Soulshine

“What is a lie but a mistake with a purpose.” The Cisco Kid, The Gay Amigo (1949) People with addictive personalities are notorious for lying. Manipulation is the name of the game because we are so desperate to get what we want from others: love, happiness, approval, etc. And manipulation often requires telling lies. To complicate matters, telling lies to manipulate someone often requires that we tell more lies to cover-up the original lies. Eventually, it all becomes a complicated nightmare. Like the Cisco Kid says every lie is a mistake with a purpose. The purpose is to get what we want in any way that we can possibly get it, aside from being truthful. And right there lies the mistake. It is a mistake to think that truthfulness is a bad choice. Truthfulness is the right choice. Like Jesus Christ said “the truth will set you free.” And, in fact, it will. For one thing if we are truthful we will weed out the toxic people. The toxic people we are often attracted to d...

“Express yourself, don’t repress yourself… Did I say something wrong? Ooops! I didn’t know we couldn’t talk about sex. Did I have a point of view? Ooops! I didn’t know we couldn’t talk about you.” Madonna, Human Nature Ok. So this week I’m doing therapy with Madonna. Love her or hate her, the woman knows how to write good lyrics, and many of them are centered on healthy vs. codependent behavior. Human Nature is a good example. It hits to the core of codependent behavior because many of us are terrified to express ourselves openly and honestly. As a result, we worry endlessly about saying “something wrong.” There were many times in the past when I found myself one on one with someone, or in a group, and I very much wanted to express my opinions. But I was so afraid of rejection that I’d replay what I wanted to say through my mind a million times before I got up the nerve to honestly express myself. And, more often than not, when I finally got up the nerve, the c...

Yesterday I was watching the film Eat, Pray, Love . It’s about a woman, Liz, who has little sense of self and strong codependent enmeshment issues.   Liz marries a man named Steven when she is very young. He was someone she chose to fade-into, even though they had little in common. Liz gave up her identity to become Steven’s shadow and has been living in the misery of being what he wants her to be for many years. As the movies opens we find Liz discovering that she no longer wants to be Steven’s mirror—and she tells it to him face to face that she no longer wants to be married before fleeing and filing for divorce. I realized while watching the film that there is a great paradox here that many codependents suffer from. First, I do not know of any codependent that enmeshes into someone who actually mirrors his/her likes and dislikes. For some odd reason, we have a tendency to enmesh in someone who is the total opposite of us in terms of personal preferences. We choose some...

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...

“Friendship... is the comfort of feeling safe with a person.” Dinah Maria Craik , A Life for a Life What greater comfort can there be than feeling safe with another person? None-- aside from feeling comfortable with yourself. People often wonder how to discern if a friendship is healthy or toxic. Understanding how we feel around each person we call “friend” is a key indicator of a healthy or unhealthy relationship. Next time we’re around certain friends, let’s tune-in to how we feel... As we’re walking to the market, we run into Janet. We feel “on-guard“ as our gut tightens. We feel unsafe. As she’s talking, we quickly realize how subtly critical Janet is, and we’re afraid she may bite us with her words at any second. We feel uncomfortable until she heads on her way. The next day at work, we notice that when our “friend” Tim enters the conference room, we feel all of the positive energy rush out the door before it closes behind him. His brooding expressions zap us with emotional...