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The Dance of Wounded Souls.
The True Nature of Love - part 1, what Love is not
"We live in a society where the emotional experience of "love" is conditional on behavior. Where fear, guilt, and shame are used to try to control children's behavior because parents believe that their children's behavior reflects their self-worth.In other words, if little Johnny is a well-behaved, "good boy," then his parents are good people. If Johnny acts out, and misbehaves, then there is something wrong with his parents. ("He doesn't come from a good family.")
What the family dynamics research shows is that it is actually the good child - the family hero role - who is the most emotionally dishonest and out of touch with him/herself, while the acting-out child - the scapegoat - is the most emotionally honest child in the dysfunctional family. Backwards again.
In a Codependent society we are taught, in the name of "love," to try to control those we love, by manipulating and shaming them, to try to get them to do the 'right' things - in order to protect our own ego-strength. Our emotional experience of love is of something controlling: "I love you if you do what I want you to do." Our emotional experience of love is of something that is shaming and manipulative and abusive.
Love that is shaming and abusive is an insane, ridiculous concept. Just as insane and ridiculous as the concept of murder and war in the name of God."
(Text in this color is used for quotes from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls) One day several years into my recovery I had one of those insights, those moments of a light bulb going on in my head, that was the beginning of a major paradigm shift for me. It was one of those moments of clarity which caused me to start reevaluating the mental perspectives and definitions that were dictating my emotional reactions to life. My relationships with myself, with life, and with other people - and therefore my emotional reactions to life events and other people's behavior - are dictated by the intellectual framework/paradigm that is determining my perspective and expectations. So the intellectual attitudes, beliefs, and definitions that are determining my perspective and expectations dictate what emotional reactions I have to life - what my relationship to life feels like.
I am not sure if this particular insight came before or after I had started consciously working on recovery from my codependency issues. I count my codependency recovery as starting on June 3, 1986 - exactly 2 years and 5 months into my recovery in another twelve step program. It was on that day that I realized that my emotional relationship with life was being dictated by the subconscious programming from my childhood - not by the intellectual attitudes, beliefs, and definitions that I had consciously chosen as being what I believed as an adult. To my horror I could see clearly that my behavioral patterns in my adult life were based on the beliefs and definitions that were imposed on me in early childhood. And I could see that even though these subconscious beliefs were based partly on the messages I received, they were even more firmly grounded upon the assumptions that I made about myself and life because of the emotional trauma I had suffered and because of the role modeling of the adults that I had grown up around.
On that day 13 years ago I Truly was able to see and admit to myself that I had been powerless to make healthy choices in my life because the emotional wounds and subconscious programming from my childhood had been dictating my emotional reactions to life, my relationship with myself and life. The saying I had heard in recovery that 'if you keep doing what you are doing, you will keep getting what you are getting' suddenly became clear. On that day, a paradigm shift occurred that allowed me to see life from a different perspective - a perspective that caused me to become willing to start doing the work necessary to change that intellectual programming and heal those emotional wounds.
