Dr. Ivan Pavlov, a professor of physiology (the science of organic functions/processes,) won the Noble Prize in Medicine in 1904 for his study of the physiology of digestion. His study of the physiological process of digestion in dogs led him to studying the link between digestion and the autonomic nervous system. He found that he could train dogs to associate the ringing of a bell with food so that they would start salivating – which gave the stomach the message to start the digestive process – every time a bell would ring. Thus the term “Pavlov’s dog” entered language referring to conditioned reflexes that are learned as opposed to innate and natural.

The work of Dr. Pavlov formed the foundation for work of psychologist’s such as B.F. Skinner, who studied and refined his theories and in the process founded the field of behavioral psychology.

This branch of psychology ignores the unconscious which traditional psychoanalysis focused upon, in favor of behavior modification. Behavior modification uses positive or negative reinforcement to train animals or people to change their behavior into that which is more acceptable to whomever has power over that animal or person.

Behavior modification techniques are used extensively in institutions – prisons, mental hospitals, juvenile facilities – to control behavior and attempt to change behavior patterns.

Some years ago, I worked for a period of time in a Boys Home that employed behavior modification techniques. As much as I needed the money at that time, I couldn’t do the work for long (although long enough to be able to afford to buy my first computer.) It broke my heart to see wounded boys being treated like animals who needed to be trained.

Unfortunately in a dysfunctional society, behavior modification has it’s place because the medical and mental health systems are out of balance and dysfunctional.

“Our mental health system not only does not promote healing – it actually blocks the process. The mental health system in this country is designed to get your behavior and emotions under control so that you can fit back into the dysfunctional system.” – Text in this color is used for quotes from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

That a person’s behavior doesn’t fit into the accepted norms of the dysfunctional society is identified as the problem that needs to be changed. The underlying causes of that symptomatic behavior are not really addressed in institutions that structure their programs to rely on behavior modification techniques.

Behavior modification can be functional in terms of bringing about a temporary change in a person’s behavior but unless the causes are addressed there is no real fundamental healing that takes place. Psychoanalysis focused upon an intellectual understanding of cause – and it is ultimately dysfunctional because emotional healing is not a component of the work.

“What the researchers were beginning to understand was how profoundly the emotional trauma of early childhood affects a person as an adult. They realized that if not healed, these early childhood emotional wounds, and the subconscious attitudes adopted because of them, would dictate the adult’s reaction to, and path through, life. Thus we walk around looking like and trying to act like adults, while reacting to life out of the emotional wounds and attitudes of childhood. We keep repeating the patterns of abandonment, abuse, and deprivation that we experienced in childhood.

Psychoanalysis addressed these issues only on the intellectual level – not on the emotional healing level. As a result, a person could go to psychoanalysis weekly for twenty years and still be repeating the same behavior patterns.”

Focusing on symptoms and intellectual understanding while discounting the emotional trauma at the core of the programming, are manifestations of the dysfunctional perspectives of codependent cultures. Emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional cultures do not produce medical and mental health systems that are holistic – that treat the whole person.

I will discuss in more detail in later chapters the emotional component of human beings and the dysfunction that is manifested in human systems – including medical and mental health – at all levels by the false beliefs and masculine feminine imbalance caused by planetary conditions. The main point I want to make in this chapter, is that codependency is an effect of behavior modification.

Codependency = conditioned reactive programming

Awakening from the bondage of ego programming

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder / Brainwashing / Behavior Modification / Conditioned Reflex

Codependency is a conditioned reflex. It is a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Codependence as Delayed Stress Syndrome.)  It is an effect of brainwashing, the result of behavior modification. Codependency is condition, or dis-ease, that is caused by environmental conditions and conditioning rather than a phenomena which is genetic or innate to human nature. (Disease = a disturbance in a natural process, an abnormal condition which disturbs normal organic structural integrity / process.)

The forms of behavior modification that cause codependency are both intentional and unintentional. Parents use some behavior modification techniques in teaching children how to behave. These are not inherently bad or wrong in and of themselves. Some of them may be useful tools in teaching social and survival skills to children. The intentional behavior modification techniques can also be abusive depending upon the intellectual paradigm / beliefs that are providing the standards for judging what behavior is acceptable. (i.e. If a parent believes that children should be seen and not heard they will be abusive in attempting to get the child to behave “properly.” On the opposite end of the reactive codependent spectrum, a parent who does not want to abuse their children in the ways they experienced in childhood, will often go to the other extreme, giving the children too much power and not setting proper boundaries for their behavior – this is a form of unintentional behavior modification and is also abusive.)

It is the unintentional behavior modification that is normally the most damaging. I spoke of the most powerful form of unintentional behavior modification in the third chapter of this work – role modeling.

“The single most important influence in the development of a person’s relationship with their own emotions is role modeling. Mom and Dad were our primary role models for how a male emotional being and female emotional being behave, for how they relate to, and express, their emotions. (As well as for how male and female relate to each other.) The cultural role models that we were exposed to – through books, movies, television, etc., – play an important factor also, but our primary role models were our parents.

The direct messages we got – both verbal (big boys don’t cry, little ladies don’t get angry, there is nothing to be afraid of, etc.) and behavioral (punishment for expressing emotions) – and indirect messages (the ways we interpreted and internalized the behavior of other people – parents, teachers, peers, etc. – as being personal punishment, as being our fault) we got both from our parents and from society play a part in that development, but role modeling has the greatest impact.” – Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Chapter 3: Emotional Honesty

“If a culture is based on emotional dishonesty, with role models that are dishonest emotionally, then that culture is also emotionally dysfunctional, because the people of that society are set up to be emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional in getting their emotional needs met.

What we traditionally have called normal parenting in this society is abusive because it is emotionally dishonest. Children learn who they are as emotional beings from the role modeling of their parents. “Do as I say – not as I do,” does not work with children. Emotionally dishonest parents cannot be emotionally healthy role models, and cannot provide healthy parenting.”

Both intentional and unintentional behavior modification experiences play a part in creating codependency. A codependent society – that discounts the emotional and spiritual components of a human’s being and evaluates worth based upon external conditions (money, property, and prestige) and comparison to others (prettier than, smarter than, etc.) within a polarized (black/white, right/wrong) framework that defines wrong as shameful – conditions the people who grow up in that society to feel ashamed of their feelings and their humanity.

We were conditioned to “keep up appearances,” to keep our defectiveness secret. What would the neighbors think? Keep the family secrets – deny the elephant in the living room. (Referring to a metaphor about the power of denial in alcoholic families – denying the effect that alcoholism has on a family is like ignoring an elephant standing in the middle of the living room.)

We saw how our parents denied reality – and how much power they gave to what other people thought (or came from a family that lived the other extreme of rebellion and flaunting outrageous behavior in which case we felt ashamed because our family was different) – and we formed attitudes and beliefs based upon what we were feeling and hearing, seeing and experiencing. The reality we experienced in our homes – which were supposed to be our sanctuaries – was the only reality we knew. Those environments were where we learned how to live life and how to relate to other people. The conditions in our families dictated the behavior modification we experienced and internalized.

“We grew up having to deny the emotional reality: of parental alcoholism, addiction, mental illness, rage, violence, depression, abandonment, betrayal, deprivation, neglect, incest, etc. etc.; of our parents fighting or the underlying tension and anger because they weren’t being honest enough to fight; of dad’s ignoring us because of his workaholism and/or mom smothering us because she had no other identity than being a mother; of the abuse that one parent heaped on another who wouldn’t defend him/herself and/or the abuse we received from one of our parents while the other wouldn’t defend us; of having only one parent or of having two parents who stayed together and shouldn’t have; etc., etc.

We grew up with messages like: children should be seen and not heard; big boys don’t cry and little ladies don’t get angry; it is not okay to be angry at someone you love – especially your parents; god loves you but will send you to burn in hell forever if you touch your shameful private parts; don’t make noise or run or in any way be a normal child; do not make mistakes or do anything wrong; etc., etc.

We were born into the middle of a war where our sense of self was battered and fractured and broken into pieces. We grew up in the middle of battlefields where our beings were discounted, our perceptions invalidated, and our feelings ignored and nullified.

The war we were born into, the battlefield each of us grew up in, was not in some foreign country against some identified “enemy” – it was in the “homes” which were supposed to be our safe haven with our parents whom we Loved and trusted to take care of us. It was not for a year or two or three – it was for sixteen or seventeen or eighteen years.

We experienced what is called “sanctuary trauma” – our safest place to be was not safe – and we experienced it on a daily basis for years and years. Some of the greatest damage was done to us in subtle ways on a daily basis because our sanctuary was a battlefield.

It was not a battlefield because our parents were wrong or bad – it was a battlefield because they were at war within, because they were born into the middle of a war. By doing our healing we are becoming the emotionally honest role models that our parents never had the chance to be. Through being in Recovery we are helping to break the cycles of self-destructive behavior that have dictated human existence for thousands of years.

Codependence is a very vicious and powerful form of Delayed Stress Syndrome.”

relationships horizontal and vertical

It is the nature of organisms of every living species on the planet to survive and propagate. The definition of “organism” is “an animal or plant internally organized to maintain vital functions.” (New Illustrated Webster’s Dictionary, 1992) (I also believe that the planet Earth itself is a living organism – Gaia – but that is another discussion.)

There is some element within all living things that strives for survival. The higher up the evolutionary ladder an organism is, the more mental capacity it displays. This mental capacity – intelligence – gives it the ability to process information and adjust it’s behavior to maximize chances for survival.

The vital difference between human beings and even the most intelligent of animals is consciousness. Consciousness for human beings includes not only a capacity for self awareness – the ability to have a conscious relationship with self – but also a consciousness of something larger than self. This consciousness of something larger than self is what has driven human beings throughout history to seek some kind of supernatural force / higher power which gives meaning and purpose to life beyond mere survival.

“Codependence and recovery are both multi-leveled, multi-dimensional phenomena. It is very easy for me to write hundreds of pages about any single aspect of codependence and recovery – what is very difficult and painful is to write a short column. No facet of this topic is linear and one-dimensional, so there is no simple answer to any one question – rather there are a multitude of answers to the same question, all of which are True on some level.

So in order to facilitate writing a short column on this month’s topic, I am going to make a brief point about two dimensions of this phenomena in relationship to empowerment. These two dimensions are the horizontal and the vertical. In this context the horizontal is about being human and relating to other humans and our environment. The vertical is Spiritual – about our relationship to the God-Force. Codependence is at it’s core a Spiritual disease and the only way out of it is through a Spiritual cure – so any recovery, any empowerment, depends upon Spiritual awakening.” – Empowerment

“We are not animals – not that there is anything wrong with being an animal – but we have a consciousness of something larger, something beyond ourselves. We have a memory of some other place – of some place kinder and gentler and more Loving.

We are Spiritual Beings.”

As I say in this quote from my book, there is certainly nothing wrong with animals. Animals are a perfect part of the conscious living energy that is The Great Spirit. They are connected to the Spirit just as humans are. Your dog or cat or horse or whatever, may in fact be a part of your Self. Everything is part of the energy of ALL THAT IS. Everyone and everything is experiencing the Spiritual Evolutionary process. All human beings in reality have experienced not only being animals, but being part of the elemental forces of the planet.

“You have experienced being wind, rain, and fire as well as mineral, plant, and animal and can in special moments access emotional memories of those experiences. So you are not crazy for feeling at One with a tree or a bird or a speck on the wall.” – The Dance of the Wounded Souls Trilogy History of the Universe Part I

I am not going to get into metaphysics or quantum physics in this chapter. I just want to make the point, that believing that one can communicate with the spirit of a loved animal – either alive or dead – is not necessarily crazy. That animals spirit may be some aspect of your Self that you have manifested in this life to help your self in your journey of Spiritual Awakening.

I am going address the phenomena of consciousness in relationship to the horizontal human experience – consciousness of self – in the remainder of this chapter and the vertical, Spiritual component, consciousness of Self in the next chapter.

(For anyone who has issues, is triggered, by references to spirituality or a higher power, please stick with me long enough to investigate what I have to say in the coming chapters – or you can check out my web pages Spirituality for Agnostics and Atheists or spiritual integration by clicking on these links. It is important to start awakening to how our childhood experiences have impacted our lives, so if the term Spiritual Awakening is causing you problems, think of it as what it also is, an intellectual awakening – an expansion of awareness.)

In a holistic approach to healing, it is vital to address both dimensions for a multitude of reasons. The most important in terms of this chapter, has to do with innate reflexes as opposed to conditioned reflexes. On the horizontal level, the innate programming for human beings carries the same priority for humans as does the innate programming of animals – survival. On the vertical level, survival is not the first priority. Our first priority on the vertical, in relationship to our Source – as Spiritual beings having a human experience – is to reconnect with Love, with our Source.

The survival programming that is innate to our nature as human animals in relationship to the horizontal has been in conflict with our vertical, Spiritual yearning to return home to Love – because planetary conditions caused the illusion that we were disconnected from our Source. This conflict has been at the core of the human dilemma. Planetary conditions have changed in a significant manner in recent history, making it possible for the first time in recorded human history for us to start learning how to integrate the vertical into the horizontal.

“A Transformational Healing Process has begun on the planet Earth. Due to a profound change that has taken place in the energy field of Collective Human Emotional Consciousness, resources are now available to us to do healing that has never before been possible in recorded human history. Human beings now, for the first time, have the capacity to directly address the core issues of the human dilemma.”

The purpose of codependency recovery and inner child healing is to clear up our relationship with the horizontal – with self and how we relate to everything and everyone in our human environment – so that we can learn how to integrate the Spiritual into the physical and bring some balance and higher meaning to this human dance we are doing. We are here in body at this time to manifest Love into this human experience. We cannot do that without first learning how to access Love for our self. In order to do that, it is necessary to awaken to how the environments we grew up in conditioned us to live life in a way that is dysfunctional in relationship to the Spiritual / vertical component of our being – in a way that does not work to help us reconnect with Love.

Animals are trained – Human Beings are emotionally traumatized

Dr. Pavlov showed that repeatedly ringing a bell right before feeding a dog could result in a conditioned reflex. That a dog could be programmed in a way that caused an alteration in the dog’s internal processes, in it’s relationship with eating. He also showed that if the dog experienced the bell ringing without being fed enough times, it would revert to it’s normal digestive processes. In other words, conditioned reflexes can be unlearned.

This true in human beings also – which makes recovery from codependency possible. However the process – both of the programming and of recovery from the programming – is much more complicated and complex in human beings.

Human beings are only in part animal. Human beings are a composite of four essential elements / dimensions of being. Those four are components are mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. Mind, body, and soul are three parts of a four part equation.

Animals do not have the intellectual capacity to define themselves in relationship to their environment. They do not have consciousness of self. Animals are not capable of self awareness. They live life in reaction to innate and/or conditioned reflexes / instincts.

