The dysfunctional dance of Codependence is caused by being at war with ourselves - being at war within.
On January 3, 2002 I will celebrate 18 years of being clean and sober. I have actually been clean and sober now for longer than I drank and used. An amazing miracle that has unfolded one day at a time. Some of those days were excruciatingly painful - full of hopelessness and despair. In early recovery, I didn't make it through those days sober because I wanted to be sober - or because I wanted to be alive. I made it through one day at a time because I was terrified of returning to, and getting stuck in, the hell I had been living in for the last 4 or 5 years of my drinking.
There is an old AA saying that: Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't open up the gates of heaven and let us in - it opens up the gates of hell and lets us out. When I got released from my alcoholic hell, what I found myself experiencing was life. The very thing I had been drinking to cope with!
What I realize now, is that I was released from alcoholic hell and found myself in codependent hell. My relationship with my self and with life condemned me to codependent hell - and alcohol and drugs had given me a vacation of sorts from dealing with the fact that I did not have a clue of how to live life in a functional way.
I am very, very grateful now that I am a recovering alcoholic. If I had not found alcohol and drugs, I would have killed myself in one way or another in my late teens or early twenties. My 17 plus year drinking career kept me alive long enough to be present when planetary conditions changed so that the New Age of Healing and Joy could dawn in human consciousness. Long enough to have available to me, the tools and knowledge to be able to heal my wounded soul and learn to live life in a way that works. Long enough that first Adult Children of Alcoholics, and then Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings, were available to help me in my healing process.
We are at war with ourselves because we are judging and shaming ourselves for being human. We are at war with ourselves because we are carrying around suppressed grief energy that we are terrified of feeling. We are at war within because we are "damming" our own emotional process - because we were forced to become emotionally dishonest as children and had to learn ways to block and distort our emotional energy.
We cannot learn to Love ourselves and be at peace within until we stop judging and shaming ourselves for being human and stop fighting our own emotional process, until we stop waging war on ourselves.
I can see now, that the reason I was able to stay sober was because of two concepts that are invaluable to any healing or growth. The first one made the second possible. It is the first of these concepts that is the single most important step in the inner healing process - the one that I stress so much to anyone I am working with on how to change and improve the quality of their lives.
That concept is detachment.
Codependence is a compulsively reactive condition. I had gone through life like a pin ball - bouncing / reacting from one point to the next, from one person to the next. It was never my fault. Someone, or something else, was always to blame for how messed up my life was - for how awful I felt inside. I focused on blame and resentment because the only alternative that I knew was to blame myself. I was at war inside of myself - and because I was taught to look outside for definition and worth by the society I grew up in, I tried to assign the blame externally for that internal war.
At the core of codependency is shame about being human. This shame was caused by a polarized, black and white intellectual paradigm that empowered the perspective that the only alternatives for evaluating worth, for determining value, are right and wrong. Human beings are incapable of being perfect based upon a perspective in which the only alternatives are right and wrong.
Codependency is a dysfunctional relationship with life, with being human. It is the dance I learned to do as a little kid. It is a dance whose music is generated from fear and shame, to a rhythm dictated by black and white thinking. It is a dance characterized by movement between extremes - blame them or blame me, overreact or underreact, less than or better than, success or failure, win or lose, etc., - which makes balance impossible. There is no middle ground in a dance that can only be done right or wrong. There can be no inner peace.
Since I was continually attempting to do life perfect (or rebelling by going to the opposite extreme) according to false beliefs about the nature and purpose of being human, I could never have any inner peace. I judged my self and my life experience, both consciously and unconsciously, out of a dysfunctional polarized belief system - so that it was not possible to stop being at war within. At the core of my being I felt like I was a defective monster, some kind of shameful, unlovable loser - and I tried to deflect some of that pain by blaming others.
No wonder I drank. Alcohol - and later drugs of various kinds - saved my life.
The first thing I had to do to get sober was to detach enough from my personal reality - from my hellish emotional pain and shame, from the intellectual garbage generated by my twisted codependent thinking - to become conscious of the reality that alcohol was not working for me anymore. I had to get conscious enough to be able to realize that it had been many years since alcohol had given me the relief and good feelings that it had when I started drinking.
With any addictive, mind / mood altering substance / behavior, the very thing that brought some relief from the internal war and mental anguish - the substance or behavior that gives us feelings of being high, of rising above our lives of quiet desperation, of feeling good - becomes something that we feel is necessary just to feel normal. Then eventually, normal becomes very low indeed.
I had to detach from myself enough to look at my life from a perspective that allowed me to see that maybe my behavior had something to do with why I was so miserable - but that is was not because I was a shameful being. The twelve step concept of powerlessness - the idea that alcoholism was a disease rather than a weakness of character - allowed me to detach and view my behavior, my drinking and using, with enough objectivity to start seeing reality with more clarity.
Once I surrendered to the reality that alcohol was hurting me rather than helping me, then I could make some effort to start living life differently. It was necessary for me to get a detached, objective look at myself in order for me to get honest enough with myself to decide that it might be better for me to get sober. I did not stop drinking because I wanted to stop drinking. I stopped drinking because alcohol and drugs were not working for me any more. When I was able to look at reality with some detachment, I could see that what I thought was the solution had actually become the most pressing problem.
The second concept that was so valuable in staying sober and starting to change my life, was the concept of delayed gratification. When I first started recovery, I thought that living life one day at a time was a revolutionary concept for me. But looking back now, I can see that living life one day at a time is what I had been doing all my life. The difference was that I had been living out of instant gratification.
As I describe on my page The codependent three step - A Dance of Shame, Suffering, & Self-Abuse, codependency is a vicious, compulsive, self-abusive dynamic - an prison that we are trapped in as long as we are reacting. In my codependent dance I was the victim of myself, I was my own perpetrator, and I rescued myself in ways that were ultimately self abusive. The shame and pain I was feeling was causing me to feel like a victim, the critical parent voice in my head was beating me up for being a stupid loser, and I was rescuing myself with drugs and alcohol.
In early recovery, I learned to think the next drink through to the consequences before picking it up. In other words, think about how I would feel about myself tomorrow if I take a drink today. And be conscious enough to tell myself the truth that I didn't want just one drink - I wanted oblivion, unconsciousness.
So, I started living life one day at a time from a detached place of consciousness that was aware of cause and effect - and understood that not indulging in instant gratification today would help me to not hate myself so much tomorrow.
Detachment allowed me to start aligning myself with the way life really works - cause and effect - and choosing delayed gratification one day at a time. It has resulted in 18 years of sobriety.