I spent most of my life doing the Serenity prayer backwards, that is, trying to change the external things over which I had no control - other people and life events mostly - and taking no responsibility (except shaming and blaming myself) for my own internal process - over which I can have some degree of control. Having some control is not a bad thing; trying to control something or somebody over which I have no control is what is dysfunctional.
What is so valuable, what I believe is unique, about the approach to inner child healing that I have been guided to develop and refine, is that it provides a formula for integrating Spiritual Truth and intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior into one's emotional relationship with life.
It does not matter how much Spiritual Truth, how many mystical experiences of oneness, how in tune with Love, you can feel in certain moments - if you cannot integrate it into your life in a way which changes your emotional experience of life on a moment to moment, day to day basis. You can go to therapy for many years, read all the Spiritual and self help books, go to workshops and seminars and lectures - compile encyclopedic intellectual knowledge of what healthy behavior is - and still be reacting to old wounds in the relationships that mean the most to you.
The missing ingredient for so many people who have been seeking for many years, is how to integrate what you know into how you feel about your experience life. That is what I teach people - because it is what I have spent many years learning. It is what I am still learning.
The telephone counseling that I have been doing for the last year and nine months has led me to refine and fine tune my understanding of the dynamics of the healing process work. I resisted suggestions to do telephone counseling for quite awhile because I was concerned about how effective it would be. When working with someone in person, I can observe body language and look into their eyes. It is much easier to help a person get into their feelings, do their grief work, when working in person.
The very fact that I wasn't in the presence of the person has turned out to be perfect - it actually forced me into a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the process. Working with people on the telephone led me to focus on how to help the person change their relationship with themselves and life in the quickest, most effective way.
I realized that I did not need to know a lot of details about the persons story. I will get just enough information from them to be able to identify the primary themes and issues in their lives - and the dynamics in childhood that spawned these issues. That allows me to explain the dynamics to them in a way they can understand and relate to from their personal experience.
The dynamics of codependence are universal and predictable - because all human beings share the same emotions and emotional process. The internal dynamics of the interrelationship between the mental and emotional levels of our beings is something I understand intimately. Each of us is unique and different in the details of our lives, in the flavor of codependency we adapted - but we all have the same basic internal dynamic.
I wrote the final draft of my book, Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls, in 1995. Everything I say about the disease and the recovery process in that book is perfectly aligned with what I know today. It is a Truly amazing book that I am very grateful to have been guided to write.