Human beings have the ability to define self individually in relationship to their environment. Human beings have the capacity to remember the past and envision the future. Human beings have a relationship with self that is defined by their perspective of self in relationship to life, to other human beings, to everything in their environment. The quality of this relationship to both self and external stimuli is characterized as the person’s self worth or self esteem.

An animal does not have a sense of, or capacity for, such a relationship with self. Animals do not have self worth. Animals just are. They live in the moment being perfectly the animal that they are. Their life experiences – the intentional or unintentional behavior modification that life brings their way – can alter, distort, change their reactions to their innate reflexes / instincts but they adapt and go on surviving / maintaining their vital functions.

A dog can be abused so that it cringes and grovels – or so that it attacks and kills – but these are conditioned reflexes that are expansions of / adaptations of / distortions of their innate natural reflexes / instincts. A dog in the right environment can unlearn these conditioned reflexes over time. It does not cringe and grovel because it has low self worth, or attack and kill because it believes it is better than whatever life form it is attacking – it is reacting to distortions of it’s natural instincts. The behavior modification training it has been subjected to, the conditioning that it has experienced, has taught it to react in a certain way to certain stimuli (the ringing bell) in alignment with it’s survival reflexes.

Animals with higher intelligence can also have distinct, individual personalities and a capacity for emotional attachment. Animals have the capacity for emotional reaction.

Dogs are certainly capable of emotional reaction and attachment. And this emotional attachment can be so great that it will sacrifice it’s survival for the person / people it has that attachment to – but this is true rather the dog has been treated lovingly or abusively because part of it’s innate reflex programming is loyalty to it’s pack, which is part of it’s survival programming. Dogs have been selectively bred for centuries to see humans as their pack leaders. Dogs have been bred to be codependent upon humans – to see humans as their higher powers.

(This brings to mind an old joke. God made dogs to be a companion to humans. After a period of time, one of the angels came to God and said, “We have a problem. The human beings experience the dogs behavior and look into the dogs eyes and start thinking that they are god.” God said, “Well, I’ll fix that.” And God created cats.;-)

A dog who was abused as a puppy will cringe and shrink back (somewhat similar to internal feeling which causes the classic codependent form of codependency) or snarl and bite (one of the counterdependent flavors of codependency) when anyone attempts to touch it. This is a conditioned reflex. This can be seen as the result of emotional abuse, but it is not the result of the animal having a damaged self image.

An animal can be emotionally abused, but it does not have a conscious relationship with self that can be affected by that emotional abuse. When a human being is emotionally abused (and any type of abuse – physical, sexual, verbal – is also emotionally abusive Emotional abuse is Heart and Soul Mutilation) it is traumatizing because of the effect it has on the being’s relationship with self. It is because humans have the capacity for self awareness that emotional trauma has such a huge impact on our lives.

For a human being, any kind of abuse is doubly traumatic. The abuse itself – and the effect that the abuse has on the person’s relationship with self, their self image. The effects of childhood abuse are more long lasting and traumatic than the incidents of abuse in and of themselves. The capacity which human beings have for self awareness – a relationship with / perspective of self – dictates that any emotional trauma suffered in early childhood, when we are forming the foundation of our relationship with self, is internalized and integrated into our perspective of self. That core relationship with self then dictates how we relate to life and other people.

Emotional trauma directly affects one’s relationship with self – ones self worth and self image. Emotional trauma is internalized and becomes a part of the emotional, behavioral defense system adapted by the element of a human’s being that is responsible for helping a human survive on a horizontal level – the ego.

Ego – consciousness of self

The ego is the part of our being whose job it is to help us survive. It is a part of our internal structure that is organized to maintain vital functions, that fights for survival. It is the ego that defines our relationship with self according to it’s survival programming and to the conditioning it experienced in early childhood. The ego is the part of us which determines our perspective of self – our self image.

A dog who was abused as a puppy can unlearn their conditioned reflexes by spending enough time in a safe and loving environment. Although a safe and loving environment can be very valuable to a human being who is healing from their childhood wounding – the emotional trauma they experienced because of behavior modification experiences in early childhood – love from external sources is not enough to heal a person’s relationship with self.

“It is necessary to own and honor the child who we were in order to Love the person we are. And the only way to do that is to own that child’s experiences, honor that child’s feelings, and release the emotional grief energy that we are still carrying around.”

Intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior, experiences of a spiritual nature, faith in a Loving Higher Power, can help a person change their relationship with other people and life to a certain degree. It will not however, change the way a person reacts in the relationships that mean the most to them – it will not help them to open their heart to love and to being loved on the most intimate levels. Romantic relationships are the arena where our buttons get pushed, where our deepest wounds are triggered – which activates our emotional defenses.

We are not capable of having a Truly healthy romantic relationship, a Loving emotionally intimate relationship with another human being, until we start healing our childhood wounds in relationship to the trauma we experienced from the people we first opened our hearts to. Our parents were our first loves – and we were wounded in our relationships with them because they were wounded. We internalized and incorporated the conditioning from those initial experiences of opening our hearts to emotional intimacy into our relationship with self.

It is not our relationship with our parents that we need to heal in order to open to Love, it is our relationship with our self – the self image we formed because of our relationships with them. The healing we need to do is internal, in our relationship with self. Our ego adapted defenses to protect us in the environment we grew up in. In order to change our relationship with self we need to change our childhood ego programming.

“Codependence is an emotional and behavioral defense system which was adopted by our egos in order to meet our need to survive as a child. Because we had no tools for reprogramming our egos and healing our emotional wounds (culturally approved grieving, training and initiation rites, healthy role models, etc.), the effect is that as an adult we keep reacting to the programming of our childhood and do not get our needs met – our emotional, mental, Spiritual, or physical needs. Codependence allows us to survive physically but causes us to feel empty and dead inside. Codependence is a defense system that causes us to wound ourselves.”

The ego is not a bad thing, it was just programmed very dysfunctionally in early childhood. Our ego defenses are set up to protect us from the pain and shame of feeling unlovable and unworthy. The subconscious ego programming from my childhood was heavily invested in trying to protect me from the shame of admitting that I felt fear – or any other emotion that I thought made me less of a man.

“The ego is the part of us that is charged with responsibility for our survival. The ego is the seat of the disease of codependence.

Being born into an emotionally dishonest, fear and shame based, Spiritually hostile environments (based on separation rather than connection), caused us to be emotionally traumatized in childhood. In response to that emotional trauma our egos adapted some very dysfunctional programming. (Functional in terms of survival, but dysfunctional in terms of helping us to be happy and at peace within.)

For some of us, the wounding started in the womb where we: incubated in our mother’s fear and shame; or got addicted to adrenaline because of the emotional volatility of our mother’s life; or could feel our mother’s waiting for us to arrive to give meaning and purpose to her life; or felt how unwelcome we were because she had already had too many children and was feeling overwhelmed; etc.

We exited the warm nurturing cocoon of our incubator into a cold, harsh world. A world run by Higher Powers (parents and any body else bigger than us – siblings, grandparents, hospital or orphanage personnel) who were wounded in their childhood. Gods who were not emotionally healthy, and did not know how to Love themselves. Our egos were traumatized – and adapted programming to try to protect us from the pain of emotional trauma that felt life threatening.

The people we Loved the most – our Higher Powers – hurt us the most. Our emotional intimacy issues were caused by, our fear of intimacy is a direct result of, our early childhood experiences. Our lives have been lived in reaction to the intellectual paradigms our egos adapted to deal with emotional trauma.

The part of a child’s brain that is logical and rational, that understands abstract concepts (like time or death), that can have any kind of an objective perspective on self or life, does not develop until about the age of 7 (the age of reason.) As little children we were completely ego-centric and magical thinking. We did not have the capacity to understand that our Higher Powers were not perfect. We watched their role modeling, experienced their behavior as personal, and felt the emotional currents of our environments – worry, frustration, resentment, fear, anger, pain, shame, etc. – and were emotionally traumatized.

Our ego adapted itself to the environment it was experiencing. It developed emotional and behavioral defense systems in reaction to the emotional pain we experienced growing up with parents who were wounded codependents.

If you have ever wondered why it is so much easier to feel Spiritual in relationship to nature or animals, here is your answer. It was people who wounded us in childhood. It is people who our egos developed defense systems to protect us from.” – Reprogramming our dysfunctional ego defenses

The human left brain (logical, rational) is on one level – in it’s relationship to the ego – a rationalization computer, capable of rationalizing any behavior that the ego deems necessary for survival. (Even if this rationalization results in death. A suicide bomber for instance, is someone whose damaged ego perceives a martyrs death as preferable to a life of feeling like an oppressed and powerless victim. This is a wounded human being who has been forced by cultural programming / conditioned reflexes to channel a great deal of their emotional (and sexual) energy into self righteous victimization – into anger, rage, and religious fanaticism.)  It is possible for wounded humans to rationalize committing monstrous acts because the ego’s damaged programming. “Death before dishonor” is not such a noble cry when you take into account that dishonor for a man could mean admitting fear or crying. When one understands the emotional dynamics of codependency, it becomes readily apparent why emotionally dishonest patriarchal cultures manifest a lot of war and violence.

Our ego desperately fights to hang onto denial and rationalization – because to the ego it feels like a fight for survival, literally a life and death struggle. No one wakes up one morning and says, “Hey maybe I will do some emotional healing today – that sounds like fun.” We start doing this healing work because we are in so much emotional pain. We start doing it because we have hit an emotional bottom where rationalizations and denial no longer work. We start doing it because we have reached a point where emotional dishonesty is killing us – literally.

As long as we allow our ego programming to dictate our relationship with life, we will live life based upon fear.

“This human experience is a process that involves inherent conflict between the continuously changing nature of life and the human ego’s need to survive. In order to insure survival (which is the ego’s appointed task) the human ego needs to define things. What is food? What is friend or enemy? Who am I and how do I relate to them? What can hurt me and what brings me pleasure? It also learned that it is healthy to have a fear of the unknown (it was important to check an unknown cave for saber toothed tigers before strolling into it.) As a result, the ego fears change and craves security and stability. But because life is constantly changing, security and stability can only be temporary.” – Loving and Nurturing self on your Spiritual Path

“Fear of the unknown is a natural, normal part of being human. It has a purpose – and deserves to be honored as something which serves us. But, like our relationship with all the aspects of our being, our relationship with that fear is dysfunctional.

The damaged ego responds to it’s programming by generating fear of the things we learned to fear as a child: making mistakes; doing it wrong; being emotional; speaking our Truth; taking risks; being alone; not being alone; whatever. We then empower the fear by focusing on it, magnifying it, and generally giving it the power to define us and our life – or by denying it, which also gives it power because in denying our fear we are denying our self and reality. Going to either extreme results in the inability to see the situation clearly.

Because our ego was programmed to react to life from fear, negativity, scarcity, and lack (again due to emotional trauma we experienced, and the messages and role modeling of the adults around us) the disease focuses on and magnifies fear – and then it scrambles around trying to find something to cover up and repress the very fear it is generating. The disease blows the fear way out of proportion and then leads us to addictive and/or compulsive behavior as a way of stuffing the fear.

This is the essence of the dysfunction. We live our life reacting to fear, and the shame, that the disease empowers and then “helps” us avoid by causing us to focus on something outside of ourselves as the cause and/or the cure for the core place within us where we feel empty – where we feel unlovable and unworthy.” – The Recovery Process for inner child healing – through the fear

Allowing fear and shame to define and dictate our life experience is not a pleasant way to experience being human. Living life in reaction to our conditioned reflexes, to the programming our ego’s adapted in early childhood, does not work to help us relax and enjoy life. It is dysfunctional if we want to become free from the past and have the capacity to experience happiness, inner peace, and Love.

The way I found to start having some freedom from the past is to consciously start changing my ego programing and become willing to heal my emotional wounds. I was led into this conscious healing process by working a twelve step program to help me quit living in the emotional hell that alcoholism had created in my life. I did not get conscious that this was what I was doing until I started my conscious codependency recovery on June 3, 1986 – at two years and five months clean and sober.

Getting into recovery from alcoholism saved my life and led me to codependency recovery. Codependency recovery taught me how to live life in a way that allows me some freedom from the conditioned programming of the past – that allows me to have a great deal of serenity and Joy in my life today.

“It is the process of striving for integration and balance of masculine and feminine within (integration of Spiritual Truth into our relationship with our mental, emotional, and physical levels, balance between mental and emotional, between rational and intuitive, between feeling and thinking) that allows us to find some balance and harmony in our relationships with ourselves and with life. This striving for integration and balance (which working a Twelve Step program brings to an individual’s life – even if one is not conscious that that is what is happening) allows us to reach a place where we can be happy in the moment the majority of the time – happy, Joyous, and free.”

Unfortunately, there are many people in twelve step programs who have not been willing to get emotionally honest with themselves – who are scared of feeling the feelings because they haven’t changed the subconscious programming that keeps them in denial. That denial and emotional dishonesty keeps them stuck in bondage to the ego’s false self image.

One of the reasons that I feel compelled to keep writing more about this process is because there are so many wounded codependents out there who do not know how to do the integration and reprogramming work that will help them open up to Love. Hopefully, some of the ways that I am explaining the wounding and recovery process in this online book will speak to some of those wounded codependents – especially to all of the suffering codependents in Alcoholics Anonymous.” – Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Chapter 5: Codependency = conditioned reactive programming ~ Pavlov’s Dog

Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light  Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life is available in a subscription area of the Joy2MeU website entitled: Dancing in Light

A special offer for that subscription (as well as for the Joy2MeU Journal) is available on this special offers page.

The first two chapters of this online book are available through my regular website – the first chapter is a response to an online article about codependence that I found very codependent (thus the title of the first chapter): The codependency movement is NOT ruining marriages!

I have published two other chapters of this work as blogs: Chapter 8 Codependents as Emotional Vampires and Chapter 13: Changing the Music: Love instead of fear and shame.

Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light  Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life is the third book of what I think of as the Wounded Souls Trilogy along with Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls A Cosmic Perspective on Codependence and the Human Condition and Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light Book 1 Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child Healing. (This is different from The Dance of the Wounded Souls Trilogy Book 1 – “In The Beginning . . .” which is a Magical, Mystical Adult Spiritual Fable that was in fact the first book I wrote – but have never finished.)

I am going to be preparing Book 2 for publication in the coming months.

 

Earlier in this series I mentioned that I would be focusing on three primary areas in relationship to learning to have a healthier relationship with self and others:  boundaries, emotional honesty, and emotional responsibility.  The three areas are intimately interrelated, and because I do not feel I can talk about one area without also discussing the others, I may have gotten the cart before the horse in a sense in this series.  I started the series in the first two articles focusing more on emotional honesty and responsibility – and learning to have internal boundaries with ourselves in terms of seeing the process of life more realistically (what we need to accept, and what we can change) – and starting to take responsibility for our behaviors and emotions.

