Doug

The Gatekeeper


"Some people, when they first get into Recovery, when they first start on a healing path, mistakenly believe that they are supposed to take down their defenses and learn to trust everyone. That is a very dysfunctional belief. It is necessary to take down the dysfunctional defense systems but we have to replace them with defenses that work. We have to have a defense system, we have to be able to protect ourselves. There is still a hostile environment out there full of wounded Adult Children whom it is not safe to trust. . . . . . . .

The process of Recovery teaches us how to take down the walls and protect ourselves in healthy ways - by learning what healthy boundaries are, how to set them, and how to defend them. It teaches us to be discerning in our choices, to ask for what we need, and to be assertive and Loving in meeting our own needs. (Of course many of us have to first get used to the revolutionary idea that it is all right for us to have needs.)"
"Codependence is a disease which involves the being's emotional defense system being dysfunctional to the extent that it breaks our hearts and destroys our ability to Love and be Loved, wounds our souls by denying us access to our Spiritual Self, and scrambles our minds so thoroughly that it causes our minds to become our own worst enemies."

Gatekeeper is a term I first remember encountering over 15 years ago in relationship to archetypes. It is one that I have come to associate in my mind with the ferocious battle our codependency can put up when we are at a place when we are attempting to open our hearts to Loving and being Loved - when we are attempting to open up to allowing good things to happen in our lives instead of sabotaging ourselves.