"Here is something that I wrote in August as part of my writing for the online book.  I may still use it in that online work eventually.

That doesn't mean we have to let go of people we care about completely, although some of them we certainly will choose to - or they will choose to have nothing to do with us once we start standing up for ourselves and speaking our Truth.  It means we need to let go of the illusion that they are who we want them to be - that we need them in our life.  We need to start seeing people more clearly so we can practice discernment in the people we choose to trust, the people to whom we choose to open up our hearts and minds.  There are two through nine choices in relationships - different levels / categories of friendship. 

"I have found it important to have boundaries in terms of how I view other people.  If I have one or two people in my life that I feel that I can truly communicate with and be emotionally honest with on all levels, that is an incredible abundance. . . . . . . It has been very helpful to me, to accept that people are where they are at - and that it is OK. . . . . . .  This was especially important in terms of letting go of expecting my family of origin to change.  They are not who I want them to be, they don't understand me and can't see me.  It isn't personal - they are just dancing with their wounds and following their path.  It is not for me to judge someone else's path.  Letting go - especially in terms of doing the inner child grieving about letting go of the myth of family - and accepting, was a necessary component in being able to have a friendly, superficial relationship with my family today.  Superficial is what they are capable of - I needed to accept that and make the best of the situation. 

In terms of friends, there are going to be people in my life, who I can share certain things with - but not other things.  Some people that I can relate to on certain levels, or about certain issues.  To expect that I can be emotionally honest with everyone in my life in a way that works (is safe, is heard, is understood) is an insane expectation in such a dysfunctional society with relatively so few people actually doing the healing work." - Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility ²

When I mention above that we start choosing "safe" people to interact with, I was not talking about other people actually being able to harm us.  The safety I was referring to is an internal thing.  We need to build a sanctuary for ourselves internally - grounded in our Spiritual connection - so that we aren't giving other people power over our self esteem. 

"I want to make a point here also, that when I say "safe" in terms of being emotionally honest, I am talking about what will work best.  In earlier recovery, when I was still giving a lot of power to the old wounds and old tapes, it could feel devastating to me to have someone judge and shame me.  Then safe referred to danger, to people who would judge and shame me.  It also meant people who would try to fix me.  Trying to fix someone else is not support, it is codependence.  When someone starts trying to rescue me it imparts a judgment on where I am at - it means they are not comfortable so they are going to try to change me to make themselves comfortable.  This is tied into what I was speaking of above about offering advice or opinions to someone who hasn't asked.  It can be a form of abuse. 

As I have gotten healthier in recovery, with more capacity to be balanced and see life with some clarity - other people and life events have less power to effect me.  The more I am grounded in the Spiritual belief system I have integrated into my internal process, and the more I have done my inner child healing - the less power any of my old buttons hold. The better I have become at letting go, the shorter the periods of time have become that I am giving others the power to rock my emotional boat.  The term safe for me transformed into meaning something more like: safe from wasting time and energy trying to communicate with someone who can not hear.  To get into an argument, a power struggle over right and wrong, with someone who doesn't speak my language is dysfunctional - is actually, pretty silly." - Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility ²

The less we are allowing the disease to cause us to judge and shame ourselves, the more we are Loving and respecting ourselves by owning our worth as Spiritual beings, the easier it becomes to feel safe within no matter what is happening externally.  The saying that I quote often, "Serenity isn't freedom from the storm, Serenity is Peace amidst the storm" has gradually become a concrete reality in my life.  It has become the foundation upon which my relationship with reality is based.  I certainly can have emotional reactions to life events and other peoples behaviors, can experience fear and hurt and anger - but underneath my reactions to day to day life is an inner peace and faith that is ultimately what defines my relationship with my life experience today.  Very cool result of having been willing to heal and grow. 

The road does become narrower - but the horizons get broader.  The scenery on our journey gets more beautiful as we learn to relax and smell the flowers.  The experience of this human trip in day to day life becomes happier and easier, includes more Joy and Love in the moments of our days.  It can still feel like a pretty solitary journey at times however, because we are pioneers. 