The reason I started there, is because changing our relationship with ourselves and life is vital in order to make any long term changes in our relationships with others.  It is vital to learn to respect and honor our selves, so that we can awaken to the need to have boundaries that let other people know that we deserve and demand respect.

What is so powerful and effective about the inner child healing process, as I have learned to apply it, is that it changes our core relationship with ourselves.  Once we start having a more Loving relationship with ourselves, everything changes.  We start to naturally and normally:  set boundaries with others;  speak our Truth;  own our right to be alive and be treated with respect and dignity.

To start by learning how to set boundaries and assert ourselves, without changing the core relationship with ourselves, will ultimately not work in the relationships we care most about.  It is relatively easy to start setting boundaries in relationships that don’t mean much to us – it is in the relationships that mean the most to us that it is so difficult.  That is because, it is those relationships – family, romantic, etc. – that our inner child wounds are the most powerful.  The little child within us does not feel worthy, feels defective and shameful, and is terrified of setting boundaries for fear everyone will leave.  The other extreme of this phenomena is those of us who throw up huge walls to try to keep people from getting too close – and sabotage any relationship that starts getting too intimate – to try to protect the wounded child within from being hurt.

With boundaries, as in every area of the healing process, change starts with awareness.  I had to hear about boundaries, and start learning the concept before I could even realize that I didn’t have any.  I had to start getting some glimmer of an idea of what boundaries are, and how to set them, in order to understand how hard they were for me – and how absolutely vital to learning to Love myself.

So, in this third article of this series on emotional honesty and emotional responsibility I am going to be focusing on setting personal boundaries with other people.  I am going to attempt to keep the focus on a very basic level for those readers who are new to the concept of boundaries.

Personal Boundaries

“Boundaries define limits, mark off dividing lines.  The purpose of a boundary is to make clear separations between different turf, different territory. . . .

In relationship to recovery and the growth process, I am going to be talking about two primary types of boundaries.  Natural boundaries that are part of the way life works – that are aligned with the reality of the rules that govern human dynamics – and personal boundaries.” – Emotional Honesty and Emotional Responsibility Part 2

“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.)” – (Text in this color are quotes from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

The purpose of having boundaries is to protect and take care of ourselves.  We need to be able to tell other people when they are acting in ways that are not acceptable to us.  A first step is starting to know that we have a right to protect and defend ourselves.  That we have not only the right, but the duty, to take responsibility for how we allow others to treat us.

We need to start becoming aware of what healthy behavior and acceptable interaction dynamics look like before we can start practicing them ourselves – and demanding the proper treatment from others.  We need to start learning how to be emotionally honest with ourselves, how to start owing our feelings, and how to communicate in a direct and honest manner.  Setting personal boundaries is vital part of healthy relationships – which are not possible without communication.

The first thing that we need to learn to do is communicate without blaming.  That means, stop saying things like:  you make me so angry;  you hurt me;  you make me crazy;  how could you do that to me after all I have done for you;  etc.  These are the very types of messages we got in childhood that has so warped our perspective on our own emotional process.

I grew up believing that I had the power to make my father angry and to break my mother’s heart.  I thought that I was supposed to be perfect, and that if I was not, I was causing the people I loved great pain.  I grew up believing that something was wrong with me because I was human.  I grew up believing that I had power over other peoples feelings – and they had power over mine.

In my codependence I learned to be enmeshed with other people – to not have healthy boundaries that told me who “I” was, and that I was a separate person from them.  I had to become hyper-vigilant in childhood.  I learned to focus on trying to interpret what my parents and other authority figures were feeling in order to try to protect myself.  As an adult, I unconsciously tried to manipulate people – by trying to be what they wanted me to be if I wanted them to like me, or trying to be either intimidating or invisible if that seemed the safest course.  I had no real concept of being responsible for my own feelings because I had learned that other people were responsible for my feelings – and vice versa.  I had to learn to start defining myself emotionally as separate from other people in order to start learning who I was.

I was not able to start seeing myself as separate in a healthy way (I had always felt that I was separate in an unhealthy way – shameful and unworthy) until I started to see that I had been powerless over the behavior patterns I learned in childhood.  Since my behavior patterns, my behavioral and emotional defense systems, had developed in reaction to the feeling that there was something wrong with me, I had to learn to start taking power away from the toxic shame that is at the core of this disease.  Toxic shame involves thinking that there is something wrong with who we are.  Guilt – in my definition – involves behavior, while shame is about our being.  Guilt is:  I did something wrong;  I made a mistake.  Shame is:  I am a mistake;  something is wrong with me.

“On an emotional level the dance of Recovery is owning and honoring the emotional wounds so that we can release the grief energy – the pain, rage, terror, and shame that is driving us.

That shame is toxic and is not ours – it never was!  We did nothing to be ashamed of – we were just little kids.  Just as our parents were little kids when they were wounded and shamed, and their parents before them, etc., etc.  This is shame about being human that has been passed down from generation to generation.

There is no blame here, there are no bad guys, only wounded souls and broken hearts and scrambled minds.”

In order to stop giving the toxic shame so much power, I had to learn to detach from my own reactive process enough to start being able to see a boundary between being and behavior.  I had to stop judging myself and other people based on behavior.  I started to learn how to observe behavior without making judgments about myself and others. There is a huge difference between judgment in my definition and observation.  It is vital for me to observe other people’s behavior in order to protect myself.  That does not mean I need to make a value judgment about their being based upon their behavior.

Judgment is saying, “that person is a jerk.”  Observation is saying, “that person seems to be really full of anger and it would be better for me to not be involved with them.”

“[When I use the term “judge,” I am talking about making judgments about our own or other people’s being based on behavior.  In other words, I did something bad therefore I am a bad person; I made a mistake therefore I am a mistake.  That is what toxic shame is all about:  feeling that something is wrong with our being, that we are somehow defective because we have human drives, human weaknesses, human imperfections.

There may be behavior in which we have engaged that we feel ashamed of but that does not make us shameful beings   We may need to make judgments about whether our behavior is healthy and appropriate but that does not mean that we have to judge our essential self, our being, because of the behavior.  Our behavior has been dictated by our disease, by our childhood wounds; it does not mean that we are bad or defective as beings.  It means that we are human, it means that we are wounded.

It is important to start setting a boundary between being and behavior.  All humans have equal Divine value as beings – no matter what our behavior.  Our behavior is learned (and/or reactive to physical or physiological conditions).  Behavior, and the attitudes that dictate behavior, are adopted defenses designed to allow us to survive in the Spiritually hostile, emotionally repressive, dysfunctional environments into which we were born.]”

Formula for emotionally honest communication

So, it is very important for us to learn to communicate about how another person’s behavior is affecting us – without making blaming “you” type of statements.  There is a simple formula to help us do this.  It is:

When you . . . . .

I feel . . . . .

I want . . . .

Since I am powerless over you, I will take this action to protect myself if you behave in this way.

The fourth part of this formula is setting the boundary.  I will get to that in a moment.  The first three parts of the formula are a very important part of taking responsibility for our self – an important step in learning to define ourselves as separate in a healthy way.

When you . . . . .

The “When you . . .” statement is a description of behavior.  It is very important actually describe the behavior.  To say to another person: when you get angry;  when you shame me; or such statements – is too general, not specific enough.  These types of general statements do not really describe the behavior – they are our interpretations of the behavior.  A major facet of codependence is assuming, interpreting, mind reading, and fortune telling – due to our childhood conditioning. We think we know the intentions and motives of others.  We assume that they are conscious of their behavior and will know what we are talking about.

It is vital to realize that we do not know how to communicate in a direct and honest manner.  We need to stop interpreting and start communicating.  It is important to describe the behavior rather than our interpretation and assumptions about what the behavior means.

“When your face gets red and your voice gets louder and your hands clench into fists” – is specific and descriptive.  It does not assume – rather it describes the behavior that appears to us to indicate anger.

“When you look at me with a frown on your face and your eye brows slightly raised and give a loud sigh” – is a description of behavior that causes us to react with guilt and shame.  Usually the other people have no idea of what their behavior looks like.  Our parents tried to control our behavior with fear, guilt, and shame because that is how their parents tried to control their behavior in childhood.  We react in the ways we do because of the emotional buttons, the triggers, that our parents behavior toward us installed in our programming.

Usually, when we first confront such behavior in a healthy way, the other people will profess innocence and ignorance of what we are talking about.  But, by describing the behavior, we will be planting seeds of consciousness in them that may eventually cause them to get more conscious of the sound of their own voice, or their sighs.  Describing behavior is an important step towards making it possible for the other people to get past their toxic shame so that they can start seeing a boundary between being and behavior.

We of course, are powerless over them – over whether they get it, understand what we are doing.  But in learning to communicate in a healthy way, without blame and shame, we are maximizing the possibility of communication.

I feel . . . . .

This is the part of the formula where we start learning to express our emotions in a healthy and honest way.  This is a vital part of the process of owning our emotions.  Anyone who is fairly new to this process, and isn’t sure what I mean by owning the feelings, would probably benefit from reading two short articles about emotions and emotional defenses.  Those articles: The Journey to the Emotional Frontier Within and Further Journeys to the Emotional Frontier Within can be accessed right now by clicking on the link for the first one and then following the link to the second one.  (The article will appear in a new browser window, so that after reading the articles you can collapse the new window and return to this article.)

It is best to use primary feeling words (described in the articles above) when expressing the “I feel . . . .” part of this formula – but it is also OK to use words that describe the messages we feel are inherent in their behaviors.

When your voice gets louder and your face gets red and you clench your fists,

I feel scared, intimidated, unsafe.  I feel like you are going to hit me.

When I try to talk to you while you are watching television and I have to say your name 3 or 4 times before you respond,

I feel angry, hurt, discounted, unimportant, insignificant, invisible, like I am being punished.  It feels like you do not want to communicate with me.

It is important to state our feelings out loud, and to precede the feeling with “I feel.”  (When we say “I am angry, I’m hurt, etc.” we are stating that the feeling is who we are.  Emotions do not define us, they are a form of internal communication that help us to understand ourselves.  They are a vital part of our being – as a component of the whole.)  This is owning the feeling.  It is important to do for ourselves.  By stating the feeling out loud we are affirming that we have a right to feelings.  We are affirming it to ourselves – and taking responsibility for owning ourselves and our reality.  Rather the other person can hear us and understand is not as important as hearing ourselves and understanding that we have a right to our feelings.  It is vitally important to own our own voice.  To own our right to speak up for ourselves.

As we get farther along in the process, and start to get more aware of our inner child wounds, we can start being more discerning in our communications techniques.  For instance, if one was hit as a child, then a raised voice is a trigger to the child’s fear of being hit.  For the little child it was life threatening when a giant adult raged.  In your adult relationship, you may feel very confident that your significant other (or boss or whatever) would not hit you – but when we are triggered, we react out of the emotional wounds of the child, out of the child’s emotional reality.

So then you might say something like:

When your voice gets louder and your face gets red and you clench your fists . . .

I feel scared and hurt.  I react out of the 5 year old in me who got hit when my father raged.  I react to a loud voice by feeling like I am going to be hit.

(Often someone that comes from a loud expressive family will get involved with someone that comes from an very emotionally repressive family.  Then the first person will not think anything of being loud – while the second will be very upset by loudness.  The only way to work through the programming from our childhood is to be able to communicate with each other so that we can start becoming conscious of our behaviors and how they affect others.)

I want . . . .

I want is pretty self explanatory.  But again it is important not to be too general.  Saying something like: “I want to know I am important to you.  I want to know you love me.” is not specific enough.  Describe the kind of behaviors that would give you the message that you want from the other person.

“I want you to answer me when I talk to you.  I want you to tell me you love me – and show me with funny little gifts and cards and making plans on your own for a special date for just the two of us.  I want you to ask me how my day went and really listen to my answer.”  etc.

Setting Boundaries

The purpose of setting boundaries is to take care of our self.  Being forced to learn how to set boundaries is a vital part of learning to own our self, of learning to respect ourselves, of learning to love ourselves.  If we never have to set a boundary, then we will never get in touch with who we really are – will never escape the enmeshment of codependence and learn to define ourselves as separate in a healthy way.

When I first encountered the concept of boundaries, I thought of them as lines that I would draw in the sand – and if you stepped across them I would shoot you (figuratively speaking.)  (I had this image of some place like the Alamo – from a movie I guess – where a sword was used to draw a line in the sand, and then those that were going to stay and fight to the death stepped across it.)  I thought that boundaries had to be rigid and final and somehow kind of fatal.

Some boundaries are rigid – and need to be.  Boundaries such as: “It is not OK to hit me, ever.”  “It is not acceptable to call me certain names.”  “It is not acceptable to cheat on me.”

No one deserves to be treated abusively.  No one deserves to be lied to and betrayed.

We all deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.  If we do not respect ourselves, if we do not start awakening to our right to be treated with respect and dignity (and our responsibility in creating that in our lives) – then we will be more comfortable being involved with people who abuse us then with people who treat us in loving ways.  Often if we do not respect ourselves, we will end up exhibiting abusive behavior towards people who do not abuse us.  On some level in our codependence, we are more comfortable with being abused (because it is what we have always known) than being treated in a loving way.

Learning to set boundaries is vital to learning to love our self, and to communicating to other’s that we have worth.

There are basically three parts to a boundary.  The first two are setting the boundary – the third is what we will do to defend that boundary.

If you – a description of the behavior we find unacceptable (again being as descriptive as possible.)

I will – a description of what action you will take to protect and take care of your self in the event the other person violates the boundary.

If you continue this behavior – a description of what steps you will take to protect the boundary that you have set.

One very drastic example (in the case of someone who is just learning about boundaries and has been physically abused in the past) would be:

If you ever hit me, I will call the police and press charges – and I will leave this relationship.  If you continue to threaten me, I will get a restraining order and prepare to defend myself in whatever manner is necessary.

It is not always necessary or appropriate to share the third part of this formula with the other person when setting a boundary – the first two steps are the actual setting of the boundary.  The third part is something we need to know for ourselves, so that we know what action we can take if the other person violates the boundary.  If we set a boundary and expect the other person to abide by it automatically – then we are setting ourselves up to be a victim of our expectation.

It is not enough to set boundaries – it is necessary to be willing to do whatever it takes to enforce them.  We need to be willing to go to any length, do whatever it takes to protect ourselves.  This is something that really upset me when I first started learning how to set boundaries.  It took great courage for me to build myself up to a point where I was willing to set a boundary.  I thought that the huge thing I had done to set a boundary should be enough.  Then to see that some people just ignored the boundaries I had set, seemed terribly unfair to me.

Consequences

It is very important to set consequences that we are willing to enforce.  If you are setting boundaries in a relationship, and you are not yet at a point where you are ready to leave the relationship – then don’t say that you will leave.  You can say that you will start considering all of your options including leaving – but do not state that you will do something that you are not ready yet to do.  To set boundaries and not enforce them just gives the other person an excuse to continue in the same old behavior.

