Soulshine

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...

“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” Franklin Roosevelt    Fear, more than anything else, has kept us frozen and powerless to protect ourselves. From the time we were small, many of us learned incorrectly that we had no right to speak our truth, to own our emotional truth (our personal power) or to trust anyone to be truthful with us.    As a result, we learned to remain silent in the face of abuse perpetrated against us and we learned to stuff all of our feelings. We became possessed by our fears: 1) fears that we didn’t count; 2) that we deserved the abuse we received; and 3) fear that we were destined to be victims.      Today we are all here to prove to ourselves and to the world around us that we do count, that we deserve to be treated with proper respect and that we are not victims of life or anyone.    Today we are proclaiming that we will own our personal truth, that we will learn to experience and understand our ...

“But now I know That the world still turns And the sun still burns And that’s what I’ve learned without you And the days roll on And my heart gets stronger too Don’t think I didn’t love you Just because I made it through But I learned to love myself Without you.” Reba McEntire, Myself Without You Throughout most of my life I have been a fiercely independent codependent. The only times I ever wavered from being fiercely independent were when I met someone who pushed all of my buttons in all of the right ways; meaning a person who had just the right addictive personality to match mine. Anytime my addictive “yin” met an addictive “yang,” I’d swing almost immediately from the extreme of being fiercely independent on myself to the opposite extreme of being miserably dependent on that other person. Of course, once we both sucked all of the life out of each other and the relationship ended, I’d go defiantly back to being fiercely independent; even though my...

“Do whatever you want with me, anything you want with me, fill me up with your memory.” Foxy, Lady of the Streets (1979) I believe love and sex addiction are derived from codependency. Some people have such a giant void inside themselves that nothing can seemingly fill it up aside from physical touch. In the same way that a sugar addict needs a donut or a shopping addict needs a new pair of shoes when they are ultimately feeling bad about themselves, a sex addict needs physical fulfillment. The root cause of this addiction can be complex. Some sex addiction is rooted in the fact that a person was sexually abused as a child. But much of it derives from the fact that all addictive thinking is rooted in a deep sense of self-worthlessness. Addicts believe that they are inherently unlovable and that they have to earn love. For some addicts, sex becomes a viable way of earning love—or some form of validation of their worth from others that they actually mistake for lo...

“One of the best feelings in the world is knowing that your presence and absence both mean something to someone.” Anonymous As a codependent I spent most of my life painfully wanting someone—almost anyone—to want and need me. I searched desperately every day to find that someone who would both enjoy and miss my presence. My radar was always on and every person who crossed my path was potentially “the one.” It never occurred to me before recovery that I needed to first appreciate my own presence. I needed to see myself as a valuable person and to treat myself as such. I needed to be comfortable being me and being with me. I needed to like and love me. And I needed to believe that my presence meant something. Because this idea never occurred to me, my neediness was off-the-scale. It was so flaming-out-of-control that most people ran when they saw me coming. After all, neediness fueled by self-loathing and constant internal misery is rarely appealing to anyone. And i...