Soulshine

“Every minute, every hour I'm gonna shower you with love and affection Look out, it's comin' in your direction and I'm I'm gonna make you love me Oh, yes I will, yes I will I'm gonna make you love me Oh, yes I will, yes I will.” I’m Gonna Make You Love Me   (written by Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff & Jerry Ross) Performed by The Supremes & The Tempations I remember the days long ago when “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” was not only my theme song, but my daily mantra. After all, there had to be some unsuspecting fool out there who I could shower with love and affection enough to make them love me. And, of course, I thought that in the process, as long as they were having to love me for all I did for them, they’d have to let me rearrange them and make them into who I really wanted them to be, too. So I tried and tried through caretaking and people-pleasing to make people love me, but it never worked. Every person I took emotionally h...

“Every time we take on someone else’s responsibility, we are keeping them stuck, and in the process making a hostage of both of us. It is not easy to let the addict mature, but we must. We are harming him or her every time we step in and bring order to the chaos he or she created.” Karen Casey , Codependence And The Power of Detachment Codependents often struggle with an inner-need to rescue other people from their problems. The motivation for a codependent is simple: If I can rescue this person, he/she will need and love me. What the active codependent fails to understand is two-fold. First, no one is going to love us based in what we “do” for them. People either love us for who we are, or they don’t. Second, it’s impossible to rescue another person from him/herself and his/her problems. It’s especially impossible to rescue another addict from his/her problems. Active addicts don’t really want to be rescued from their addictions. They often do want to be rescued from t...

Once we’ve gotten recovery’s wake-up call, it’s easy to see ourselves as the victims of many abusive people. Suddenly, everyone we chose to be in a relationship with looks like an evil never-do-well. We look to the past and see our “innocent” selves as having been willfully abused by these people. We pretend that in every instance they knew what they were doing in hurting and victimizing us for their personal pleasure and gain. This way of seeing the past is called denial. And it’s denial because of one word: choice. No one forced us to be in relationship with anyone from our past. We chose to be in relationship with them. Nine times out of 10, we became obsessed with a particular person—not understanding that he/she was toxic for us—and we chose to pursue a relationship with him/her. We thought about this person obsessively, called him/her constantly and bent over backwards to please him/her until we succeeded in taking this person hostage. Once we had our great obsessio...

“You can’t lose someone who truly loves you, and you can’t hold captive someone who doesn’t.” Anonymous If we are uncomfortable in our skin, we will often be fearful of losing people we “think” we love. I say “think” for a reason. When we are uncomfortable with ourselves we are often attracted to toxic people. We mistake the toxic-- usually addictive-- attraction for love. When we make this mistake we are actually fearful of losing the poison that has nearly killed us.  We become anxious and we search for ways to manipulate and control the other person so we can keep a tighter hold on our prisoner. I believe our grip tightens because we mistakenly believe that if we lose this person, we will lose ourselves, our chance for happiness and our lives. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We can’t lose ourselves by losing another person unless we have long ago abandoned ourselves by fading into the other. We can’t lose our chance for happiness either, because we never had a c...