Codependent Defenses - Part 3 My Gatekeeper

“At the core of the disease of codependency is toxic shame - the feeling that something is wrong with who I am, with my being. The feeling that we are somehow unlovable and unworthy, inherently defective, is at the heart of the fear of intimacy defenses that our ego’s adapted to protect our hearts in early childhood. “I am unlovable and it is my fault” - is the core lie of codependency.” “I have stated in numerous places in my writing that I believe that romantic relationships are the greatest arena for Spiritual and emotional growth available to us - because they are the ones that push all of our emotional buttons, trigger all of our deepest wounds. I have been in conscious codependency recovery for many years, but I have had relatively little experience in romantic relationships because of the relationship phobia I talked about in my May column: Fear of Intimacy - Relationship Phobia It was because of that relationship phobia that I didn’t understand my fear of intimacy defenses - had not had the opportunity to work through the layers of the defenses in an actual relationship experience - enough to be able to stop them from causing me to sabotage the relationship that began in December of last year.” “Underneath the gatekeeper that was guarding my heart to protect me from being hurt by others, was the toxic shame that was a deeper level of my gatekeeper - that was keeping me from opening my heart to myself on the kind of powerful and transformational levels that were in balance with the magnificent way I had opened my heart to Love another. Truly insidious and baffling and powerful is this condition of codependency. But my codependency recovery has helped me to keep stripping away the levels of dishonesty - the rationalization and denial and justification - that the critical parent voice creates to hide the real reason I was behaving the way I was. It helped me to stop focusing so much on her and her part in things, and bring the focus back to me and my part in things - so that I could take responsibility for my side of the street and uncover the real reasons for my codependent behavior.”

On this page is an article by inner child healing pioneer / Spiritual Teacher / codependency therapist on his fear of emotional intimacy defenses.

Suite101 for whom I wrote a monthly column until October 2005 no longer has any of my articles on my site. In August 2010 I am doing some editing on some of the articles I wrote then to remove bad links to articles that are no longer on their site. When I got to this one I realized that I have never added the follow up article to this one - so am going to do it on the same page with this one. This article was originally published on Suite101 at the end of November 2004.**