"We are pioneers in this healing movement that is happening.  Even if you just arrived at some consciousness of the path, you are still a pioneer [to use a Western American analogy . . . . .  - if I am a Mountain Man who followed the fur trappers, then you are in the first wagon trains.]  And it can often be lonely and scary and painful being a pioneer.  Life does not often feel Loving.  It does not normally, tangibly feel like there really is a Loving Higher Power.  As we do the work, and change our intellectual paradigm to one based on Love instead of fear so that our emotional responses to life change, we can change our relationship with life into one that is more Loving - but it still doesn't feel Loving a lot of the time.  So, it is important to remember what a gift we have been given.  In healing our relationships with our self, we are becoming vehicles / channels / vessels of Love.  By learning to Love our self we are manifesting Love into the world.  This is the dawning of the Second Coming of the message of Love, and we are all messengers/messiahs who have the privilege of carrying the message of Truth and Love by being in recovery and doing our healing to the best of our ability in the moment."  -  Joy2MeU Update 12-11-99

What was so vital to me was to separate the three major levels of my loneliness - so that I could discern between legitimate feelings of loneliness for connection with other human beings, the desperate loneliness of my inner child, and the spiritual emptiness that comes from the illusion of separation from my Source.  This is what I talked about in the latest chapter of my online book. 

"Codependency is a condition which sets us up to be starved for emotional nurturing - to be emotionally anorexic.  Not having our emotional needs met in childhood sets us up for the behavior patterns that cause our adult emotional needs to go unmet - and both areas of need are reflections of our Spiritual wound, of the hole we feel within due to the feeling of disconnection from our Source.  That deep empty longing can only be filled Spiritually, by reconnecting with our Source. 

As long as we are looking outside to fill the hole we feel within ourselves, we are destined to be emotional anorexics.  Our emotional needs cannot be filled as long as our self worth is enmeshed in our emotional relationship to external sources.  We are not able to discern between our legitimate adult emotional needs and the desperate emotional neediness of our wounded inner children as long we are looking outside of ourselves to find worth, to fill the feeling of emptiness within." - The codependency movement . . . marriages! Chapter 9 emotional anorexia

"When I mentioned being alone, I was talking specifically about in person, emotionally intimate relationships.  I was not talking about that desperate feeling of loneliness that I used to experience.  That desperately lonely part of me involved my inner child loneliness - and beyond that, the hole in my soul that was about feeling disconnected from the Source.  I have not felt disconnected from the Source for many years now.  That Spiritual hole that I spent much of my life trying to fill with something or someone outside of me, is what I learned to fill by working a twelve step Spiritual program.  I am never alone on that level.  I have not felt alone in that way for a long time. 

Through my inner child healing work, I have developed relationships with the desperately lonely, needy inner children within me - and those wounds have only a fraction of the power they used to have.  The next time that I have the opportunity to explore a relationship with another person that includes the possibility of a romantic connection, those wounds will come into play / buttons will be pushed - and it will be an wonderful opportunity for further growth and healing. ;-) 

So, in stating that I was very alone - notice that I did not say I was lonely - I was referring to an adult need for connection with other human beings in person. . . . . .  A sad truth for many people, is that the emotional intimacy they have experienced on the internet is the most powerful intimacy they have ever experienced.  This is a symptom of how wounded and starved emotionally we were as children - the reason for patterns of emotional deprivation as an adult - and a message from the Source about how important it is to develop compassion for self in recovery.  Just as the first twelve step meetings I ever attended were the most intimate, honest, real, and safest places I had ever experienced up to that time - so for many people the internet was the first place to experience any kind of true emotional honesty and safety.  As I grew, and learned to be more emotionally intimate with myself, my capacity for emotional intimacy increased - and after a certain point, the number of people who had a comparable capacity decreased, the number of places where it was really appropriate to share on the deepest levels became fewer.  There are multiple levels to everything, recovery keeps changing and getting different - the road gets narrower as the horizons get broader."  -  Joy2MeU Update May 2001 Newsletter 1

The breakthrough that I had in my journal processing in June and July, is that I was able to see, and make a conscious choice to opt for deprivation over getting involved with someone that I did not feel I could really open my heart to.  It was very important for me to do that, so I could take some power away from my deprivation issues.  Even though I have done tremendous healing over the years, I find that in this one critical area I keep uncovering ways that I am giving power to feeling like a victim.  That was a very big breakthrough for me - to make deprivation a conscious choice rather than engaging in behavior that felt like a betrayal of myself.

