The Rules that Work
In terms of the Serenity Prayer, I needed to figure out what I did have the power to change and what I did not. I needed to learn the extent of my own personal power. I needed to detach from my own reactive relationship with life enough to start seeing with some clarity where the boundaries of my power ended so that I could figure out what I was responsible for - and therefore what I could change - and what I was powerless over, and therefore needed to accept.
The Serenity Prayer states;
God,
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
The wisdom to know the difference is, of course, the key here. As long as I was looking outside of myself for a way to fill the hole I felt within, I was set up to fail. As long as my relationship with life was being dictated by the false beliefs and definitions I had learned in childhood, I was destined to have a dysfunctional relationship with life.
I do not have the power to make other people be who I want them to be. I am not in control of life. I cannot dictate the outcome of situations. I can take actions in a direction to try to make something happen. I can plant seeds in hopes that they grow. But ultimately I am not in control of life events. It was very important for me to accept that in order to start seeing life more clearly.
It was very important for me to realize that what I do have some power over is my own attitudes, behavior, and feelings. It was very important for me to recognize that other people did not have power over my feelings unless I gave it to them. It was vital for me to start realizing and taking responsibility for how I was setting myself up to be the victim because of my childhood programming.
"There is an old joke about the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic. The psychotic truly believes that 2 + 2 = 5. The neurotic knows that it is 4 but can't stand it. That was the way I lived most of my life, I could see how life was but I couldn't stand it. I was always feeling like a victim because people and life were not acting in the way I believed they "should" act.
I expected life to be different than it is. I thought if I was good and did it "right" then I would reach 'happily ever after.' I believed that if I was nice to people they would be nice to me. Because I grew up in a society where people were taught that other people could control their feelings, and vise versa, I had spent most of my life trying to control the feelings of others and blaming them for my feelings.
By having expectations I was giving power away. In order to become empowered I had to own that I had choices about how I viewed life, about my expectations. I realized that no one can make me feel hurt or angry - that it is my expectations that cause me to generate feelings of hurt or anger. In other words, the reason I feel hurt or anger is because other people, life, or God are not doing what I want them, expect them, to do.
I had to learn to be honest with myself about my expectations - so I could let go of the ones that were insane (like, everyone is going to drive the way I want them to), and own my choices - so I could take responsibility for how I was setting myself up to be a victim in order to change my patterns. Accept the things I cannot change - change the things I can." - Serenity and Expectations
If someone is emotionally abusive, and I keep expecting them to treat me in a loving respectful way - then I am the one who has the problem. I give them the power to push my buttons because I am empowering an insane expectation. I think they "should" act different, so I keep setting them up to be the bad guy, and me to be the poor abused victim. This is a codependent pattern that allows me to feel superior to others because of my self righteous indignation.
It is very sad that one of my main sources of self esteem for much of my life was to feel morally superior to the people who were abusing me. It is not bad or wrong or shameful - but it is dysfunctional, and it is very sad.
We cannot become clear on what we are seeing or hearing if we are reacting to emotional wounds that we have not been willing/able to feel and subconscious attitudes that we have not been willing/able to look at.
We cannot learn to trust ourselves as long as we are still setting ourselves up to be victimized by untrustworthy people. We cannot learn to Love ourselves enough to meet our own needs until we start to release the attitudes and feelings that tell us that we are unworthy - that it is somehow shameful to be ourselves. We cannot learn to Love ourselves without learning discernment.
The black and white thinking of Codependence causes us to either keep the baby in the dirty bath water or throw out both. Discernment is picking the baby out of the dirty bath water.
We can learn to trust and Love ourselves through learning to make healthier choices about who to trust and what to believe. We can begin to be able to recognize Truth and throw out the distortions, false beliefs, and lies. By doing our emotional healing, by changing the dysfunctional attitudes, we can start being responsible in our lives - that is, we can begin to have the ability to respond to life honestly in the moment.
Until we heal our wounds, until we become honest and clear in our emotional process, we are not able to be discerning. We are not capable of responding to life in the now - we are only able to react out of old grief, out of old tapes.
One of the trickiest challenges with codependence recovery is escaping from the black and white thinking. Out of our codependence - from an emotional reaction level - there were two options: blame them, blame me. It is vital in recovery to start taking the blame out of the process. We need to learn to take responsibility for our side of the street, and hold other people responsible for their side of the street.
As we become aware of how we have set ourselves up to be emotionally abused it is important not to judge and blame ourselves for behavior and attitudes that we were unconsciously empowering. If we beat ourselves up for being emotionally abused, then we are emotionally abusing ourselves.
It is vital to start recognizing how the childhood emotional and intellectual programming set us up. It is very important to start recognizing our powerlessness to change our patterns until we became aware of them. In order to stop emotionally abusing ourselves, and allowing others to emotionally abuse us, it is very important to become aware of how powerful our childhood programming has been in our lives.
We must start recognizing our powerlessness over this disease of Codependence.
