary reason for empathizing with the Phantom is that his story parallels my own. Since my teenage years, I’ve always seen myself as hideous to look at. This started when I developed a horrible case of teen acne that literally ravaged my face and left it terribly scarred. Coupled with my ever-growing codependency, I had little hope...