If you verbally abuse me by calling me names like stupid or jerk, I will confront you about your behavior and share my feelings.

If you continue that behavior I will leave the room/house/ask you to leave.

If you keep repeating this behavior I will start considering all of my options, including leaving this relationship.

~

If you break your plans with me by not showing up or by calling me at the last minute to tell me that you had something else come up, I will confront your behavior and share my feelings.

If you repeat that behavior, I will consider it to mean that you do not value or deserve my friendship – and I will have no contact with you for a month.

Since behavior patterns are quite ingrained in all of us, it is important to allow the other person some wiggle room to make a change in behavior – unless the behavior is really intolerable.  To go from one extreme to the other is a reaction to a reaction – and is codependent.  There are choices in between which are sometimes hard for us to see if we are reacting.  To go from tolerating verbally abusive behavior to leaving a relationship in one step is swinging between extremes.  It is helpful to set boundaries that allow for some gradual change.

When I ask you what is wrong and you say “Never mind,” and then slam cabinet doors and rattle pots and pans and generally seem to be silently raging about something,

I feel angry, frustrated, irritated, hopeless, as if you are unwilling to communicate with me, as if I am supposed to read your mind.

I want you to communicate with me and help me to understand if I have done something that upsets you.

If something is bothering you and you will not tell me what it is, I will confront you about your behavior and share my feelings.

If you continue that behavior, I will confront your behavior, share my feelings, and insist that we go to counseling together.

If you keep repeating this behavior I will start considering all of my options, including leaving this relationship.

The consequences we set down for behavior we find unacceptable should be realistic – in that, the change that we are asking for is something that is within the others power (rather they are willing to take that responsibility is another thing altogether) – and enforceable, something that we are willing to do.

It is also important to set consequences that impact the other person more than us.  Often when people are first learning how to set boundaries, they do not think it through far enough.  They set boundaries that impact themselves as much or more than the other person.  For example, a single parent with a teenager who needs to get consequences for coming home late, or bad grades, or whatever, may be tempted to say something like “If you miss your curfew again, you will be grounded for a month.”  The reality of grounding a teenager for a month is that it often means the parent is also grounded for a month.  If taking away driving privileges means then you will have to drive them to school – maybe you want to choose some other consequence

Choices

Setting a boundary is not making a threat – it is communicating clearly what the consequences will be if the other person continues to treat us in an unacceptable manner.  It is a consequence of the other persons behavior.

Setting a boundary is not an attempt to control the other person (although some of the people who you set boundaries with will certainly accuse you of that – just as some will interpret it as a threat) – it is a part of the process of defining ourselves and what is acceptable to us.  It is a major step in taking what control we can of how we allow others to treat us.  It is a vital step in taking responsibility for our self and our life.

Setting boundaries is not a more sophisticated way of manipulation – although some people will say they are setting boundaries, when in fact they are attempting to manipulate.  The difference between setting a boundary in a healthy way and manipulating is:  when we set a boundary we let go of the outcome.

We want the other person to change their behavior.  We hope they will.  But we need to own all of our choices in order to empower ourselves to take responsibility for our lives and stop setting ourselves up to be a victim.  One of our choices is to remove ourselves from relationship with the person.  We can leave a marriage.  We can end a friendship.  We can leave a job.  We do not have to have any contact with our family of origin.  It is vitally important to own all of our choices.

If we do not own that we have a choice to leave an abusive relationship – then we are not making a choice to stay in the relationship.  Any time we do not own our choices, we are empowering victimization.  We will then blame the other person, and/or blame ourselves.  It is a vital part of the process of learning to love ourselves, and taking responsibility for being a co-creator in our life, to own all of our choices.

It is essential to own that we have choices in order to escape the codependent suffering victim martyr role – or the other extreme, which is being abusive in order to try to make others do it “right” (that is, do what we want them to.)  Both, the people who appear to be victims and the people that appear to be abusers, are coming from a victim place in terms of blaming others for their behavior.  “I wouldn’t have to hit you if you didn’t talk to me that way” is a victim statement.  Both victim and perpetrator are coming from a victim perspective, blaming their behaviors on others – or on themselves, “I can’t help it, that is just how I am.”

“When we look outside for self-definition and self-worth, we are giving power away and setting ourselves up to be victims. We are trained to be victims. We are taught to give our power away.

As just one small example of how pervasively we are trained to be victims, consider how often you have said, or heard someone say, “I have to go to work tomorrow.” When we say “I have to” we are making a victim statement. To say, “I have to get up, and I have to go to work,” is a lie. No one forces an adult to get up and go to work. The Truth is “I choose to get up and I choose to go to work today, because I choose to not have the consequences of not working.” To say, “I choose,” is not only the Truth, it is empowering and acknowledges an act of self-Love. When we “have to” do something we feel like a victim. And because we feel victimized, we will then be angry, and want to punish, whomever we see as forcing us to do something we do not want to do such as our family, or our boss, or society.”

“And we always have a choice. If someone sticks a gun in my face and says, “Your money or your life!” I have a choice. I may not like my choice but I have one. In life we often don’t like our choices because we don’t know what the outcome is going to be and we are terrified of doing it ‘wrong.’

Even with life events that occur in a way that we seemingly don’t have a choice over (being laid off work, the car breaking down, a flood, etc.) we still have a choice over how we respond to those events. We can choose to see things that feel like, and seem to be, tragic as opportunities for growth. We can choose to focus on the half of the glass that is full and be grateful for it or to focus on the half that is empty and be the victim of it. We have a choice about where we focus our minds.

In order to become empowered, to become the co-creator in our lives, and to stop giving power to the belief that we are the victim, it is absolutely necessary to own that we have choices. As in the quotation above: if we believe that we “have” to do something then we are buying into the belief that we are the victim and don’t have the power to make choices. To say “I have to go to work” is a lie. “I have to go to work if I want to eat” may be the truth but then you are making a choice to eat. The more conscious we get about our choices, the more empowered we become.

We need to take the “have to”s out of our vocabulary. As long as we reacting to life unconsciously we do not have choices. In consciousness we always have a choice. We do not “have to” do anything.

Until we own that we have a choice, we haven’t made one. In other words, if you do not believe that you have a choice to leave your job, or relationship, then you have not made a choice to stay in it. You can only Truly commit yourself to something if you are consciously choosing to do it.  This includes the area that is probably the single hardest job in our society today, the area that it is almost impossible not to feel trapped in some of the time – being a single parent.  A single parent has the choice of giving their children up for adoption, or abandoning them.  That is a choice!  If a single parent believes that he/she has no choice, then they will feel trapped and resentful and will end up taking it out on their children!” – Empowerment and Victimization – the power of choice

We always have a choice.  The choices may seem to be awful – but in reality, allowing ourselves to buy into the illusion that we are trapped will have worse consequences in the long run.  It may seem ridiculous to suggest that a parent can abandon or give a child up for adoption – but owning our choices no matter how outrageous is a step in owning responsibility for being co-creators in our life.  If we are blaming and being the victim we will never be happy.

(And this is a good example of when sharing the 3rd part of this formula is not appropriate.  It would be abusive to threaten a child with being put up for adoption.  This is a choice that we need to own to escape feeling trapped in our relationship with ourselves – it is strictly an internal thing.  With children it is vital to not project our own internal struggle onto the child – it doesn’t have anything to do with the child, it is all about our relationship with self.)

Negotiation

We set a boundary to define our territory, to protect our space – physical, emotional, mental, sexual, spiritual, financial, etc.  We set the boundary because it is what we need to do for our self, to protect and take care of our self.  We set it knowing that the other person may not be able or willing to change their behavior – and that we are prepared to take whatever action we need to take if that proves to be the case.  That action may include cutting that person out of our life completely.

I was scared of setting boundaries because the little boy in me was afraid of:  hurting other people;  having other people be angry at me;  being abandoned;  losing the relationship.  Ultimately, it came down to: people will go away if I say no or set a boundary with them.

I had to become willing to take that risk.  I had to decide that I had enough worth to stand up for myself even if people did go away.  And some people did go away.  Some people do still when I set a boundary.  But I was also amazed to see that some of the people that I set a boundary with started to treat me with more respect.  They were able to hear me and valued me enough to change their behavior.

By becoming willing to take the risk of setting boundaries, I got the wonderful gift of getting what I wanted – some of the time.  I had to let go of the outcome and learn to accept the situation however it unfolded.  I had to let go of a lot of people that I had considered friends.  I came to the realization that the people I had been calling friends, were not really friends at all – because as long as I did not know how to be a friend to myself, I could not truly recognize friendship in others.  As long as I was unconsciously reacting out of my old programming, the people I was attracted to were people who would abuse me, shame me, abandon and betray me.

I came to the realization that anyone who is a friend is someone I can communicate with – and be able to negotiate boundaries with.  The vast majority of boundaries are in fact a negotiation rather than a rigid line in the sand.  Adults need to negotiate boundaries between themselves.  This is very true in romantic relationships – and is the standard for all relationships.

What we are striving for is healthy interdependent relationships.  We want friends who are allies.  With alliances it is necessary to negotiate boundaries.  Here is what I am willing to do, and here is what I need from you.  We want a romantic relationship with a partner who will share our journey with us.  In order to make that possible it is necessary to communicate, share feelings, and negotiate agreements about behavior.  By setting boundaries, we are communicating with another person.  We are telling them who we are and what we need.  It is much more effective to do that directly and honestly than to expect them to read our minds – and then punish them when they cannot.

Often it is little things that seem inconsequential that it is most important to set boundaries about.  Irritating little habits or mannerism of another person.  The irritating little things will grow into huge monsters unless we learn to communicate and negotiate.  When we stuff our feelings we build up resentments.  Resentments are victim feelings – the feeling that somebody is doing something to us.  If we don’t speak up and take the risk of sharing how we feel, we will end up blowing up and/or being passive aggressive – and damaging the relationship.

Learning to set boundaries is a vital part of learning to communicate in a direct and honest manner.  It is impossible to have a healthy relationship with someone who has no boundaries, with someone who cannot communicate directly, and honestly.  Learning how to set boundaries is a necessary step in learning to be a friend to ourselves.  It is our responsibility to take care of ourselves – to protect ourselves when it is necessary.  It is impossible to learn to be Loving to ourselves without owning our self – and owning our rights and responsibilities as co-creators of our lives.

The is the third in a series of 5 articles focused on emotional honesty and emotional responsibility on Robert’s website.  The first in the series was: Emotional Honesty and Emotional Responsibility.

Joy2MeU.com includes over 200 pages of free original content on codependency recovery, inner child healing, relationship dynamics, alcoholism/addiction, fear of intimacy, Twelve Step Spirituality, New Age Metaphysics, emotional abuse, setting boundaries, grief process, and much more. Here is the site index page of his site. He also has a mobile friendly site focused on his work:  http://recoverycodependence.com/

The approach to the inner child healing that he talks about on his web site is one he pioneered – and is not widely known yet.  The formula – which includes learning to set the internal boundaries –  is something that he teaches people how to do through telephone counseling  and periodic Day long Intensive Training workshops in San Diego.

““If we are reacting out of what our emotional truth was when we were five or nine or fourteen, then we are not capable of responding appropriately to what is happening in the moment; we are not being in the now.

When we are reacting out of old tapes based on attitudes and beliefs that are false or distorted, then our feelings cannot be trusted.

When we are reacting out of our childhood emotional wounds, then what we are feeling may have very little to do with the situation we are in or with the people with whom we are dealing in the moment.” – quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

The single most important component in a healthy relationship is the ability to communicate.  If two people have the capacity to communicate with each other, then any issue can be worked through to some kind of clarity.

For the purpose of this discussion I am going to divide communication into two levels: surface communication having to do with ideas, facts, details, concepts, etc. – and emotional communication.  In reality, of course, all communication contains aspects of both levels – and in relationship, the emotional level is by far the most important and most difficult.

In terms of surface communication, it is very important to establish a common language.  And I am not talking here about one person speaking English and one speaking French.  I am talking about two people who speak the same language linguistically but have different interpretations of various words due to a variety of factors – i.e. raised in different geographic, religious, or cultural environments, different educational or economic levels, different life experiences, etc.  Two people who are on Spiritual paths might speak a different language because one has been involved in Twelve Step Recovery while another has been pursuing a Shamanistic path or Buddhist or whatever.

It is very important, right from the beginning of the relationship to strive for clarity in communication.  The single most useful tool is simply to ask.  “How do you define that word?” or “What did you just hear me say?”  Very often, you will find that what the other person heard was not what you were attempting to convey.  Attempting to clarify and develop a common language lays a good foundation for further communication.

It is also vital to recognize that certain words are emotional trigger words.

“One of the greatest blocks to communication is that some words are emotionally charged.  They are words that trigger an automatic emotional reaction within us.  To use a trigger word in an argument – a word such as “controlling” or “manipulative” – can turn a discussion into a battle instantly.  When someone flings a trigger word at us, or we at them, it is like we have just shot an arrow into them.  It usually causes them to go on the defensive and start flinging some arrows back at us – or perhaps go into some other defensive mode, such as crying or walking out.

Using trigger words blocks communication.  And we usually use them consciously (although we certainly may not be honest enough to admit it at the time – or even later, depending on the level of our recovery.)  We use them in reaction – because we have been hurt or are scared, because we are trying manipulate and control the other person.  (Using a word like “manipulate” or “control” to describe someone else’s behavior to them, is almost always an attempt to control and manipulate the person we are accusing of that behavior.)

For the purposes of this discussion, what is important is to realize that trigger words fall into realm of cause and effect.  We are born with a certain personality – we are not born with certain words programmed as emotional triggers.  Emotional triggers fall entirely in the province of experience.  We have an emotional charge attached to certain words because of our life experience.  In other words, we have a relationship to that word that is a result of emotional experiences in our life.” – Spirituality for Agnostics and Atheists 

It is really important to identify what each person’s emotional trigger words are in order to be able to communicate – in order to avoid automatic reactions based upon the past.  Old wounds and old tapes cause us to have emotional trigger words and it is vitally important to get conscious of what our own personal ones are so that we can learn to be less reactive – and to get in touch with what our partner’s trigger words are so that we can avoid them when possible.  (i.e. In my early recovery I worked to stop calling myself “stupid” so much and changed it to “silly” because that felt gentler to me.  For my wife however “silly” is a trigger word that feels worse to her than being called stupid.)

In terms of the emotional level of communication, there are many aspects to consider.  I will touch on a symptomatic one here in this article and then expand on the challenges of emotional intimacy in the next Chapter (Chapter 11 – Emotional Honesty Necessary.)

