Soulshine

Recovery is never short-term. There is no vacation from recovery. It’s a minute by minute, day by day, lifetime process. If we continually think of addiction as an emotional disease, we can better monitor our recovery. Addiction is all about emotional medicating. We can be sailing along through our day and all is good. Then suddenly someone makes a comment that hits on an old unhealed emotional wound from childhood, and we nosedive into being a shamefaced five year old. The feelings we experience seem unbearable so we order a Martini, or we make a quick stop by the bakery, or we head to the shopping mall or casino, or we return to work and drown the pain in busyness. Prior to recovery, we didn’t understand that there were certain emotional triggers that sent us into addictive acting-out. Now that we know, we have to practice vigilant awareness. It helps by being able to identify our discomfort. First off, we need to acknowledge that the discomfort is emotional. Second we ...

I live and breathe 12 Step spirituality and I am never ashamed of it. I willingly tell people that I was raised in an alcoholic home, that I wrestle with codependency and other addictive issues and I am NOT ashamed. I acknowledge my personal baggage, I own it and I work at taking my power back from it. That is something to be proud of. I remember the first day I learned from a therapist that I suffered from an addictive personality, specifically codependency. I asked myself “Should I tell others? What if people put me down or abandon me because of it?” Then I realized that these were shame-filled, fearful thoughts. So I thought “Seems to me that shame has always been the real problem. If I am ashamed of being codependent, I will hamper my recovery, so I chose right now to be proud and grateful that I am helping myself.” And I decided to tell others. That was 1995, and I have never looked back with regret. Most every recovery group title ends with “Anonymous,” and that’s OK. B...

“Folks who have no vices have few virtues.” Abraham Lincoln We all know people who have no vices, or rather, who pretend to have no vices. These people tend to be self-righteous, overly-critical and extremely judgmental. These are their key defense mechanisms. And these defense mechanisms are necessary because they mask the fact that these Fake Saints do indeed have vices. Many addicts can identify with being a Fake Saint in one way or another because addiction causes us to cover our tracks through deceit. Codependents, especially those who are accommodators, are usually guilty of being Fake Saints. As Darlene Lancer notes in Conquering Shame and Codependency , “Because love is the highest ideal, an Accommodator strives to be a loving, lovable, charitable and selfless do-gooder—someone flawlessly noble and compassionate.” In other words, codependent accommodators project a false self-image in order to earn their highest ideal—love. Prior to recovery, and even s...

Freedom from shame means being “on our guard” or aware of our feelings at all times. It means being able to catch ourselves when we are being swept down a dark alley of emotional pain fueled by shame. When we are aware of our shameful feelings, we are able to make a powerful choice between addictive acting out, or facing the feelings. When we choose to face the feelings, we can challenge the ugly thoughts that fuel them, and we can take our personal power back from shame. Facing our feelings requires that we be “courageous” enough to embrace them. It also requires that we be “strong” enough to ask for the help we may need to feel safe enough to fully recover our personal power. We know that help is available to us. We can seek help through our Higher Power and we can seek help from family and friends that we are able to trust. We can also seek help through professionals, like therapist, spiritual directors or clergy, and we can seek help through support groups. If we are ...

As I’ve emphasized before, addiction is an emotional dis-ease, and the primary emotion that fuels addictive behaviors is shame. So let’s define shame. According to Webster’s Dictionary shame is a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety. Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason say in their book  Facing Shame  that "While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person." I agree with Fossum and Mason. Guilt is an emotional that arises when we realize we have said or done something hurtful or wrong. Guilt is primarily about our behavior, which we can change. It’s true that we can be ashamed of something we’ve said or done, or failed to say or do, but guilt is the primary feeling that motivates us to be responsible for our bad behavior. Shame, on the other hand, is a devastating feeling about our own defectiveness or inadequacy as a person. Shame is ...

Addiction is an emotional dis-ease. It’s all about running away from our uncomfortable emotions (shame, in particular) and thus running toward addictive acting-out to drown those emotions into a comfortable state of numbness or euphoria or a false sense of happiness. I was recently watching Sandra Bullock playing the role of “Gwen” in the film 28 Days . Gwen is either drunk or drugged-out all of the time. She’s constantly running from her shame through alcohol (or drugs), which causes her to do more shameful things, which causes her to feel worse about herself, which causes her to then drown herself in more alcohol and drugs. It’s an endless cycle of Gwen running from her feelings about herself. Unfortunately, Gwen also has a partner-in-crime: Her fiancé Jasper. Jasper is equally as trapped in addictive acting-out. As the movie progresses, we learn that Jasper is actually a substitute for Gwen’s mother. Her mother was a hopeless alcoholic who died from her disease when Gwen w...

“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...

“It’s not the power of the curse. It’s the power you give the curse.” Billy, Penelope (2007)    The 2007 film Penelope is a wonderful lesson in self-acceptance and the self-love that grows from accepting yourself just the way you are. Too many of us have walked through life cursing ourselves with every possible form of self-condemnation. We’ve criticized ourselves because we thought our noses were too big, or our bellies were too fat, or our teeth was too stained. We’ve beat ourselves up because we thought we weren’t nice enough, or smart enough or cool enough.    As a result, many of us turned to self-improvement. We joined gyms and aerobicized. We read books on how to become better people. We invested in the latest fashions, music and trends to make ourselves feel socially acceptable. We did everything but look in the mirror and say “I love and accept you just the way you are.”      In his book Be Happy , Robert Holden says “N...

“Loneliness can only be understood, never escaped or overcome—except temporarily.” Darlene Lancer , Conquering Shame and Codependency Loneliness and codependency often go hand-in-hand. For years I tried to bury my loneliness through losing myself in other people. I thought that if I could just fade into someone else, all of my emptiness, all of my loneliness would dissipate. But it never did. When fading into someone else wasn’t alleviating my inner-emptiness, I tried to escape my loneliness through other addictive behaviors. Shopping always worked best for me. Buying anything gave me that TEMPORARY respite from my loneliness and my emptiness. But it was always TEMPORARY—very temporary. The problem here is the solution we addicts so often use. We want to escape from our uncomfortable feelings. Escaping is a solution that never works. Instead of trying to escape from difficult feelings, like emptiness, loneliness or anxiety, we need to welcome these feelings. We need to...

“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 ...

“Cause I'm only strong as glass They say I'm built to last but I could break Yeah I'm only strong as glass And I am all I have so if I break, there's no more.” Goapelle, Strong As Glass (2014) Most of my life I’ve felt as if I was only as strong as glass. And I don’t mean that in a physical sense, but in an emotional sense. Inside, my spirit or soul has always felt fragile. It was severely damaged in my childhood when I chose to give all of my personal power away to my parents and grandparents. This is a choice that most every child in an abusive home makes. Children basically have no other choice because they believe their parents and grandparents are infallible and all-powerful, like God. A child believes that his/her parents have to be right and that he/she has to be wrong. So when a child is shamed into believing that he/she is defective in some way, worthless or unlovable, he/she can reach that point of being emotionally devastated; even annihil...