As long as we did not know we had a choice we did not have one.
If we never knew how to say "no," then we never really said "yes."
We were powerless to do anything any different than we did it. We were doing the best we knew how with the tools that we had. None of us had the power to write a different script for our lives.
Two Examples
I am going to wrap up this article by giving two examples of how powerful the intellectual and emotional programing is until we get conscious of it and honest with ourselves about how the past is dictating our lives today. The first example is from my own personal process about the breakthrough that started my codependence recovery. The second is about someone I worked with and points out how necessary it is to do the emotional healing to get in touch with the subconscious intellectual programming
"I went home to do some writing and was pretty amazed at what it revealed. I realized that I was still reacting to life out of the religious programming of my childhood - even though I had thrown out that belief system on a conscious, intellectual level in my late teens and early twenties. The writing that I did that night helped me to recognize that my emotional programming was dictating my relationship with life even though it was not what I consciously believed.
I realized that the belief that "life was about sin and punishment and I was a sinner who deserved to be punished" was running my life. When I felt "bad" or "bad" things happened to me - I tried to blame it on others to keep from realizing how much I was hating myself for being flawed and defective, a sinner. When I felt good or good things happened I was holding my breath because I knew it would be taken away because I didn't deserve it. Often when things got too good I would sabotage it because I couldn't stand the suspense of waiting for god to take it away - which "he" would because I didn't deserve it.
. . . I said to myself - this is no way to live life, I need to change this. So that night I started to focus on changing the subconscious programming from my childhood. I didn't know how I was going to do it - but I was determined to find out. (That was an act of Love for myself that at the time I wouldn't have known to call Love.)" - Joy2MeU Journal Premier issue The Story of "Joy to You & Me"
"We cannot get clearly in touch with the subconscious programming without doing the grief work. The subconscious intellectual programming is tied to the emotional wounds we suffered and many years of suppressing those feelings has also buried the attitudes, definitions, and beliefs that are connected to those emotional wounds. It is possible to get intellectually aware of some of them through such tools as hypnosis, or having a therapist or psychic or energy healer tell us they are there - but we cannot really understand how much power they carry without feeling the emotional context - and cannot change them without reducing the emotional charge / releasing the emotional energy tied to them. Knowing they are there will not make them go away.
A good example of how this works is a man that I worked with some years ago. He came to me in emotional agony because his wife was leaving him. He was adamant that he did not want a divorce and kept saying how much he loved his wife and how he could not stand to lose his family (he had a daughter about 4.) I told him the first day he came in that the pain he was suffering did not really have that much to do with his wife and present situation - but was rooted in some attitude from his childhood. But that did not mean anything to him on a practical level, on a level of being able to let go of the attitude that was causing him so much pain. It was only while doing his childhood grief work that he got in touch with the pain of his parents divorce when he was 10 years old. In the midst of doing that grief work the memory of promising himself that he would never get a divorce, and cause his child the kind of pain he was experiencing, surfaced. Once he had gotten in touch with, and released, the emotional charge connected to the idea of divorce, he was able to look at his present situation more clearly. Then he could see that the marriage had never been a good one - that he had sacrificed himself and his own needs from the beginning to comply with his dream / concept of what a marriage should be. He could then see that staying in the marriage was not serving him or his daughter. Once he got past the promise he made to himself in childhood, he was able to let go of his wife and start building a solid relationship with his daughter based on the reality of today instead of the grief of the past.
It was the idea / concept of his wife, of marriage, that he had been unable to let go of - not the actual person. By changing his intellectual concept / belief, he was able to get clear on what the reality of the situation was and sever the emotional energy chains / cords that bound him to the situation and to his wife. He was then able to let go of giving away power over his self-esteem (part of his self-esteem was based on keeping his promise to himself) to a situation / person that he could not control. He gained the wisdom / clarity to discern the difference between what he had some power to change and what he needed to accept. He could not change his wife's determination to get a divorce but he could change his attitude toward that divorce - once he changed the subconscious emotional programming connected to the concept." - The True Nature of Love - part 4, Energetic Clarity
Our childhood programming, our codependence, is incredibly powerful. It is so important to have compassion for our selves. We truly were powerless to do the dance of life in a functional way as long as we were reacting unconsciously. Becoming conscious, starting to get honest with ourselves so that we can see reality more clearly, is the beginning of an incredible adventure - an E ticket ride on the biggest roller coaster imaginable.
It is not our fault that we were wounded. It is not our fault that we have had dysfunctional and dishonest interaction patterns. It is very painful to start getting honest with ourselves. It is also the beginning of learning to Love our self. The traumatic event that forces us to start awakening,, the roadblock that is keeping us from getting where we thought we wanted to go, is actually a detour that puts us on the path back home to Love. It really is good news.
In the next article, I intend to address these issues on a more practical, how to do it, type of level. Whenever I get that posted there will be a link here - The next article is focused on Setting Personal Boundaries. If you read the personal boundaries page first in this series, then the next article is Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility1