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...

“I didn’t know I was broken until I wanted to change.” Bleachers, I Wanna Get Better (2014) No one suffering from codependency, or any other addictive personality defect, knows that they are “broken” until one day they decide they need to change. That day happened to me in early October of 1995. Prior to that day, I had no idea that I was the one with the problem. I knew I was rarely happy and I knew that most all of my relationships had a pattern of falling apart. But I thought it was always the fault of the other person and that fact that they refused to change in the many ways that I insisted that they change. It never once had occurred to me that I was the one who truly needed to change because my patterns of behavior were dysfunctional and extremely broken. The only change I was willing to engage in was a false sense of change known was people-pleasing. Yes, I would pretend to be whomever someone else wanted me to be; meaning I would pretend to like what they ...

In his book Loveability , Robert Holden outlines what love is and what it is not. I find this list to be very helpful in terms of facing and calming the codependent crazies. Let’s look at the 10 points he makes below. I have placed my spin on them for the purpose of seeing these points through a codependent love lens… Is it love or is it FEAR?   When we believe “I am not loveable,” the fear is always “Love has forsaken me.” And this will cause us to look for ways in which love is failing us. We will be on-guard constantly and will likely drive a wedge between us and the person we are professing to love. This can be especially true if we have abandonment issues. Is it love or is it DEPENDENCY?   I am unable to love me and so I make someone else responsible. Dependency is the issue for us codependents. Our self-love is generally so poor that we desperately want someone else to make us OK and so we look for that person who will be responsible for all of our need...

“The circus elephant doesn’t run away because he’s been chained to a stake like that since he was very, very little.” Dr. Jorge Bucay , Let Me Tell You a Story Before recovery, many of us had a favorite motto: “I can’t do it.” People would lovingly tell us we needed to start helping ourselves, and we would say “I can’t do it. I need you to do it for me!” Or others might suggest that we seek help from a therapist or a support group and we’d quickly blurt out “I can’t do it” as we adamantly listed every reason why we couldn’t possibly help ourselves. Recovery has taught us that we alone are responsible for ourselves—and that no one else is. As a result, most recovering people learn to trade-in their “I can’t do it” motto for an “I can do it” motto. We have learned to be responsible for our own self-care by partnering with a Higher Power, and by setting the proper boundaries that allow us to take care of ourselves. And we’ve learned that we must care for ourselves first ...

"His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God... and he must be about His Father's business: beauty... and to this conception he was faithful to the end."                                                            F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby It makes no difference where we have come from, who are parents were or how our past has shaped us. We are not prisoners to any of it, or anything. As adults, we have stewardship-- ownership-- of our own lives. We are all sons and daughters of God an...