Listening to Faces: Remembering Codependency and Daily Inspirations

Understanding where our need to control came from is a beginning. Most of us, at least before recovery, were insecure. We wanted to protect ourselves from abandonment, ridicule, physical and emotional harm. The only way we knew to do that was to insist others fulfill our needs. We strengthened, day by day, a trait that hinders us now…

A Woman’s Spirit

Yesterday I spoke at the psychiatric hospital where I first began working with co-dependency. It was a weekend family program for families of patients in an intensive outpatient chemical dependency program. I experienced their faces – stressed, worried, frightened, unsure of what they were dealing with and what they were supposed to do. But courageous enough to expose themselves to the information and assistance that was being offered them.

As I listened to their faces, I remembered my own beginnings of recovery – becoming aware of the cycle of destruction that had so mutilated my living:

1. I was hurting and wounded – and uncertain what was wrong or what could be done – why I was so abandoned and alone.
2. I believed that I had to control the situations, and circumstances – the relationships of my life – or everything was totally hopeless and unbearable.
3. To survive, I had to believe that I could control the outcomes of my life – if I tried hard enough I could change things, and make people love me.
4. As I believed I could control the outcomes, I became convinced that “I Am Responsible”– when bad things happened it was my fault.
5. Because I am responsible, I had to do something – to fix, change, and control what was happening.
6. When I did “something” to try to control the outcome, I appeared to be either successful or a failure, depending on the outcome.
7. When it seemed that I was successful, I became even more convinced that I could control the outcomes – if I “just” tried hard enough – I was even more convinced that I AM RESPONSIBLE for what happened.
8. When I seemed to fail, I believed that I was bad, not good enough, deserving to be punished, and I separated myself from others, from my God, and from my true self.
9. Shame raged – the incredible separation, loneliness, and abandonment – disconnected from love, acceptance, and Presence. And I would try harder than ever to control the outcomes of my life – the endless separations – trying with everything I possessed – to please someone -- to be just maybe good enough – to anybody.

This vicious, vicious cycle continued until I could barely crawl across the landscape of my life -- mangled, beaten, tortured – alone.

The more I force things, the tougher my life. Helen Neujahr

If someone had not offered me the light of their love, I would have certainly continued to die – infinite times -- in the hell of my own self degradation and shame.

• The healing began with someone telling I could not control others or myself. Alone I was powerless – my life was totally unmanageable – especially on the inside. I could not be responsible for the outcomes – the perceptions, reactions, or actions of others – or my self.
• I could only begin to be healed inwardly myself – if I connected personally and intimately with a Higher Power, who could begin to restore sanity to my bruised and insane brain. I was taught how to connect and listen and experience a Presence Who had no rules, or conditions or restrictions for Their loving me. They were as available as my conscious pain made me willing and open to receive.
• And then I was taught how to “act” within this new relationship so that I could increasingly surrender my illness, and the outcomes of my life to Someone who had all the needed solutions, and cared infinitely about my condition and circumstances.

I am a child. Today I have spiritual Parents. Their love, guidance, and unconditional Presence nurtures and supports my living, loving, and healing. I am not alone. And when I hurt – and I still do -- I listen and They are present -- to love away my pain – and make my life an increasingly better place -- by their loving and caring design.

It is not the passionate appeal that gains the Divine Ear so much as the placing of the difficulty and worry in the Divine Hands. So trust and be no more afraid than a child would be, who places its tangled skein of wool in the hands of a loving mother, and runs out to play, pleasing the mother more by its unquestioning confidence than if it went down on its knees and implored her help, which would pain her the rather, as it would imply she was not eager to help when help was needed.

God Calling

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Photography/graphics by W. Wass