Soulshine

Dear Higher Power, Thank you for granting me awareness. I AM NOT A VICTIM! I am not a victim of my parents. I am not a victim of my family. I am not a victim of past or current relationships. I am not a victim of my employer or coworkers. I am not a victim of twisted religious teachings. I am not a victim of the world, or "friends" or life. I am only a victim of my own self-destructive thoughts. I have shot myself through the soul with my own negative thinking. I own the fact that I have done a poor job of guarding my thoughts. I have allowed negative overthinking to devour my self-love. I have allowed constant self-criticism to poison my heart and soul. And I have consistently projected my own negative thoughts about myself onto others, often falsely accusing them of victimizing me. With all humility, I acknowledge that no one has victimized me more than I have victimized myself.  I have daily destroyed myself with my victim-mentality. Today, I a...

Codependents are often very compliant. We often enter recovery with a strong need to please other people in order to earn our self-worth, to earn love. One of the most dangerous compliance patterns for codependents, and sex-love addicts, is that some of us accept sexual acting-out when we really want love. And this acting-out eventually leads us to experience feelings of self-betrayal, abuse, disappointment, shame, guilt and anger. I remember one of the first CODA meetings I attended at the Steps Alano Club in St. Louis, Missouri. A woman stood up and admitted that she felt so unlovable and so worthless that she had developed a pattern of behavior in which she engaged in sex with anyone who showed even the slightest interest in her. It was the only way she knew how to medicate away her emotional pain about feeling like a worthless person. She even admitted to having sex with men she actually despised because she was so desperate for some form of affirmation, of affection, even t...

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...

Self-love is a tough one for most everyone who enters a Recovery program. So many of us as children were taught, or programmed, to loath ourselves. We were constantly criticized by our parents and rarely, if ever, received positive recognition. We were taught by them that we were not valuable, that we did not count and that we were basically unlovable.  Growing up in my own household as a child, I learned I was lovable if I did all of the right things to please my parents, but otherwise, I was NOT lovable. Love had to be earned and it could be withdrawn at any second of any day. This led to a fear of abandonment as well as self-loathing inside of me.  Life became a hell of emotional instability for me. One day I might be lovable in the morning, but by afternoon, I was getting the silent treatment or hearing words like "I'm ashamed to even call you my son!" As an adult I firmly believed I needed someone who could love me unconditionally into loving mysel...

    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...

How true. If we are lonely, we will attract lonely people. If we are mentally and emotionally needy, we will attract mentally and emotionally needy people. If w e are addicts, we attract other people with addictive problems. If we accept and love ourselves just as we are, if we are mentally/emotionally/spiritually healthy, we will likewise attract people who love themselves well and are mentally/emotionally/spiritually healthy too. We attract what we are. So if you want to know why you often attract the wrong people, look inside yourself and see where you need to change and grow in self-love.

  There are people who honestly love us for who we are; for the beauty they see in our souls. That's the truth. They have no secret agenda. The only thing they may want from us is to be loved and respected for the beauty of their own souls, too. When we won't allow these people to honestly love us, eventually they walk away. Not because they've stopped loving us. They do love us. But because they can no longer face the pain of our rejection of ourselves, of them and of their freely given love for us. They have finally realized that they can't get through the stone wall we've erected around ourselves. And that it's impossible to knock down that wall. No amount of their love can do it. Only we can knock down that wall by finally accepting the fact that we are indeed loveable and worthy of their love. So with heavy hearts, people walk away from us. They are exhausted and they are hurting inside themselves. They feel disrespected and rejected because we ...

      I want to be accepted and loved for who I am. I want the whole world to give me this gift. But it has yet to happen. Why? Because I must be the first person to gift myself with unconditional acceptance and love.  No one else can provide me with this gift until I first provide it to myself. Once I begin the practice of accepting and loving myself unconditionally, others will gladly wrap their arms around me and love will naturally flow forever in my favor.

      “You don’t know all the beauty you possess inside, You just can’t see what I see in you… If you could see you through my eyes You’d see someone beautiful On the inside and outside, So beautiful you’d know how I feel You’d know how much you mean to me If you could see you through my eyes.” Kenny Lattimore, If You Could See You (Through My Eyes) Most everyone I know suffers from “blindness” when it comes to seeing their own personal beauty. So many of us suffer from self-persecution. We’ve made so many negative judgments against ourselves that we have long been blinded to the fact that we are wonderfully made. And, unfortunately, no one can tell us how beautiful we are inside or outside, and make us believe it. We have to choose to believe in our own beauty and value before we can accept anyone else’s positive evaluation of us. We have to look past our negative self-judgments and choose to love the REAL person that we are underneath all of ...

    It’s that time of the year again. The parties and shopping are well underway and so is the urgent need to be happy. Christmas has always been a difficult time for me mentally and emotionally. It’s the one season of the year in which everyone desperately wants to feel loved; and yet many of us who grew up in dysfunctional households don’t know how to accept love, or allow ourselves to be loved. We didn’t receive the love we needed as children and consequently we never learned to love ourselves. This is the real problem. Recovery has taught me much about me and self-love. Looking back now, I see that over the many years and Christmas seasons of my life I was in fact loved by many people. But I never acknowledged that love because I didn’t have the inner-tools to accept that love. I didn’t know how to accept it because I didn’t know how to love and accept myself. So I learned to play the victim of the holiday season. I ached inside and moaned and groaned to myself e...

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...