The symptomatic one is something that may seem simple but is actually one that relatively few people in our dysfunctional culture have mastered – the ability to listen.  In order to Truly listen it is necessary to be present – and the difficulty with being present is caused by unhealed emotional wounds.  If we are not able to be emotionally honest with ourselves then it is impossible to be present and comfortable in our own skins in the moment.  Obviously then, we are also incapable of being present with, and emotionally honest with, others.

Listening is far more than just the absence of talking or the appearance of paying attention.  Listening involves more than just hearing the words that another person is saying.  In order to Truly hear what another person is attempting to communicate, it is necessary to be tuned in to what is going on underneath the words.  Communication is only partly about content – just as important in communication are things like body language, eye contact, underlying emotional currents.

When we are present in our bodies in the moment and paying attention it is easy to discern if the other person is really talking to us – as opposed to talking at us, or telling a story.  In the beginning of any relationship, people tell each other stories about their past – it is part of getting to know each other.  What is important is to be able to be present while telling the story.  That involves not just  listening to the other person but also listening to ourselves.

Being present starts with being conscious of ourselves – it involves listening and paying attention to ourselves and our end of the communication.   If I am listening to myself while telling someone a story about my past, I can catch myself when I get to a part of the story that I have creatively embellished over the years.  As we learn and grow, our perspective of our past changes and it is very important to be able to listen to ourselves so that we can catch ourselves in places where we have exaggerated or rationalized something from our past.  One of the important parts of the healing process is telling our story – and if we just regurgitate an old tape by rote we are not being present and paying attention.

If we have the capacity to be present with ourselves while telling our story, that means we also have the capacity to be present with the other person.  I can be in the middle of telling a story and see in the other person’s eyes that they aren’t listening – which gives me the space to stop and ask what is going on.  If I am not present enough to see the other person isn’t listening then I am just talking at that person.  And conversely, if I am conscious I will be able to recognize when that person is talking at me.

Communication involves being able to talk to and listen to – the ability to be present in our bodies in the moment.” –  Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth Chapter 10 – Communication is Key

If you live in Southern California and want to learn how to do relationships in a healthier way it would be really helpful for you to come to my Intensive Training Day workshop.   If you are alone this Valentine’s Day, this workshop can help you understand your patterns and fear of intimacy so that you can make better choices the next time you venture into the Romantic Arena. If you are in a relationship and find your self having problems with communicating and reactions – then it would be very helpful for you to come to my workshop together.  I have posted a page withspecial offers for my February 15th workshop.

If you don’t live in this area, there is a MP3 recording of my workshop that you can download.

I have special offers for Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth on this page. (which includes offers for my other books also.)

When you purchase Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth  Codependent Dysfunctional Relationship Dynamics & Healthy Relationship Behavior through Joy2MeU you get a personally autographed copy;-) but you can also purchase through Amazon.com and Amazon.UK.

The Greatest Arena is also available as two ebooks (each only$9.95) eBook 1: Codependent Dysfunctional Relationship Dynamics & Healthy Relationship Behavior (the first 20 chapters of The Greatest Arena) is available on Amazon  and on Amazon UK.

Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth eBook 2: Deeper Within (emotionally) & Further Out (metaphysically) From Fear of Intimacy to Twin Souls (chapters 21 through 40 of The Greatest Arena) is available on Amazon and Amazon UK.

Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth eBook 1: Codependent Dysfunctional Relationship Dynamics & Healthy Relationship Behavior now also available as an audio book.

 ““We need to become clear internally on what messages are coming from the disease, from the old tapes, and which ones are coming from the True Self – what some people call “the small quiet voice.”

   We need to turn down the volume on those loud, yammering voices that shame and judge us and turn up the volume on the quiet Loving voice.  As long as we are judging and shaming ourselves we are feeding back into the disease, we are feeding the dragon within that is eating the life out of us.  Codependence is a disease that feeds on itself – it is self-perpetuating.

    This healing is a long gradual process – the goal is progress, not perfection.  What we are learning about is unconditional Love.  Unconditional Love means no judgment, no shame.” – quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

    The holidays were always a very hard time for me emotionally.  Being alone on Christmas and New Years Eve was very painful.  So painful that sometimes I would arrange to be with someone or with a group of people just so I wouldn’t be alone.  That often was more painful than being alone.  And on those occasions when I was in a relationship during the holidays it was also painful because there was something missing, somehow I was failing the other person or she was failing me because even though there were moments of Joy and Love, it never felt quite like it “should” feel.

    After I had been in recovery a few years – in the course of trying to figure out how I set myself up to be a victim with my expectations – I had a very important insight about holidays.  I realized that holidays – not just Christmas and New Years Eve but Thanksgiving, Valentines Day, etc. – along with days like anniversaries and my birthday were the times which I judged myself the most.  My expectations of what a holiday “should” be, of where I “should” be at a certain age, of how my life “should” look at this particular time, were causing me to unmercifully beat myself up.  I was buying into the disease voice which was telling me that I was a loser and a failure (or going to the other extreme and blaming someone else for my feelings.)  I was giving power to the toxic shame that told me that I was unworthy and unlovable.

    I realized that I was judging myself against standards that weren’t real, against expectations that were a fantasy, a fairy tale.  The fairy tale that everyone should be happy and cheerful during the Christmas holidays is ridiculous just like the myth of happily-ever-after is a false belief that doesn’t apply to this level of existence.  The holidays are just like every other day of the year only magnified.  That means there will be moments of happiness and Joy but there will also be moments of sadness and hurt.

    Christmas is about Love and birth – rebirth.  The Winter Solstice is the time of the longest darkness and marks the point of increasing light, the new beginning.  Hanukkah is a celebration of, and time of, rededication.  Kwanzaa is a time of recommitment.  These are all times of both celebration and introspection.  Of assessing the past and focusing on what we want to create in the future (New Years resolutions.)  Any new beginning, any birth or rebirth is a also an ending.  With every ending there is sadness, feelings of loss and grief.  Loss because of Loved ones who are no longer in our life, grief because Loved ones who are still in our life cannot see us or understand us, sadness because of things that ended and people we have had to let go of during the past year.

    What is so important, what has changed my experience of these Holidays completely is allowing myself to accept the reality of my life (looking at both the half of the glass that is full as well as the empty part) and be wherever I need to be emotionally – that is, allowing myself to be emotionally honest with myself.  That does not mean that I have to be emotionally honest with other people.  If I am feeling grief because I am alone on the Holiday it does not serve me to share that with someone who is not being emotionally honest – someone who will shame me for not being cheerful.  If I am feeling hurt or scared or angry I will only share that with someone who is a safe person to share with emotionally – that is, they won’t discount and invalidate my feelings or try to fix me.

    I don’t have to live up to some false expectations about how I “should” be feeling today.  It was trying to deny the pain and sadness, the anger and fear, while judging myself as shameful for not feeling what I “should” feel or being who I “should” be, that caused me to get depressed and suicidal.  When I am in my feeling process I actually am a lot happier and feel more Joy than I ever did before I learned how to be emotionally honest.  It was on Christmas about 25 years ago that I got real clear that I could feel more than one feeling at once.  I was sad that it was Christmas and I was alone, and I was grieving for all of the Christmases that I had been sad and alone – which were very valid and legitimate feelings.  But as I went around to various clubhouses and friend’s homes that were having open houses, I could feel happy to see people I cared about.  I could feel Joy and gratitude that I was in recovery and feeling my feelings at the same time I was owning the sadness of that day and the grief of all the lonely holidays that I had experienced.

    It is so very important to stop judging ourselves against someone else’s standards and shaming ourselves due to a fantasy of where we “should be.”  We are exactly where we are supposed to be. We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.  We are perfect in our Spiritual Essence, we are perfectly where we are supposed to be on our Spiritual path and from a human perspective we will never do human perfectly.

    A natural normal part of our human experience is feeling the feelings – we need to accept that.  No one who is being emotionally honest with themselves can go through the holidays without feeling sadness and hurt, anger and fear.  The good news is that the more we are able to own those emotions the more moments of peace, Joy, and happiness we can have.

    So, have a happy, merry, sad, Joyous, painful, peaceful, scary, cheerful in the moment Holiday season experiencing what it feels like to be alive in human body.  Whatever your celebration: Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa, New Years, etc. let it be about the new beginning; the rededication to: the recommitment to: the rebirth of; life.  But most of all, let it be about Love by first of all Loving yourself enough to tell the critical parent voice in your head to shut up with all the comparisons and shame and judgment.”

 

Special Holiday Offers – Give the gift of recovery this year by giving some people you care about a personally autographed copy of Robert’s Joyously Inspirational Book.  3 copies of Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls for the bargain price of $12 each plus shipping – save almost $18.00 off of retail price.  There are also special offers for other produces and services offered by Robert Burney on that page.

The formula that Robert pioneered for inner healing – which includes learning to set the internal boundaries –  is something that he teaches people how to do through telephone counseling http://Joy2MeU.com/PhoneCounseling.htm – here are special offers on telephone counseling that can change your life for the better in 2015.

He also teaches the formula he discovered through Day long Intensive Training workshops in San Diego.

“He discovered and developed a powerful, life changing formula for integrating Love, Spiritual Truth, and intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior into one’s emotional experience of life – a blueprint for individuals to transform their core relationship with self and life.

This blueprint can be invaluable to people just starting the recovery / healing process, and is often the missing piece that people who have been healing /  recovering for decades have been seeking.  What is unique about the approach is that all of the tools are brought together in a focused system for achieving integration and balance – and even someone who has a very good therapist right now, can still find it very beneficial to attend this workshop.”

There is now a downloadable mp3 recording available of my Life Changing workshop – and special offers for both the MP3 Download of Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls (recorded by Robert) and the recording of the Intensive Training Workshop are available on this page.

There is a special offer for the next Workshop on January 4th 2015.

 

I am profoundly, deeply, everlastingly grateful for the gift of the 12 steps.  The process of learning to apply the Spiritual Principles in my life has changed my life from an unendurable hell to an adventure that is exciting and enJoyable most of the time.  The twelve steps work.  That is the bottom line.  They work to help a person transform their experience of life into something better.  They work to help a person learn to develop a relationship with life and self that allows room for inner peace, happiness, and Joy.  The twelve step process works to help a person open up to Love.

As I explain in my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls, planetary conditions caused human beings to develop a relationship with being human that was reversed to Love and Truth.  The reason this human experience is so screwed up is because humans have been doing life backwards – looking outside for Truth and Love, for validation, meaning, and purpose.  Outer dependence is dysfunctional.  It is the reason we do not know how to love our neighbors as our self – because we do not know how to Love our self.  It is the reason we have war and poverty, pollution and child abuse, rape and bigotry.  This world would be a much nicer place if everyone was working a twelve step program.

The good news is that there has been a major change in those planetary conditions, and a new age – an Age of Healing and Joy – has dawned in human consciousness.  The human condition is changing.  We have entered a new time in human evolution – a time in which we are learning to manifest Love into the world by learning to access Love for self.  The twelve step process has played a major role in the Spiritual Revolution that is taking place on this planet.  The mystical gift of the twelve steps greatly accelerated the process of bringing the planetary energy field to critical mass so that this change could take place. In this series of articles I am sharing my perspective of the twelve steps.

“I believe that in a hundred years historians will look back and pinpoint this milestone as the single most important event in the twentieth century.  This milestone was the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron, Ohio, in June of 1935.

Besides the invaluable gift of sobriety that AA has given to millions of Alcoholics, it also started a revolution in Spiritual consciousness.

The dramatic success and expansion of AA facilitated the spread of a radically revolutionary idea which has traditionally, in Western Civilization, been considered heresy.  This was not a new idea but rather a reintroduction and clarification of an old idea, coupled with a formula for practical application of the concept into day-to-day human life experience.

This revolutionary idea was that an unconditionally Loving Higher Power exists with whom the individual being can personally communicate.  A Higher Power that is so powerful that it has no need to judge the humans it created because this Universal Force is powerful enough to ensure that everything unfolds perfectly from a Cosmic Perspective.

This reintroduction of the revolutionary concept of an accessible Loving God has been clarified to specifically include the concept that the individual being can define this Universal Force according to his/her own understanding, and can develop a personal, intimate relationship with this Higher Power.

In other words, no one is needed as an intermediary between you and your creator.  No outside agency has the right to impose upon you its definition of God.

The spread of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the other Anonymous programs which sprang out of AA, is the widest and most effective dissemination of this radical revolutionary concept that has ever occurred in Western Civilization.

Mystics, gnostics, and certain “primitive” peoples have, throughout recorded human history, understood the Truth in this concept – but the “organized religions” of urban-based civilizations have persecuted, tortured, and crucified any messengers or groups of people who believed in a Loving, personal God or Goddess – because it threatened the power of those organized religions’ control over the masses and therefore their very existence.  This time the dissemination of the message has been effective because:  The time was right; the revolutionary concept was camouflaged as part of a successful treatment for a fatal, incurable disease; and it was accompanied by the Twelve Step Spiritual program.” – quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

Codependency: A Dance of Black and White Thinking and Toxic Shame

“One of the core characteristics of this disease of Codependence is intellectual polarization – black and white thinking.  Rigid extremes – good or bad, right or wrong, love it or leave it, one or ten.  Codependence does not allow any gray area – only black and white extremes.

Life is not black and white.  Life involves the interplay of black and white.  In other words, the gray area is where life takes place.  A big part of the healing process is learning the numbers two through nine – recognizing that life is not black and white.

Life is not some kind of test, that if we fail, we will be punished.  We are not human creatures who are being punished by an avenging god.  We are not trapped in some kind of tragic place out of which we have to earn our way by doing the “right” things.

We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.  We are here to learn.  We are here to go through this process that is life.  We are here to feel these feelings.”

There is an acronym in Twelve Step Recovery, that like many simple sayings, it full of Truth.  That acronym is HOW.   The letters stand for honesty, openness, and willingness.  It is vital to be willing to start looking at life and self from larger perspectives, willing to take the action necessary to align with healing.  To be open to changing our attitudes, to feeling our feelings.  And it is so vital to start being willing and open to getting more honest with ourselves.

“We were powerless out of ego-self to do anything any different than we did it.  We are powerless out of ego-self to heal this disease.  Through Spiritual Self, through our Spiritual Connection, we have access to all the power in the Universe.

We need to have the willingness: willingness to get to a new level of self-honesty; willingness to start listening to the Loving inner voice instead of the shaming ones; willingness to face the terror of healing the emotional wounds.”

Codependence is dishonest.  It is an emotional defense system adapted by humans to try to survive the pain of feeling unworthy and unlovable.  From a codependent perspective there are no choices – only two extremes, black and white.  Right or wrong.

Because as small children we did not have any perspective or discernment (prior to the age of reason, which occurs about 7 as our brains develop) we were incapable as viewing our parents as anything other than perfect Higher Powers.  Our God and Goddess.  Because our Higher Powers were wounded and did not know how to Love self, we were wounded and got the message that something must be wrong with us.  Toxic Shame.

