Soulshine

Kindness has become my theme for 2016—and maybe for life. Being kind is something that I have struggled with mostly because I have been so unkind to myself for as long as I can remember. No one has been meaner to me than I have. Sure, there have been many mean and hurtful people in my life, but I have only had to face one of them 24/7—and that’s me. People come to me daily with their problems and I quickly pick-up on their self-effacing language: “If only I weren’t so stupid…” “I’m such a lame-brain…” and “I can never get anything right…” are just a few of the side-comments people make while talking. I don’t think most of them even realize how much they belittle themselves with negative statements. I honestly believe that if we want to have a good relationship with others, we must start by first having a good relationship with ourselves. This means we have to start befriending ourselves through words and acts of self-kindness. We need to catch are selves when we say somet...

Everyone has multiple opportunities to become the hero of their own life story. In Disney’s Maleficent , we focus primarily on the character who is portrayed as the evil fairy in the traditional story of Sleeping Beauty. We learn her complete story: The fact that she began life as a good fairy who was the champion of her people against an evil king, who was then betrayed by her close friend and the future heir to the evil king’s throne, Stefan. We thus learn why Maleficent became so bitter and why she cast an evil spell upon her betrayer’s first born child, Aurora. Maleficent, like all of us, was not born evil. Redemption was always within her grasp. And, although we are addicts, redemption is always within our grasp as well. It’s completely up to our being willing to choose to redeem ourselves from addiction. That’s the first step: admitting we have a problem and that we are now willing to do something to help ourselves. And how is Maleficent redeemed? She is redeemed throug...

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...

“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...

I’ve long believed that the root problem for all addicts is extreme lack of self-love. We are very mean to ourselves, and this self-loathing and self-hatred destroy our souls. When we can no longer bear the pain, we then turn to some addictive behavior as a means of temporarily rescuing ourselves from our own self-abuse. The remedy for this situation is obviously a healthy dose of self-love, but that’s not easy to accomplish when we’ve spent years self-destructing through self-criticism. So a necessary first step is the daily practice of being kind to ourselves. Self-kindness is the first step toward healing. And being kind to ourselves can be expressed many forms. We can start by speaking words of kindness to ourselves. We are long used to sharply criticizing everything we say, think or do. We criticize our bodies, our personalities, our abilities, our loveability and our self-worth. It’s time we replaced our very harsh criticisms of ourselves with compliments and other word...

“Is it the facts you want about my daughter, or Lisa’s fancies? Charlotte was a late child. There were three boys and then, after a long time, this girl. A child of my old age, I’ve always called her… my ugly duckling. Of course it’s true that all late children are marked.” Mrs. Vale, Now Voyager (1942) Sometimes a child is negatively marked or branded by a parent. Sometimes a mom, who has always felt ugly, sees too many of her own hated physical features in a particular daughter; or sometimes a dad, who has always felt stupid, sees too many of his personality traits in a particular son. These parents project their own self-loathing onto their children. Mom brands the daughter who looks like her “my ugly duckling” and dad brands the son who just can’t seem to get a math equation right “you stupid numbskull!” If these children then accept these labels (lies) as valid, they will brand themselves with them. Every time the daughter looks in the mirror she will repea...

“Love yourself And the rest will follow.” Don Miguel Ruiz    Kindness is an act of acceptance and of love. Whenever we acknowledge our weaknesses and personal brokenness and treat ourselves with kindness we are loving ourselves. Kindness is the healing ointment we cover our hearts and souls with in order to alleve the emotional pain generated by negative thinking about ourselves.    Practicing kindness means we replace our stinging, hurtful self-thoughts with gentle, compassionate self-talk. It means that we work on sympathizing with and thus better understanding ourselves— and the fact that we are flawed, or perfectly imperfect, just as EVERYONE IS! Kindness is the process by which we reclaim our wounded self-love.    For humans there’s great importance to understanding that we are ALL in the same dilemma; that we all suffer from inner-brokenness. First, it helps us to be less critical of ourselves when we truly acknowledge that no one is...

“I now find myself eating for all the same reasons I drank:  I’m lonely, I’m afraid.” Craig Nakken , The Addictive Personality Many people mistakenly belief that addiction itself is the primary problem. It is not. Addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem. The deeper problem is self-hatred. Most every addict suffers from a severe amount of self-loathing. In fact, self-love is a tern that is completely foreign to people who are caught in the throes of addictive behaviors. No one over-indulges in alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex, shopping or any other addictive behavior for no reason. The reason is clear to me. It is lack of self-love. That lack of self-love leads to lack of self-esteem and lack of self-worth. We are then left fearful and lonely. We fear that others will find out how miserably imperfect and unacceptable we are and so we isolate as much as possible to avoid rejection. As we separate ourselves from people and healthy relationships, we begin bui...