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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I Am Afraid of the Pain

A friend wrote this comment on Facebook:

I have to go to bed. Why can't I act like a normal human being and go to bed at night? I know. I've had PTSD since my surgery. I'm afraid to go to sleep; afraid of the pain that will be there when I wake up.

My personal experience is that “trauma” is anything separates me from conscious contact with God, with myself, and with others. This loss of conscious contact – separation – separates my conscious cognitive reasoning and decision making abilities from my impulse driven primitive brain, and I am either unconscious and numb, or conscious and overwhelmed by waves of pain, fear, and horrible loneliness.

For me, there are “answers” which my cognitive brain can know and understand, but these answers are not solutions which can heal my woundedness and relieve my pain and fear. In my experience, the trauma was the loss of conscious contact by pain and fear, and the solution is a spiritual process of improving my conscious contact with my God, with myself, and with others.

Spirituality, for me, is about my conscious experience of intimate relations with my conscious Higher Power’s Presence.

In separation – trauma – my brain constricts neural energy in order to try to control the pain, and ends up creating an ongoing illness which inflicts more pain and fear – separation – even when the trauma is less or no longer occurring. For me, the following has become my daily, moment to moment process of dealing with post trauma and chronic separation:
1. Experience and admit my powerlessness over the pain and fear, and their causes. This, for me, is an improvement in conscious contact with myself, with the beginning of a conscious experience that I am not expected to – nor could I when I tried – control my perceptions, reactions, actions, and the outcomes of my life experiences.
2. Connect with a Presence greater than myself. “Abandonment”, separation, loss of conscious contact was ultimately the actual trauma. So the solution, treatment, medication for the “illness” is a restoring of conscious contact – intimately, personally and consciously. The major way that I have been able to do this is by self disclosing –expressing -- my pain and fear to others who have experienced and/or are consciously experiencing similar trauma, separation, and their results. Where two or more are “gathered” together in conscious contact with themselves, God will appear – intimately and personally – as an unseen but infinitely powerful Presence that can soothe our pain and restore healthy connection to the separation within our brains – and relationships.
3. Based on the Presence I have begun to experience, take actions of trust and confidence in my God. I was taught, “if you believed that your God were healing your life and taking away your pain, what would you be doing right now?” At times, it was as simple as taking conscious deep breaths. Other times it was giving a smile or a nod, or a listening ear to someone else. Other times it was having fun, or finding something humorous to enjoy.

I believe, from my experience, that you cannot change your situation and pain with thought, knowledge, or understanding. But I believe that there is hope – because you – we -- are Never Alone.

Where two or more come together in conscious powerlessness, God is allowed to consciously appear – to be intimately Present – and “things” change. Maybe you have been given this opportunity as a spiritual means of becoming even more than your have ever been. Experience and Presence will tell.