“That shame is toxic and is not ours – it never was!  We did nothing to be ashamed of – we were just little kids.  Just as our parents were little kids when they were wounded and shamed, and their parents before them, etc., etc.  This is shame about being human that has been passed down from generation to generation.

There is no blame here, there are no bad guys, only wounded souls and broken hearts and scrambled minds.”

Out of our codependent relationship with life, there are only two extremes: blame them, or blame me.  Buy into the belief that they are to blame for what I am feeling – or I am to blame because I am a shameful unworthy being.   The emotional pain of feeling unlovable to our parents – which is a reflection of unbearable anguish of feeling separated from The Source – can feel like a bottomless pit of agonizing suffering.   At the core of our wounding is the unbearable emotional pain resulting from having internalized the message that God – our Source – does not Love us because we are personally defective and shameful.

Our addictions, compulsions, and obsessions;  our continuing quest to reach the destination, to find the fix;  our inability to be present in the now through worrying about the future or ruminating about the past;  are all tools that we used to avoid the emotional pain.  Our behavior patterns and dysfunctional relationships (of all kinds, with other people, with money, with our gender and sexuality) are symptoms.  Codependence is a defense system that was adapted by our damaged egos to try to avoid falling into the abyss of shame and pain within.

We formed our core relationship with self, other people, and life based upon this feeling of toxic shame.  Like the corruption at the foundation of Western Civilization, there is corruption in the foundation of our relationship with self.  Reflections.

In order to start changing our ego programming and healing our emotional wounds, it is necessary to start Loving ourselves.  We start Loving ourselves by opening up to the possibility that maybe we are Lovable.  We start Loving ourselves by using our will power to start changing our attitudes, beliefs, perspectives, and behaviors – in order to start changing our relationship with self, with our own emotions.

We are Co-Creators of our human experience, but for most of our lives we were allied with the disease – lived life out of the fear, lack, scarcity, separation programming of the damaged ego.  We were powerless to change our ego programming out of the false self, the ego self image, that was based upon the dishonesty inherent in black and white thinking.

Our paths unfolded perfectly to bring us to a point where some life event, or series of events, brought us to our knees, caused us to hit an emotional bottom that made us start being honest enough with ourselves to see that we needed some help.  When we started to seek help, we opened up to allowing the Universe to start guiding us with carrots instead of using the stick.  We opened up to becoming willing and honest enough to start learning the lessons we are here to learn instead of being trapped in repeating our patterns.

Recovery – aligning with Love instead of shame

The tool, the gift, that I discovered when I was willing to start asking for help was the Twelve Steps.  The Twelve Step Recovery program that was developed by Alcoholics Anonymous is a work of mystical Spirituality.  It is a formula for integrating Spiritual Truth into day to day human life.

“The Twelve Step Recovery process is so successful because it provides a formula for integrating different levels.  It is by recognizing that we are powerless to control our life experiences out of ego-self that we can access the power out of True Self, Spiritual Self.  By surrendering the illusion of ego control we can reconnect with our Higher Selves.  Selfishness out of ego-self is destroying the planet.  Selfishness out of Spiritual Self is what will save the planet.”

One of those principles – that really scared me when I first heard I had to develop it – was humility.  I equated humility with humiliation because of my toxic shame.

In Truth, humility really means to see clearly.  To see that as a human being the reality is that I am not perfect.  There are some areas I am strong in – that I have gifts, abilities, talents, skills – and some that I am weak in.  None of us human beings are perfect in our humanness – we are all perfect in our Spiritual essence.

One person will be talented in one area but weak in another.  Because we got the message in childhood that we were supposed to be perfect, that it was shameful to be ‘wrong’ – and we were taught to look outside and compare ourselves to determine our worth – we focused on our strengths as proof we were better than others.  Which also meant we needed to deny our weaknesses – or deny that the areas in which we were weak had any importance.  Humility is about owning both our strengths and our weaknesses – and realizing that all human beings have both strengths and weaknesses.

“Looking outside of ourselves for self-definition and self-worth means that we have to judge people in order to feel good about ourselves.  There is no other way to do it when you look outside.

We were taught to have ego-strength through judgment – better than, prettier than, smarter than, richer than, stronger than, etc., etc.

In a Codependent society everyone has to have someone to look down on in order to feel positive about him/herself.  This is the root of all bigotry, racism, sexism, and prejudice in the world.

True self-worth does not come from looking down on anyone or anything.  True self-worth comes from awakening to our connection to everyone and everything.

The Truth is that we are like snowflakes:  Each individual is unique and different and special and we are all made from the same thing.  We are all cut from the same cloth.  We are all part of the Eternal ONENESS that is the Great Spirit.

When we start looking within and celebrating the Truth of who we Truly are, then we can celebrate our unique differences instead of judging them out of fear.”

When I started to open up to the concept that there was a Higher Power who Loved me Unconditionally, then I could start getting past the shame to seeing the gray area.  Then I could start to stop reacting out of the black and white, fear based programming of my damaged ego.

When I started to be open to seeing myself more clearly, then I could start to see that I had more in common with other human beings than I had differences.  Then I could start to see that thinking I was better than someone else because of a gift is false pride.  A gift is just that – a gift.  Talent, intelligence, looks – those are gifts to be cherished and cultivated, not standards for feeling better than another human being.

Through working the twelve step program, I could start to understand that every cloud has a silver lining.  (I just flashed on my mother in childhood telling me that every curse is also a blessing – in regard to my emotional sensitivity I believe.  We do hear messages of Spiritual Truth from early on – it is applying them to our lives that we need some help figuring out how to do.)  A gift also carries obligations with it.  Though feeling pride about a gift was false – what I could take pride in was the action I took to cultivate that gift.   (Which of course I had not done in some cases because of the black and white thinking and toxic shame – I was afraid to take a risk because I was sure I would fail.  Another thing to realize I was powerless over and forgive myself for.)

Through starting to see myself more clearly – by stopping with the shame of self and judgment of others to protect myself from that shame – then I could more easily see that we were more alike than different.  Then I could start to be open to believing that maybe I had worth and deserved Love – and that you did also.

Feeling shameful and reacting to life from fear, caused me to focus on how I was different (and better, or worse) than you.  The more I could start to see that I am not perfect and that it is OK – the more I could access the acceptance to allow you to not be perfect.

That helped me to stop taking other peoples behavior so personally.  When I started understanding how I had been reacting – started seeing myself more clearly and accepting reality, I could also start seeing that what you were doing was not really about me, it was you reacting to your wounds.

The more clearly I saw myself within the framework of a Spiritual recovery process, the easier it became to see that I had not been seeing myself or you clearly – or life.

Working the steps, applying the principles in our lives

Twelve step recovery is a blessed gift.  Unfortunately not all twelve step groups are utilizing them to their full capacity.  In Alcoholics Anonymous for instance, there are many people who are stuck in a black and white perspective that causes them to keep focusing on the symptom of drinking for many years after they have gotten sober.  Of course, one of the reason they do this is because they are scared of doing the emotional healing and facing the toxic shame – so they get stuck in a rigid black and white perspective.

This disease / condition of codependency is so powerful and insidious because the programming is so ingrained and so much a part of the human condition.  The key to changing the conditions in the world is honesty and clarity.

The first three steps of the twelve step program basically involve: Step 1. getting honest enough to recognize that what we have been doing is not working;  Step 2.  getting willing to open up to some help from outside;  Step 3. asking for help.  The next step – the 4th – involves taking an honest inventory and starting to see ourselves with more clarity.  When we start getting more honest with ourselves, the 11th step tells us how to access the power to change our lives – through prayer and meditation.

In other words, life breaks us down enough to make us surrender – to make us start the process of stopping our ego programming from defining our life experience and dictating our relationships.  Then we develop a level of consciousness that allows us to look at the gray area.  We are then able to observe ourselves objectively enough to see that what we have been doing isn’t working for us – and can start to be open to the possibility that maybe we are not shameful beings, but we have been living life by some dysfunctional programming.  Once we start detaching from ego-self and developing a higher level of consciousness, we are directed back inward to seek the Truth.  Prayer and meditation not meaning, necessarily, formal practices but rather developing a conscious relationship, and ongoing communication, with our Spirit – with our intuitive guidance.

We start to align our consciousness with Spiritual Self so that we can use our will power to change the negative programming and stop the self abusive behaviors that we adapted to protect ourselves.  And as the 10th step dictates we need to keep taking a daily inventory – we need to be willing to stay open to messages from the Universe so that we can catch ourselves when we are being dishonest with ourselves.

Honesty with self is absolutely vital to recovery and healing – to raising our consciousness.  As we start to awaken to Spiritual Truth, we can start to peal away the layers of dishonesty that we have wrapped ourselves in out of our codependent defense system.  It is very painful to start getting honest with ourselves.  We feel ashamed as we start to see how dishonest we have been.

The Truth shall set you free – but it will be a very painful process.

It is vital to face the pain of taking inventory of how we have been dishonest.  What makes it possible to start to see ourselves, and our behavior patterns, more clearly is starting to believe that maybe we are not shameful.  Maybe we do have a disease – a compulsively reactive condition – that we have been powerless over.  Maybe there is a Loving Higher Power.

By starting to stop the dishonesty of believing that others are completely to blame, we can also stop empowering the lie that we are to blame because we are defective.  By stopping the blaming, we can start taking responsibility – owning our side of the street.

A very important part of the process of taking responsibility is making amends.   Cleaning up the wreckage of our past.  Even though we were powerless over our behaviors because of our ego programming, because of our codependency, we still have to take responsibility for the behaviors and their consequences.

The purpose of making amends to others is to heal our Spirit, to clear our conscience, to dump any baggage from the past that we are still carrying.  We do this for ourselves.  Often the other person doesn’t even remember an incident that we make amends for.  Sometimes the other person is hateful and bitter still.  We can still make amends for our side of the street, even if they are not owning their side of the street.  We are not making the amends so that we can all make up and be friends – although that is certainly possible sometimes – we are making them to free us from the past, we are doing them as a Loving thing to do for our self.  We do not have the power to get others to do what we want them to – so we need to focus on what we do have the power to change.  We can shine the Light of Love and consciousness into any dark corners within so that we can stop giving power to the past.

Making amends is about forgiveness.  Healing the wounds from the past is the Loving thing to do for ourselves.  Seeing more clearly so that we can own our responsibility in situations that we are still carrying resentments about, helps us to let go of those resentments.  Carrying a resentment doesn’t hurt the person we are resentful of – it hurts us.

I have found that the reason I had resentments that I couldn’t let go of, was because I hadn’t forgiven myself.  I was holding onto feelings of self righteous indignation about how I was victimized, because I couldn’t face the shame of admitting that I set myself up in some way.  By trusting that person, or letting them into my life, or whatever.

Making amends for the ways in which our behavior has hurt others is part of the process of healing self.  And making amends is much more than saying “I’m sorry.”  Making amends is about changing the dysfunctional behavior patterns.  Making amends is about doing what it takes to stop empowering the dysfunctional attitudes and black and white thinking so that we can change the behaviors.  It is about becoming willing to face the terror of healing our emotional wounds, so that we can stop reacting and hurting other people and our self with our behavior.

The steps help us to move into a growth paradigm – a relationship with life that helps us see problems as opportunities for growth instead of punishment.  Applying the twelve step principles in our life helps us stop taking other people’s behavior so personally – and learn to protect ourselves from their behavior if necessary.   As we forgive ourselves for our past behaviors, and learn to see life and self with more clarity and more Love – we see others with more clarity and more Love.

By taking power away from the polarized thinking and the emotional wounds from the past we can stop being our own worst enemy.

“Because of our broken hearts, our emotional wounds, and our scrambled minds, our subconscious programming, what the disease of Codependence causes us to do is abandon ourselves.  It causes the abandonment of self, the abandonment of our own inner child – and that inner child is the gateway to our channel to the Higher Self.

The one who betrayed us and abandoned and abused us the most was ourselves.  That is how the emotional defense system that is Codependence works.

The battle cry of Codependence is “I’ll show you – I’ll get me.””

We need to learn to see the gray area.  It is never just black and white, right and wrong.  There are always multiple levels involved in this experience of being human.  It is vital to stop empowering black and white thinking.

There is a simple prayer that sums up this process.  It is a formula for learning how to live life in a healthy way.  It, like the Twelve Step Recovery process, is a Divinely inspired work of Mystical Truth.  It is called the Serenity Prayer.

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 Serenity Prayer is generally thought to have been written by Reinhold Niebuhr)

God / Goddess / Great Spirit, please help me to access:

the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (life, other people),

The courage and willingness to change the things I can (me, my own attitudes and behaviors),

And the wisdom and clarity to know the difference.

(My personal adapted version of Serenity Prayer)

This link will take you to different interpretations of The Twelve Steps on a page of my site.

The last section of this article is a short excerpt about the Principles of Twelve Step Recovery along with my version of the of the first three steps from intellectual and emotional levels as I understand and apply them – originally published online in 1998.  At the bottom of the page is a disclaimer to let you know that Alcoholics Anonymous has not approved any deviation from their approach to the Twelve Steps and any reference I make to the steps is not meant to imply otherwise.

The Twelve Steps are a formula for integrating the Spiritual into the physical so that powerlessness can lead to True empowerment.

Twelve Step Principles & tools include:

Self-Honesty, willingness, Acceptance, letting go, surrender,

Faith, Trust, honesty, Humility, Patience, openness, Courage,

Responsibility, Action, Forgiveness, compassion, Love.

“When I became willing to surrender the old attitudes and beliefs, to surrender to feeling the feelings, to surrender trying to control things over which I had no control, then I accessed the power to change myself and my relationships.  I became empowered to change my life into an experience that was defined by Joy, Love, and Peace instead of fear, anger, and pain.”

There are two points of powerlessness with Codependence

The first is intellectual – when we first realize that there is something that’s not working and that maybe we have to change, to learn a different way.

The second comes after we have intellectually learned what boundaries and healthy behavior are but we cannot stop acting out the old patterns in our closest relationships – we watch ourselves saying things we don’t want to say, and doing things we don’t want to do.

This is when it is necessary to do the emotional healing.

Here is my version of the initial steps from these two different levels.

Intellectual Steps

Step 1. I acknowledge and accept that I am powerless out of ego-self to control my human life experience, and that the delusion that I should be in control has caused pain and suffering in my life.

Step 2. Came to remember that I am a Spiritual Being who is part of the ONENESS that is the Unconditionally Loving, ALL-Powerful Universal Force, and that believing in that Force can help to bring balance, harmony, and sanity to my life.

Step 3. Made a decision to ask the Force to help me align my will, my actions, and my life with the Universal Power.

Emotional Steps

Step 1. Admitted that I am powerless to substantially change the learned behavioral defenses and dysfunctional attitudes from childhood until I deal with the emotional wounds of my childhood experience.