Now I am getting a chance to look at the way I have swung out of balance in my acceptance of being isolated.

I do have legitimate adult needs for connection with other humans.  It is very difficult to get those needs met because of how narrow my path has become - but I could do more than I have been to make myself available for such relationships.  That is why it was so important for me to look at this area.  I can take some action.  I can take some risks to open up to the possibility of connection with other beings."

As I said, that section was written for the online book and thus the reference to "mad dogs and skunks I mentioned in the last chapter."  That was a reference to Chapter 7: Multiple levels of selfishness.

The issue of being alone and and feeling lonely is a big one for most of us.  It was vital for me in my recovery to see that I actually felt less loneliness when I was alone - because my patterns were more of the counterdependent type, trying to convince myself I didn't need other people.  My fear/terror of intimacy issues were so powerful that I effectively had a relationship phobia.  Those of you whose patterns were more classically codependent, tended to make the relationship your higher power and hold on for dear life because of inner child fears of being alone.  These are two extremes in the patterns I have observed in how codependents react to fear of intimacy - to be isolated and alone most of the time or to stay in relationships that aren't meeting our needs out of fear of being alone.  The third major pattern is to go from relationship to relationship, often being more codependent in some (trying to take a hostage / make the other person our drug of choice) and counterdependent in others (resisting being someone else's drug / being taken hostage.)  (Parts 3 and 4 of the Codependent Relationship Dynamics series talks about this come here - go away dynamic.)

It was when I was with other people that I felt the loneliest - because I didn't have a clue of how to connect in a healthy way.  So, I tried to convince myself that I didn't need other people. I had so much shame at the core of my relationship with my self that it felt like allowing another person to really see in to me (intimacy, in to me see) would cause them to run away screaming in horror at what a shameful defective monster I was - the ugly ogre within (just watched Shrek with my kid again the other night.:)

It has been powerfully freeing and empowering for me to learn to be discerning in seeing the different levels of loneliness - to separate the feelings of loneliness caused by spiritual disconnection from the loneliness and grief of my inner child wounds.  As I took the power away from those levels by working a spiritual program and doing my inner child healing work, I could then more clearly own and see the level that was about an adult human being wanting connection with other adult human beings - and of course, a special connection with one other person.  That is a legitimate need - and I needed to grieve for the ways I had been deprived in getting my needs to connect with other beings met - but it was by far the least powerful of the three levels of loneliness.  Separating my soul longing and the desperate, life threatening, feelings of my inner children from the adult grief made it possible to start playing in the gray area of relationships - instead of being stuck swinging between the extremes of complete isolation or opening my heart to be shattered once more by someone who would "betray" me by not being who I wanted her to be.  (Because of my childhood trauma, my fear of betrayal was greater than my fear of abandonment, so counterdependent behavior felt less potentially painful to my ego defense system than codependent - something I saw more clearly, on a deeper level, in that May 2001 Newsletter processing.)

Yesterday (June 15) I surrendered to making the Newsletter portion of this Update a different page.  It is too important a topic for me to try to cram it in with this Update portion - I want a little more space to explore where this writing is going.  Hopefully I will be able to finish that page within the next couple of days.  I will announce on my New page when the Newsletter page of this Update is posted and activate a link to it here. June 24, 2003 June 2003 Update Newsletter Discernment part 1   Here is a paragraph from that page:

"As I started to validate and understand my emotional wounds, and separate the levels and layers of them, I could then start to see my adult relationship patterns more clearly.  I could then see how the combination of feeling disconnected Spiritually and feeling unlovable to my parents in childhood gave power to the illusion that I was shameful and defective.  And because I felt shameful and defective I had good reason to fear intimacy.  That helped me to start understanding why my fear of intimacy had run my life."