Soulshine

“I’m sorry I met someone because I know how much you hate it when I’m happy… You’re happiest when I’m miserable ‘cause then you don’t have to look at how miserable you are.” Grace Adler, Will & Grace (2002) Will Truman (Eric McCormack) and Grace Adler (Debra Messing) bounced back and forth within a love/hate friendship for eight seasons on the TV series Will & Grace . Both characters were codependently needy, and they spent many an episode trying to control or fix each other. As I was watching an episode from Season Five, the above quote really made my ears perk up. It made me think back over my life and of how I, too, was often happiest when someone I’d grown close to was miserable. It doesn’t make sense on the surface unless you understand codependent caretaking. Before recovery, I was a professional codependent caretaker. In other words, I came alive in a relationship when the other person was suffering through something they were powerless over. It gave me the ...

In her book Conquering Shame and Codependency , Darlene Lancer says there are varying divisions of SELF. We are all born as our REAL selves. The REAL self is who God created us to be in all of our personal uniqueness. The REAL self is authentic and whole, acknowledges and works through all of the feelings God has blessed us with, understands its desires and needs and voices them honestly, and it is spontaneous. The REAL self knows how to allow its “Yes” to be “Yes” and its “No” to be “No.” According to Lancer the REAL self makes decisions based on “internal assessments,” not the external opinions of others, without any serious inner-conflict between thoughts and feelings. The REAL self develops in children if their parents reflect their authentic real self back to them. If parents, however, are incapable of reflecting a child’s REAL self back to the child, the child will develop a DEVALUED self . Instead of being affirmed for who they are, many children are constantly reminde...

“A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.” E.W. Howe I had a very big scare over the past week that was like hitting bottom harder than hard. My father had heart disease, so I had a calcium scan to make sure I don’t have heart issues. The calcium numbers themselves came back great, but the scan indicated a potential mass in my chest. When those words were spoken to me over the phone, my heart sank through the floor. I never expected to hear anything like this. Then my OCD went on a tear: “Oh, my God! What does “a mass” mean? Is it huge? Is it cancer? Am I going to have to have surgery? Radiation? Lose my hair? Die before I ever even truly live my life to the fullest? I never in my life have seriously thought about dying. I’ve always been amazingly healthy for an often wacked-out OCD codependent crazy (!), but now I was faced with the true reality of life and death. I turned to my Higher Power and said “Enough is enough. I’ve wasted too many years hating myself....

Codependents are infamous for engaging in enabling behaviors. These behaviors are always more about us (the codependent) than they are about the other person. We feel inferior and insecure and so we engage in caretaking—a serious form of enabling—in order to feel loved and needed by the other person. We rarely recognize the fact that our caretaking/enabling behavior hurts both us and the other person. We drain ourselves by constantly being “on call” to meet every possible need or to solve every problem of the other person. We also inhibit that person’s ability to be responsible for him/herself, and we allow them to escape all possible consequences for their own behavior or poor choices. How do we know if we are enablers? I have paraphrased a list of enabling characteristics offered by Tom Ferry in his book Life by Design . We are an enabler if we do any of the following: 1.  We worry that someone else can’t handle life situations without our help. 2. ...

“Remember, if you think something is missing in your life, it’s probably you.” Robert Holden , Shift Happens In his book The True Source of Healing , Tenzin Wangyal says “Recognizing depletion is the first step in soul retrieval—you need to know what is missing before you can retrieve it.” Most everyone who enters into a recovery program knows that there is something missing from their soul and from their life. We’ve known this, at least subconsciously, for many, many years. The problem for so many of us is that we never bothered to try and figure out what was really missing, and so we were never able to retrieve it. We mistakenly thought love from outside ourselves was missing, so we searched high and low for someone outside of ourselves to love us. We tried to squeeze love out of parents and other family members—the love we believed we deserved but never received. We bent over backwards to please them and to be their perfect little angel. When that failed to work, we soug...

“If these Christians want me to believe in their god, they’ll have to sing me better songs; they’ll have to look more like people who have been saved; they’ll have to wear on their countenance the joy of the beatitudes. I could only believe in a god who dances.” Friedrich Nietzsche In recovery it’s important to know a Higher Power, or God, who dances. We need a Higher Power who smiles when we rise in the morning, who understands when we’re frustrated, who offers empathy when we hurt inside, and who loves us no matter how bad our behavior has been throughout the day. And we need a Higher Power who will love us to sleep each night no matter how bad we may feel deep down inside about ourselves. In other words, we need a Higher Power who is ON OUR SIDE. Too many of us grew-up in households where God was a tyrant, a hanging judge; and some of us grew-up in households where there was no God at all. Either way, we never knew a God who danced with us. We never experienced an...

One of the best lessons we get in recovery is to keep our focus on ourselves. Other people don’t make us miserable. It’s our focus on other people that makes us miserable. The average codependent learns at a young age to completely take their focus off of themselves. As children, many of us learned we weren’t worthy of having needs and wants; and some of us learned that we were so worthless that it was simply too painful to focus any attention on ourselves. So we began the dysfunctional process of making everyone else’s lives our business. We focused our eyes completely on others and we began to judge them based on the harsh criteria that we were taught to judge ourselves by. We watched for every mistake, every misstep that most everyone around us made and we made it our business to judge and to criticize them. Many of us learned to focus on one person that we encountered daily—at home, or school or work—and we began giving our personal power over our own serenity away to...