I have a problem with labeling people. I mean I don’t like it. I think it promotes shame. I use to hate years ago when we had to say in a Al-anon or Coda meeting, “Hi, I’m Debbie and I’m a codependent.” It never sat right with me. It was like a was doomed for life with this disease. I believe what we affirm to ourselves continues and validates what we are over and over. I just loathed confessing that each week! Don’t get me wrong, I think the 12 step programs have their place and save peoples lives. Al-anon saved my life. It it wasn’t for the weekly meetings and my sponsor, I don’t know where I would be today. However, there came a time when I didn’t want to labeled a codependent for life nor be one of the victims who sat in the room to tell about their latest woe with detaching from my significant other or to keep telling my story over and over. I believe there has to be a time we cross over to the other side of the river to higher consciousness living and see ourselves the way our Creator sees us……A Divine Child of God.
This is why I have such a passion with working with codependents in a unconventional way. I have alot of clients who have been going to Coda meetings for years and are ready to go beyond and change their belief system. I like to encourage them to not label themselves as a “codependent” but that they have codependent behaviors and thought patterns that are able to change if they will learn how to change their belief system about themselves and others. I feel that the real core of codependency is “a loss of our true self and relationship with self”. A person who just can’t function from their own self and looks and uses things OUTSIDE of themselves like food, sex, substance, shopping and relationships to feel whole INSIDE. They obsess, over think and organize their life around what they are dependent on. After all, the motto of codependency is “To Thine Own Self Be True”.
Of course letting go of codependent behaviors and the codependent thinking (I call it the coda crazies) is a process of learning new thoughts, changing the belief system you developed as a child, and learning to love yourself from the InsideOut is a process. I know it can be done. I was the Queen of codependency. I had all the behaviors and was good at them! My shift and change came when I was ready to chose love over fear, to forgive my messengers, and begin the process of change. I had to stop looking outside my self for people and things to make me feel good on the inside. I learned that it was safe to look within. The Inner creates the Outer……Always! It’s why I chose the name InsideOut Wellness.
~Namaste~
Debbie Sherrick
If you would like to know further the traits/behaviors of codependency, please take the diagnostic on my website: www.insideoutwellnesscoach.com