"Codependency continually turns back in on us. Our damaged
ego causes great resistance to doing the healing work - and then turns
around and tells us we are not doing it "right," not doing it fast enough,
not being spiritual enough. Just this last week I had to point out
to a phone counseling client how - in an e-mail she had sent me - she was
shaming herself for not doing a better job of stopping shaming herself.
This is nasty stuff here - incredibly powerful and treacherous is the dis-ease
of codependency."
"In my own personal recovery, I was forced to go beyond the twelve step
approach as it was practiced in Alcoholics Anonymous because I was carrying
so much shame from my childhood. I was spiritually abused by a shame
based religion that taught me that I was born sinful and shameful - and
there was then (and is still today) too much black and white thinking and
shaming, too much unhealed codependency - going on in AA for me to find
what I needed there to get past the toxic shame at the core of my relationship
with my self.
I also had to go beyond what I could read and learn about Adult Child
Syndrome (there was no Co-Dependents Anonymous then) because my family
was such a normal American family that there was no overt dysfunction or
abuse to identify as the cause of my wounding - which increased the shame
I felt about my being. The only way it was possible for me to start
getting past the shame was to keep looking at the dysfunction I was discovering
in an increasingly larger context - I had to break out of conventional
paradigms. That is what led me to start realizing that the core wounding
of codependency - and the original wound that was causal in creating the
Human Condition as we have inherited it - was Spiritual."
"Codependency recovery is not self help. It is not something we
have to do alone. Healing our codependency is a spiritual process
through which we are guided by a Loving Spiritual Force."
"It is certainly not necessary for you to agree
with my beliefs - but please for the Love of Jesus (or Allah, or The Goddess,
or Jehovah, or whatever name resonates for you as
a representation of a Loving Higher Power) and for your self, question
any belief you are carrying that is blocking you from opening up to Love."
