Soulshine

What exactly is enabling ? Darlene Lancer, in her book Conquering Shame and Codependency , offers a solid definition. She says “The term enabling can be applied to any form of help that removes the natural consequences of someone else’s behavior.” So when we feel responsible for someone else’s behavior and choose to fix their problems for them, we take away the consequences of what they have done and we let them off the hook. They are then never held accountable for their actions and they never learn to be responsible for their self-destructive behaviors. I remember several years ago a man came to talk to me about his brother, who had a severe gambling problem. This man, we’ll call him Brendan, had been enabling his younger brother’s addiction by bailing him out every time he gambled-away more money than he had in the bank. In effect, Brendan became his brother’s personal banker; and whenever his brother—let’s call him Tom—had money-lenders at a given casino breathing down ...

Setting boundaries is essential for everyone’s health. When we fail to set proper boundaries, we abuse ourselves and we abuse others by enabling them to stay stuck in unhealthy behaviors. Unhealthy codependents typically build their self-worth on their ability to do for others what those very others should be doing for themselves. This is called enabling. We do it under the guise of being helpful, but the only “help” we are giving to the other person is the “help” to stay stuck in their victimhood or addiction. Enabling results from good intentions and poor boundaries. We enmesh with others and we choose to own their problems. We then think we are justified in fixing their problems. Subconsciously, we also are eager to earn their praise and gratitude for having fixed their problems for them, so we engage in our great powers of enabling. In her book Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children , Allison Bottke has a wonderful checklist for identifying enabling ...

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” Soren Kierkegaard Being who we are is essential to our happiness. And yet, so many codependents have no idea of who they really are. We rejected and lost our real selves years ago. We buried them under a false self; often times an “ideal” self that reflected the person that our parents or others wanted us to be. For some of us this ideal self was fueled by perfectionism. The real self underneath ached with inadequacy. It was the frog underneath the prince we were attempting to project to the world around us; or the raggedy Cinderella underneath the princess we wanted the world to see. We were two people in one and that drained a lot of energy out of us. It’s exhausting to live with two personas. First off, it takes a lot of energy to suppress our real selves. We are constantly on-guard that some part of our unacceptable real self with accidently pop-out and be seen by others. But it’s equally as exhaus...

I’ve long believed that the root problem for all addicts is extreme lack of self-love. We are very mean to ourselves, and this self-loathing and self-hatred destroy our souls. When we can no longer bear the pain, we then turn to some addictive behavior as a means of temporarily rescuing ourselves from our own self-abuse. The remedy for this situation is obviously a healthy dose of self-love, but that’s not easy to accomplish when we’ve spent years self-destructing through self-criticism. So a necessary first step is the daily practice of being kind to ourselves. Self-kindness is the first step toward healing. And being kind to ourselves can be expressed many forms. We can start by speaking words of kindness to ourselves. We are long used to sharply criticizing everything we say, think or do. We criticize our bodies, our personalities, our abilities, our loveability and our self-worth. It’s time we replaced our very harsh criticisms of ourselves with compliments and other word...

I just returned from a fabulous trip to Asia. It was an all-expense paid trip to Hong Kong, Bangkok and Koh Samui. And although I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, I still suffered from some pangs of guilt, which I was acutely aware of as I was experiencing them. The guilt stemmed from the fact that I was enjoying myself at someone else’s monetary expense. It was a gift that deep-down I didn’t feel worthy of receiving. The guilt wasn’t so evident when we did things as a group, but if I was lunching on my own or taking an afternoon sight-seeing trip on my own, I felt guilty about charging things to my room; knowing that I wasn’t going to have to pay for them. I realized that all of this guilt stemmed from my deeply engrained belief that my needs and wants aren’t valid. As a child I never felt that I had the right to have wants and needs. I was brainwashed into believing it was purely selfish to want or need anything. As an adult I’ve mostly coped with that guilt by being self-suffi...

“Have you ever been hit so hard by life that you just don’t care anymore?” June Lang, Redhead (1934) Yes. I have. That’s how I feel right now: Hit so hard by life that I can’t seem to muster enough interest to care anymore. I am facing the big birthday (the one that ends in 9) before the BIG Birthday. And looking back on my life, I realize that I have never been true to myself. I’ve long been true to my mother’s image of who I should be, to society’s image of who I should be and to the church’s image of who I should be. But I have never been true to who I authentically am. And I don’t have any snappy recovery jargon to make everything rosy in light of this realization. People-pleasing to earn approval and love is so deeply ingrained in me and it has squeezed every ounce of happiness out of my life, year after year. This is true even after 20 years of recovery. I still wear the chains my mother imposed on me at age five. I’ve just never been able to shake myself free of them...

What does it take to be happy with yourself? What does it take to love the person God created you to be? TOTAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE. Complete, unconditional self-acceptance is the doorway into self-love. Self-acceptance opens the flood-gates and it allows self-love to flow in and naturally fill-up your inner-emptiness. Self-acceptance means we have to become aware of, dismantle and let go of all the judgments we have made against ourselves over the years. It also means that we have to begin living our lives authentically, which requires us to throw-out all of our “SHOULDS.” Shoulds and negative self-judgments go hand in hand and they cause of to feel shame and guilt about our natural selves. They force us into living through idealized, false selves that betray who we really are and make us feel even more inadequate. “I should look like this” (You look just fine as you are!), “I shouldn’t act like that” (People who really love you will see beyond your behavior and love you anyw...