Step 2. Came to remember that I am a Spiritual Being who is part of the ONENESS that is the Unconditionally Loving, ALL-Powerful Universal Force, and that believing in that Force can help to bring balance, harmony, and sanity to my life.

Step 3. Made a decision to ask the Force to help me face the terror of healing my emotional wounds.

This is excerpted from an article by the same name on my website Joy2MeU.com  It is the first in a series of articles on the twelve step proces.  The second article in that series is The Miracle of The Twelve Step Recovery Process Part 2:  The First Three Steps – 1, 2, 3, and a 1, 2, 3

The key to codependency recovery is the inner child healing work I describe on my site:  A key element of that work includes learning to set internal boundaries.  The formula that I pioneered for inner healing – which includes learning to set the internal boundaries –  is something that I teach people through telephone counseling. (It is now possible to get phone cards for very cheap rates from many places in the world – and also to use Skype for free from anywhere.)  I talk about how the phone counseling can work to really change a persons life for the better in a short period of time on this page which includes some special combination offers.

Reading my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls  (links to all of my books in ebook format are on that page) would really help you take your understanding to a whole new level.  Understanding codependency is vital in helping us to forgive our self for the dysfunctional ways we have lived our lives – it is not our fault we are codependent.

In the last few years I have also published two more books that can be very helpful. Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light Book 1 Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child Healing and Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth.  I have special offers for either or both of these books (or for all three of my books) on this page:

I also offer periodic day long workshops in San Diego to teach people how to apply my inner child healing formula.   (There is now a downloadable MP3 recording available of my Life Changing workshop  – and I have a page with special offers for both the workshop recording and an MP3 download of Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls. )

Codependency causes us to feel like the victim of our own thoughts and feelings, and like our own worst enemy – recovery helps us to start learning how to be our own best friend.  Getting into codependency recovery is an act of love for self.

Although my book and articles make reference to Alcoholics Anonymous, the principles and Twelve Step program of A.A., this does not mean that A.A. has reviewed or approved the contents of this writing, nor that A.A. agrees with the views expressed herein. A.A. is a program of recovery from alcoholism only – use of this material in connection with programs and activities which are patterned after A.A., but address other problems, or in any other non-A.A. context, does not imply otherwise.

 

The following are some excerpts from my eBook The Metaphysics of Emotions – emotional energy is real.

“. . . . . That was the day that I started experiencing and understanding that emotions are actually energy – are something that is very real.  Thus the title of this ebook The Metaphysics of Emotions – emotional energy is real.  This ebook is a follow up to my ebook The Law of Attraction – Misunderstood & Misinterpreted A Larger Spiritual Paradigm.

My reasons for publishing these ebooks are summed up in the following paragraph from my ebook The Law of Attraction – Misunderstood & Misinterpreted.

“I am publishing this book because I believe that the way the Law of Attraction is being taught by most people who are teaching it today is not ultimately Loving.  I believe it is being taught in a way that makes many of the people hearing it feel ashamed;  in a way that causes people to focus on reaching a destination at the expense of being present in the now;  in a way that reinforces the delusion that there is something inherently wrong with being human, with human beings.  It is also being taught by most spiritual teachers in a way that discounts and devalues emotions and emotional healing.”

This ebook The Metaphysics of Emotions will be part two of the hard copy book that will be titled:  The Law of Attraction – Misunderstood & Misinterpreted A Larger Spiritual Paradigm – including The Metaphysics of Emotions.  (I haven’t published the hard copy book yet and am not sure when I am going to.)  In this ebook I will address the Truth as I understand it – that is, that emotional energy is real.” – Author’s Foreword

Table of Contents

Author’s Foreword

The Metaphysics of Emotions

Mystical messengers and Master Teachers

emotional energy is real

Metaphysical = beyond the physical

Dysfunction both Eastern & Western

A Larger Perspective

Feeling the Feelings – grief / emotional energy release

Energetic Clarity

quantum physics

Etheric plane

Tuning into Love instead of fear and shame

Etheric X-ray

Multiple Levels / Perspectives

Progress not perfection

Spiritual Beings having a human experience

” . . . . . In the ebook that I am publishing this ebook as a companion to – The Law of Attraction – Misunderstood & Misinterpreted –  I talk about some of the reasons I believe these mystical messengers / spiritual teachers are giving out messages that are affected by codependency.  Those include black and white thinking and shame about being human, but the discounting of emotions is the one that this ebook is addressing.

Emotional Energy is Real

“The dance of wounded souls is a self-perpetuating cycle of cause and effect that has evolved into becoming the Human Condition.  That dance of Codependence – as it can now be called – is both a cause, a tune that we have been dancing to, and the effect, the dance itself.  Codependence is not the original cause – it is a cause in the self-perpetuating cycles of cause and effect that have dictated the course of human evolution.

The original wound, which I will discuss a little later, had the effect of creating a Spiritually hostile condition on this planet.  That Spiritually hostile condition then became a cause with many consequences.

One of the most devastating of these consequences, or effects, was that human beings began to express emotions in destructive ways.  Because the channel between Spiritual Self and human self was disrupted by planetary condition, the human ego began to develop the belief that it was separate from other humans and from the Source.  This belief in separation made violence possible.

The violence, caused by the false belief, meant that humans could no longer enjoy a free-flowing emotional process.  As a consequence, emotionally-repressive environments evolved in the social systems on this planet.  Human beings were forced to adopt defense systems that included the belief that emotions were negative and had to be suppressed and controlled.  This was necessary in order for human beings to live together in communities that would insure the survival of the human race.

It is not necessary any longer!  And it is dysfunctional. 

The act of suppressing emotions was always dysfunctional in its effect on the emotional, mental, and Spiritual health of the individual being.  It was only functional in terms of physical survival of the species.

We now have clearer access to Spiritual healing energy and guidance which allows us to become aligned with Truth so that emotions will not be expressed in destructive ways.  We have the tools, knowledge, and guidance to allow emotional healing to take place, to allow the individual to enjoy the flow of healthy emotional process.

Attempting to suppress emotions is dysfunctional; it does not work.  Emotions are energy:  E-motion = energy in motion.  It is supposed to be in motion, it was meant to flow. 

Emotions have a purpose, a very good reason to be – even those emotions that feel uncomfortable.  Fear is a warning, anger is for protection, tears are for cleansing and releasing.  These are not negative emotional responses!  We were taught to react negatively to them.  It is our reaction that is dysfunctional and negative, not the emotion.

Emotional honesty is absolutely vital to the health of the being.  Denying, distorting, and blocking our emotions in reaction to false beliefs and dishonest attitudes causes emotional and mental disease.  This emotional and mental disease causes physical, biological imbalance which produces physical disease.

Codependence is a deadly and fatal disease because of emotional dishonesty and suppression.  It breaks our hearts, scrambles our minds, and eventually kills our physical body vehicles because of the Spiritual dis-ease, because of our wounded souls.

The key to healing our wounded souls is to get clear and honest in our emotional process.  Until we can get clear and honest with our human emotional responses – until we change the twisted, distorted, negative perspectives and reactions to our human emotions that are a result of having been born into, and grown up in, a dysfunctional, emotionally repressive, Spiritually hostile environment – we cannot get clearly in touch with the level of emotional energy that is Truth.  We cannot get clearly in touch with and reconnected to our Spiritual Self.

We, each and every one of us, has an inner channel to Truth, an inner channel to the Great Spirit.  But that inner channel is blocked up with repressed emotional energy, and with twisted, distorted attitudes and false beliefs.” – quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

Emotions are real.  Emotions are energy that is manifested into the body in a dimension, on a level, that cannot be seen or measured in any concrete way.

Traditional Western medical science has discounted emotions because it can not be measured or detected as tangible, physical substance.

“Traditional Western medical science has ignored and discounted the spiritual and emotional components of being.  The traditional medical perspective in relationship to any physically or psychologically manifested dis-ease is limited by a left brain (concrete, rational) intellectual paradigm which is entirely focused on that which can be seen, measured, quantified.  Therefore, any spiritual, emotional, and mental dis-ease is seen as resulting from biochemical, physiological, physical conditions.  Doctors (which includes psychiatrists of course) – and other traditional medical and mental health professionals – were trained to identify mental and emotional problems as biological and to see the solution as chemical.

There are certainly neurobiological aspects to any behavioral manifestation, but it is not possible for a scientific perspective which requires empirical proof to truly ascertain the cause of any condition – because emotional and spiritual components of a human’s being can not be quantified.  In other words, brain chemistry is definitely out of balance in relationship to any physical disorder or mental condition – including OCD, Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, etc.  That imbalance in brain chemistry definitely has an impact on emotions – but it is not possible to say absolutely which is the cause and which is the effect.  The chicken and egg conundrum.  In other words, did the emotional trauma and the fear and shame based relationship to life cause the chemical imbalance in the brain – or did the chemical imbalance come first.  Traditional Western medicine is not holistic – it does not treat the whole being, it treats symptoms.  Medication is necessary for some people.  It is an invaluable temporary help for others.  It is not the whole answer.  The great majority of doctors are limited by their training, the intellectual paradigm which determines their perspective, to believing that they do know the answers.” – Obsession / Obsessive Thinking Part 1

In the quote above I use the word empirical – a word that I mention in my ebook on the Law of Attraction that led me to the word metempirical – beyond experience, beyond evidence and observation.  It is actually very easy to observe when someone is having feelings – but there isn’t any measurable, discernible substance to those emotions, thus they have been discounted in Western Civilization.”

“. . . . . . A key line in this is that ‘The attitudes, definitions, and belief systems which we hold mentally dictate our emotional reactions.’  This is a key point in the Law of Attraction teachings – and it is the Truth.  We need to change the intellectual paradigm that is dictating our relationship with life in order to learn to be positive co-creators in our lives instead of the negative co-creators we were programmed to be in childhood.  It is vital to change the intellectual programming – it is the only way to change our emotional experience of life.  That is one of the reasons it is so important to align with the Law of Attraction – so that we can start creating more positive effect in our lives.

What so many people who are teaching the Law of Attraction don’t seem to understand however – or at least don’t communicate it in how they are teaching it – is that changing that ego programming now does not make the emotional energy from the past disappear.  We cannot just start being in the Now and let go of the past (except in the moment – the more we heal the more ability we have to let go of the past and be present in the moment for more moments of the day.)  We have repressed, suppressed, pressurized emotional energy within us in relationship to our emotional wounds.  That is why it is so important to do the grief work to release some of that energy – to take power from those emotional “buttons” that dictate our reactions in intimate relationships.  We can’t just start being spiritual in our relationships with other human beings without healing those emotional wounds from the past – releasing some of that repressed emotional energy.

“If you have ever wondered why it is so much easier to feel Spiritual in relationship to nature or animals, here is your answer.  It was people who wounded us in childhood.  It is people who our egos developed defense systems to protect us from.

I have told people for years, that the only reason to do inner child healing work is if we are going to interact with other people.  If one is going to live in isolation on a mountain top meditating, it will be fairly easy to feel Spiritually connected.  It is relating to other human beings that is messy.” – Reprogramming our dysfunctional ego defenses”

“. . . . . The difference between the horizontal and the vertical emotions is what I was referring to in the Law of Attraction ebook when I wrote:  ‘. . . a statement from Marianne Williamson that “What is not love is fear.”  That is not only black and white but simplistic and linear as if Love and fear were the same type of emotional energy.’  As I have said, the goal is to align attitudinally with Love as the Truth – but that doesn’t mean we are not going to feel fear at times in our human adventure.

Marianne Williamson is obviously a powerful teacher of Truth, a mystical messenger carrying the message of Love – but she could use some codependency recovery to help her stop making black and white statements that are shaming and give people the impression they are doing something wrong if they feel fear.

All of us who are drawn to this healing, who have a soul compulsion to follow a spiritual path, who are in recovery seeking answers beyond what is available in most 12 step meetings, are old souls who are present in body in this lifetime to heal these wounds and settle Karma.  Marianne Williamson is obviously an old soul who has done much work clearing her inner channel to Truth and Love and Light, but I do wish she would recognize the importance of clearing our inner channels of the repressed grief energy.

“The planetary conditions that blocked humans from accessing Christ Consciousness – the vibrational Knowing of the Truth of ONENESS – were in place for tens of thousands of years. Conditions have now changed! We have entered a new time, an Age of Healing & Joy has dawned in Human Consciousness on the planet. All of the “old-souls” involved in healing in this time have the capacity to access the Truth of ONENESS and Love through their inner channel.

(The term “old-soul” refers to the stage of consciousness evolution an individual has attained by this lifetime – it does not mean better than, or farther along than, those who do not have to do the healing. There is no hierarchy in the Truth of a Loving Great Spirit – those who appear to have low, or no, consciousness in this lifetime are simply doing their healing in another space-time illusion parallel to this one. All old-souls are born at a heart-chakra level of consciousness and therefore have more sensitivity, and less capacity for denial, than other people. In other words, the gift of having access to Truth and Love carries with it the price of greatly increased emotional sensitivity.)

Due to the planetary conditions, the human ego developed a belief in separation – which is what made violence possible and caused the human condition as we inherited it. The reflection of that human condition on the individual level is the disease of Codependence. Codependence is caused by the ego being traumatized and programed in early childhood so that our relationship with ourselves and the God-Force is dysfunctional – that is, it does not work to help us access the Truth of ONENESS and Love. It is through healing our relationship with ourselves that we open our inner channel and start tuning into the Truth.” – Jesus & Christ Consciousness

It is important to own our horizontal human emotions at the same time we are aligning with Higher Truth attitudinally.  Developing a boundary between emotional and mental – relating to our thoughts and emotions as two different kinds / levels of energy, because they are – is the key to integrating Spiritual Truth into our emotional relationship with life.  We need to clear our intellectual programming (including subconscious) of false beliefs and dysfunctional definitions and attitudes, at the same time we are learning to be Loving, nurturing and compassionate in relating to our own emotional wounds to take power away from the repressed emotional energy from our past.  We need to set boundaries with both the critical parent voice and with the emotional wounds / inner children so that we can stop letting the past have so much power in how we are living today.

“One of most important steps to empowerment is integrating Spiritual Truth into our experience of the process.  In order to do that it is necessary to practice discernment in our relationship with the emotional and mental components of our being.

We learned to relate to our inner process from a reversed perspective.  We were trained to be emotionally dishonest (that is, to not feel the feelings or to go to the other extreme by allowing the feelings to totally run our lives) and to give power to, to buy into, the reversed attitudes (it is shameful to be human, it is bad to make mistakes, God is punishing and judgmental etc.)  To find balance within we have to change our relationship with our inner process. 

Feeling and releasing the emotional energy without giving power to the false beliefs is a vital component of achieving balance between the emotional and the mental.  The more we align ourselves attitudinally, and clear out our inner channel, the easier it is for us to pick out the Truth from amid the dysfunctional attitudes – so that we can set an internal boundary between the emotional and mental.

Feelings are real but they are not necessarily fact or Truth.

We can feel like a victim and still know that the fact is we set ourselves up.  We can feel like we made a mistake and still know that every mistake is an opportunity for growth, a perfect part of the learning process.  We can feel betrayed or abandoned or shamed, and still know that we have just been given an opportunity to become aware of an area that needs some light shined on it, an issue that needs some healing.

We can have moments where we feel like God/life is punishing us and still know that “This, too, shall pass” and “More will be revealed,” – that later on, down the path a ways, we will be able to look back and see that what we perceived in the moment to be tragedy and injustice is really just another opportunity for growth, another gift of fertilizer to help us grow.

I needed to learn how to set boundaries within, both emotionally and mentally by integrating Spiritual Truth into my process.  Because “I feel feel like a failure” does not mean that is the Truth.   The Spiritual Truth is that “failure” is an opportunity for growth.  I can set a boundary with my emotions by not buying into the illusion that what I am feeling is who I am.  I can set a boundary intellectually by telling that part of my mind that is judging and shaming me to shut up, because that is my disease lying to me.  I can feel and release the emotional pain energy at the same time I am telling myself the Truth by not buying into the shame and judgment.

If I am feeling like a “failure” and giving power to the “critical parent” voice within that is telling me that I am a failure – then I can get stuck in a very painful place where I am shaming myself for being me.  In this dynamic I am being the victim of myself and also being my own perpetrator – and the next step is to rescue myself by using one of the old tools to go unconscious (food, alcohol, sex, etc.)  Thus the disease has me running around in a squirrel cage of suffering and shame, a dance of pain, blame, and self-abuse.

By learning to set a boundary with and between our emotional truth, what we feel, and our mental perspective, what we believe – in alignment with the Spiritual Truth we have integrated into the process – we can honor and release the feelings without buying into the false beliefs.

The more we can learn intellectual discernment within, so that we are not giving power to false beliefs, the clearer we can become in seeing and accepting our own personal path.  The more honest and balanced we become in our emotional process, the clearer we can become in following our own personal Truth.”

This next excerpt is from an article in which I stress the importance of recognizing the healing and recovery are a process.  Life is not about reaching destinations – it is a journey.  The goal is to learn to relax and enjoy the journey while we are healing.  When we are living life in reaction to old tapes and old wounds, we do not have the capacity to relax and enjoy the journey.

Etheric X-ray

“I learned in my own grieving process – and later applied in my work with clients – to pay attention to where the energy was manifesting in the body.  The grief associated with my emotional incest issues was being carried in my lower back on the right side.  As I mentioned above, this grief was near the second chakra because it was associated with my relationship with my own body and sexuality.  It was in my back because that is where I carry issues I don’t want to see.  It was on my right side – which is the masculine side – because it was blocking me in my relationship with my own gender, which was greatly affecting my relationship with women.

It would seem that the process of healing would be easier if we could go into a healers office and get an etheric x-ray taken of our emotional, mental, spiritual bodies as well as of our physical bodies. The diagnosis might come out sounding something like this:

Well, we have, what looks like a good 3 pounds of grief energy here in your back near the second chakra – that indicates some grief related to sexual issues that you don’t want to look at, probably some sexual abuse, or at the least some wounds in relationship to sexuality and gender.

And a good 5 pounds of grief around your heart chakra.  Those indicate multiple traumas to the heart – a strong pattern of looking for Love in all the wrong places, trying to fill your heart with love from external sources.

There is also some severe congestion in your throat area.  Your throat chakra is completely closed – which indicates an inability to own your voice and speak your Truth.  It also includes internal communication problems, that is blockage in your ability to trust your own intuition.  Which is related to the dark mass here in your forehead.  That is your third eye – or Spiritual vision – chakra, and shows that the intellectual programming in your mind is too limited and blocks your ability to see your self or life from an expanded Spiritual perspective.  etc., etc.

But the reality of how the healing process works is that we need to peel away the layers of our codependent defense system gradually.   There are healers who can tell us that we have these grief issues – as I stated in an earlier quote.

“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.” – Grieving – examples of how the process works

In the case study that I quoted earlier, I mention how I said to the man the very first session that there were childhood issues that were keeping from being able to let go.  I could have quizzed him more completely about his history and most likely have pinpointed that the time of his parents divorce was the crucial period in relationship to what he was going through when he came to me.  But that would not have helped him to get in touch with those issues in an emotional context.  He needed to go through the process of pealing layers of his defenses to gradually get to those specific emotional wounds.

There was a quote in a meditation book that I read a year before I went into treatment.  This was before I had surrendered to doing the emotional healing.  It was a message from the Universe that was part of my path of being led to do the emotional work.  It  really made me angry when I first read it.   A year later when I was in treatment, someone in my primary therapy group – which I attended at least once every weekday – would be asked to read the days meditation.  There were 5 or 6 daily meditation books lying around in that therapy room.  Whoever was asked to read the days meditation would pick one of those books and open it up – either randomly or specifically to the meditation for that day.  During my 30 days in treatment, I only was asked to read the meditation once.  I reached down on the floor and grabbed the nearest meditation book and opened it up.  I opened it up to the same quote I had read a year earlier.  It still made me angry.  It said something to this affect:

A knowledge of the path does not replace putting one foot in front of the other.

We are here to go through the process – to experience the journey.  The human part of me wants to jump to the end and get to happily ever after.  I needed to learn to accept that the process unfolded gradually, that there were always more layers of the onion to be peeled – and some tears to be cried with each level.

It is through experiencing the journey in the moment one day at a time, that we heal our wounds and settle the Karma we are here to settle.

The reality is that our emotional pain is so great that if all of our defenses and denial were stripped away at once, it would kill us.  So, getting such an etheric x-ray would only point us in the direction we need to travel – it wouldn’t help us skip any part of the process.  We get the guidance we need to know the direction to travel, by following the carrots – the messages from the Universe.  We don’t get to know what the future holds.  We do get everything we need for our journey one day at a time – even when it doesn’t feel like it.

“There is no quick fix!  Understanding the process does not replace going through it!  There is no magic pill, there is no magic book, there is no guru or channeled entity that can make it possible to avoid the journey within, the journey through the feelings.”” – Attack on America – Chapter 9

This last excerpt is important because it does emphasize that we need to go through the process – that life and recovery are a journey.  As the quote from my book that ended that excerpt states: “Understanding the process does not replace going through it!”   It doesn’t matter how much knowledge one has of the metaphysics, we still need to feel and release the emotions in order to clear our inner channel to Truth and Love.

“Each and every one of us has an inner channel.  We now have the capability to atone – which means tune into – to atone, to tune into the Higher Consciousness.  To tune into the Higher vibrational emotional energies that are Joy, Light, Truth, Beauty, and Love.

We can tune into the Truth of “at ONE ness.”  Atone = at ONE.  Atonement = at ONE ment, in a condition of ONENESS.

We now have access to the highest vibrational frequencies – we can tune into the Truth of ONENESS.  By aligning with Truth we are tuning into the higher energy vibrations that reconnect us with the Truth of ONENESS.

This is the age of atonement, but it does not have anything to do with judgment and punishment.  It has to do with tuning our inner channel into the right frequencies.

But our inner channel is blocked and cluttered with repressed emotional energy and dysfunctional attitudes.  The more we clear our inner channel through aligning with Truth attitudinally, and releasing the repressed emotional energy through the grief process, the clearer we can tune into the music of Love and Joy, Light and Truth.  

It is not easy because we have been taught to look at being human backwards.  We were forced to accept a reversed perspective.  We were emotionally and subconsciously programmed to react to life dysfunctionally based on reversed belief systems.

We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.

NOT human creatures who have to earn Spiritual existence.  We are not flawed, shameful humans who have to do human perfectly, who have to do the “right” things in order to transcend.” 

In a quote I use later in this ebook, I state: ‘We are the music of The Great Spirit – we’ve just been way out of tune.’” – from The Metaphysics of Emotions – emotional energy is real

 These excerpt are from The Metaphysics of Emotions – emotional energy is real which is an eBook available on Amazon.com

Announcing that as of 8 am Sunday September 14th the eBook The Metaphysics of Emotions – emotional energy is real will be available via a discounted count down sale on both Amazon.com  and Amazon.co.uk

The Metaphysics of Emotions – emotional energy is real which is normally $9.95 will available at $.99 starting Sunday morning the 14th for a week  – with the price increasing by $1 every 32 hours. 

On Amazon.co.uk The Metaphysics of Emotions – emotional energy is real is normally £6.56 and will be for sale for £0.99 – with the price increasing by £1 every 32 hours.

 

 ““The act of suppressing emotions was always dysfunctional in its effect on the emotional, mental, and Spiritual health of the individual being. It was only functional in terms of physical survival of the species.”

“Codependence is an emotional and behavioral defense system which was adopted by our egos in order to meet our need to survive as a child. Because we had no tools for reprogramming our egos and healing our emotional wounds (culturally approved grieving, training and initiation rites, healthy role models, etc.), the effect is that as an adult we keep reacting to the programming of our childhood and do not get our needs met – our emotional, mental, Spiritual, or physical needs.

Codependence allows us to survive physically but causes us to feel empty and dead inside. Codependence is a defense system that causes us to wound ourselves.”

“We live in a society where a few have billions while others are starving and homeless. We live in a society which believes that it is not only possible to own and hoard the resources and the land but one which can rationalize killing the planet we live on. These are symptoms of imbalance, of reversed thinking.”” – quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

Yesterday one of my phone counseling clients was telling me about her brother’s beliefs about the difference between men and women. He told her that women want to settle down with one man while men want to be with a lot of women – and that it went back to the days of cave men, so there was nothing to be done about it.

The very thing that I touched upon in last month’s article – except for the “nothing can be done about it” part. That was part of my point in the April article about the Maiden and the horndog – we can do something about it. I was trying to point out how stereotypes arise from a grain of truth that has gotten twisted and distorted over the years – and that we don’t have to be the victim of those stereotypes.

The very programming that helped the human race survive is now threatening to destroy the planet. We do not have to be the victim of genetic survival programming that is no longer necessary for survival – nor do we need to be the victim of our codependency.

Just as codependency is an emotional defense system that helped us survive childhood and results as adults in breaking our hearts, wounding our souls, and scrambling our minds – so too has the survival programming of our early days on the planet brought us to the brink of destroying the planet.

Human beings have the capacity to grow. Any time someone says anything to the effect: “That is just how it is.” “That is just how I am.” “I can’t help myself.” etc., they are making a victim statement.

We as human beings individually and collectively, not only have the capacity to grow and change, we will destroy the planet if we do not. That is one of the reasons that it is so important to be willing to question traditional values, roles, and beliefs – to be willing to change the old tapes.

As I point out so often in my writing, our attitudes, definitions and beliefs – the intellectual paradigm we are empowering (consciously or subconsciously) – determines our perspectives and expectations which in turn dictate our emotional reactions and relationships.

We do not have to be the victim of our childhood programming. In terms of the inner child healing process, we can learn to set boundaries with the Maiden and the horndog within so that we do not let the feelings arising from those parts of us dictate our attitudes and behaviors.

We also do not have to be the victim of tradition – of the programming from our days of living in caves, or any traditions that have developed since that time. The “traditional” context for viewing male and female roles (to say nothing of such areas as “family values” and marriage) in this society is patriarchal supremacy. As I say in the second article of my inner child healing series (Inner child healing – Why do it?) that I first published in June 2000:

“Modern civilizations – both Eastern and Western – are no more than a generation or two removed from the belief that children were property. This, of course, goes hand in hand with the belief that women were property.”

It is the underlying belief system that makes our perspective of men and women so dysfunctional – and has caused so much of the dysfunction in the human condition.

I spoke in last months article about how traditionally in our society: “men were programmed to be codependent (define self and take their feelings of self worth) from their work, their ability to produce. Women were programmed to be codependent on their relationships with men.” and how in a dysfunctional society a man “can be a really unpleasant and nasty human being – and still be considered successful and worthy of admiration if he is a success in the realm of money, property and prestige.”

Men are programmed to be emotionally dishonest – which causes them to be cut off from connection to their heart and soul. It is an emotionally dishonest patriarchy focused on material “success” in cultures whose value systems do not honor and respect individual dignity and worth, that can justify war – that has brought us to the brink of destroying the planet.

Women have a greater capacity for love – and more respect for individual human life – than men because that life grows in their bodies. This capacity for love and men’s overwhelming attraction to the Feminine is part of the reason that men have feared, and attempted to subjugate, women in “civilized” cultures for thousands of years.

The Women’s Movement caused many great and wonderful changes in society that have allowed women to start owning their individual worth and dignity – and has helped women to start seeing themselves as more than just extensions of men. Like any change that takes place however, there were both positive and negative affects. One of the negative affects of the Feminist Movement for many women is that they now feel that they are dependent on both relationship and career for their self worth. Many women feel that unless they are both successful in career, and in a romantic relationship, they are failures – because they are still looking externally for self worth.

The even more devastating negative affect of the Women’s movement in my perspective, is that women who inherently are most heart connected because of their ability to give birth – have been given the right to compete with men who have never been heart connected in an economic system that does not honor the heart. In other words, women have won the dubious right to be more like men – in the emotionally dishonest, human doing prototype of traditional accepted male behavior.

A healthier trend that is also unfolding because of these changes, is that many men are becoming more like women in terms of owning their emotions and connecting to their hearts. When I say becoming more like women, what I really mean is that more men are connecting to their own feminine energy and owning their humanity – they are becoming healthier and more balanced as human beings. Women have been more in touch with their humanity in the history of the world than men who have been emotionally cut off from their heart and soul. Men who are blocked from accessing their own heart and souls are out of touch with their own humanity and thus able to act in ways that are inhumane.” – Old tapes / traditional beliefs and gender roles for men and women http://joy2meu.com/gender_roles.html

Robert Burney is a writer, counselor, and Spiritual Teacher whose first book Codependence The Dance of Wounded Souls has been called “one of the truly transformational works of our time.” His website joy2meu.com offers over 200 pages of free original content and he shares the transformational formula he discovered for inner healing through telephone counseling with people around the world and Day Long Workshops in San Diego. Here is his siteindex page with links to the many pages available.

Reading my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls (links to all of my books in ebook format are on that page) can really help a person take their understanding to a whole new level. Understanding codependency is vital in helping us to forgive our self for the dysfunctional ways we have lived our lives – it is not our fault we are codependent.

In the last few years I have also published two more books that can be very helpful. Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light Book 1 Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child Healing and Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth. I have special offers for either or both of these books (or for all three of my books) on this page:

Codependency causes us to feel like the victim of our own thoughts and feelings, and like our own worst enemy – recovery helps us to start learning how to be our own best friend. Getting into codependency recovery is an act of love for self.