Codependence Recovery - Taking Responsibility not blame

By Robert Burney

“As long as we are judging and shaming ourselves we are giving power to the disease. We are feeding the monster that is devouring us. We need to take responsibility without taking the blame. We need to own and honor the feelings without being a victim of them. We need to rescue and nurture and Love our inner children - and STOP them from controlling our lives. STOP them from driving the bus! Children are not supposed to drive, they are not supposed to be in control. And they are not supposed to be abused and abandoned. We have been doing it backwards. We abandoned and abused our inner children. Locked them in a dark place within us. And at the same time let the children drive the bus - let the children’s wounds dictate our lives.” “As long as we are reacting to old wounds and old tapes we cannot respond to the now. The more we heal, the more responsibility we have - that is, ability to respond. The ability to respond in the moment. By honoring and releasing the sadness and the pain and the anger we can get to the Joy and the Love and the Peace.” (All quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls) I ended up last month’s column with this paragraph. “The real reason - the bottom line reason - was toxic shame. In next months column, I will talk about what I discovered about my gatekeeper - the power of my toxic shame - as I stripped away the layers to get more honest with myself so I could take responsibility for my part in sabotaging the possibilities presented by this relationship experience.” First of all, I want to mention how important it is to be willing to take an objective look at my own side of the street. To not buy into the black and white thinking of the disease which used to cause me to try to blame everything on the other person or blame everything on myself. The Truth is always in the gray area in between. In other words, some of it was my responsibility because of what I was doing to sabotage the relationship - and some of it was hers because of her reactions out of her old tapes and old wounds. It is really vital to be willing to do some processing about what has happened - in order to understand it better. And processing is much more than thinking about it. As I tell people all the time, it is important to write, or talk out loud, about what happened in order to get in touch with the feelings. Just thinking about things does not necessarily get the emotional energy moving - does not get us in touch with our feelings. (And when I say talk out loud I mean in a 12 step meeting setting, or to a friend or therapist who will give us feedback when they notice codependent rationalizing going on - not the kind of talking many codependents do, that is complaining to friends who will just endorse their behavior and be allies in agreeing that it was all the other person’s fault.) Being willing to process through what has happened and take inventory of my side of the street has been a key to being able to keep growing and learning for me. “The process of processing is a dynamic that in many ways is easier to demonstrate over time than it is to explain. Explaining it on an intellectual level is complicated and difficult because the process itself involves being able to look at multiple levels. The recovery process is spiritual, emotional, and mental. These levels are separate but intimately interrelated. In learning how to achieve some emotional balance in our lives, it is necessary to be able to look at our self, our own inner process, and the life dynamic itself, from different perspectives. It is this looking at different levels that is the process of processing. Processing is a matter of looking at, filtering, discerning, getting clear about what is happening at any given moment in our relationship with life, with ourselves, with everything that is stimulating us.” - The Recovery Process for inner child healing: Part 1 Sharing experience, strength, and hope, taking action There are always multiple levels to anything that is happening - and it is very important to look past the surface level to get to the cause (s) underneath. The venue that has been so valuable for me in getting clear on what is happening / has happened in my life has been writing for the personal journal I share in my Joy2MeU Journal. As I said in last month’s article. “But my codependency recovery has helped me to keep stripping away the levels of dishonesty - the rationalization and denial and justification - that the critical parent voice creates to hide the real reason I was behaving the way I was. It helped me to stop focusing so much on her and her part in things, and bring the focus back to me and my part in things - so that I could take responsibility for my side of the street and uncover the real reasons for my codependent behavior.” - Codependent Defenses - Part 3 My Gatekeeper It was in processing through the events that had occurred - stripping away the layers - by writing about them in my journal that I uncovered the deeper reason that I had been sabotaging the relationship. “I hate this!!! My fear of the outcome caused me to behave in ways that made that outcome inevitable. SHIT!!!!! This goes back to a pattern that I recognized in 1986 - on the day I count as the start of my conscious codependency recovery - when I recognized that I had a pattern of sabotaging good things in my life because I couldn’t stand the suspense of waiting for that judgmental, punishing god I learned about in childhood, to take whatever it was away from me because I was unworthy.” - Joy2MeU Journal Mini Newsletter September 2004 In the premier issue of that Journal, I shared some stories from the early years of my codependency recovery - including what I realized in the writing I did on the day I count as the beginning of my conscious codependency recovery. “I realized that the belief that “life was about sin and punishment and I was a sinner who deserved to be punished” was running my life. When I felt “bad” or “bad” things happened to me - I tried to blame it on others to keep from realizing how much I was hating myself for being flawed and defective, a sinner. When I felt good or good things happened I was holding my breath because I knew it would be taken away because I didn’t deserve it. Often when things got too good I would sabotage it because I couldn’t stand the suspense of waiting for god to take it away - which “he” would because I didn’t deserve it.” - Joy2MeU Journal The Story of “Joy to You & Me” Getting in touch with the deeper layer of wounding was the key to stopping the behavior that I had been powerless over - the behavior of pushing for a destination because of my fear of being rejected / abandoned / betrayed / banished. “I knew deep down that the relationship was doomed until / unless she opened her heart - but that I was not capable of letting go of it due to some powerlessness on my part (that I will discuses later) that was a perfect part of the unfolding adventure. It was that deep level of Knowing that caused me to have so much fear of what I knew was inevitably going to happen. (I am talking here about a level where I was conscious that she needed to make a shift within her relationship with self or our relationship was doomed - this is not the same thing as the old pattern I uncovered in the mini-newsletter where my ego programming felt that it was inevitable that I would be rejected because of my unworthiness.)” - Joy2MeU Journal The Path of one Recovering Codependent ~ the dance of one wounded soul ~ Dance 39 The fear that being rejected was inevitable was very similar, the same kind of theme, as “the relationship was doomed unless she opened her heart” - but they were different levels of my reality. While the doomed feeling was a pretty accurate interpretation of the reality of what was happening in my interaction with another being whom I was powerless over - the inevitable feeling was coming from deep within me. The feeling that rejection was inevitable was a very deep level of my wounding which I do have some power over - once I got in touch with it through my writing / processing. Thus when I got another opportunity to interact with her in the last half of October and early November I was able to clean up my side of the street. To not allow the fears generated by the toxic shame at the core of my codependency to cause me to sabotage things. Unfortunately she was still reacting to her terror of her own issues and feelings - and to the toxic shame at the core of her relationship with her self. I gained the power to change my behavior, but I was still powerless over her codependency.

I am going to add the same addendum to this page as I did to the Gatekeeper article which I updated yesterday. ~ RB 8/14/10

In June 2010 I was fixing an article (that was part of the same series as this one) which had a bad link in it and ended up adding the following paragraph at the bottom of the page as a way of bringing things up to date.

“The relationships in 2003 and 2004 (which I referred to here as an authentic experience) is something I refer to in a later Update Newsletter in 2007: “That was followed by a relationship experience in the Spring of 2003. It was a long distance relationship that included two short visits by the woman to Cambria - and was about 95% fantasy and 5 % relationship. (As opposed to the relationship in 2004 with my “twin soul” delusion, which was about 80% fantasy and 20% reality.)” Those two experiences prepared me for the reality of the relationship that started in 2005 (the history of which is probably best understood on the page about my step grandson Darien.) We just celebrated 5 years together and decided today (as I update this page to fix a bad link) that we are going to formalize our commitment to the relationship. - RB 6/20/10” We did formalize our commitment by getting engaged shortly after I added this paragraph to my article Setting Internal Boundaries in relationship to Romantic, Sexual Relationships. In this Gatekeeper article I say that I Truly opened my heart in the relationship in 2004 - and that may have been true as far as I was capable of it at the time, but it was really nothing compared to where I have gone since then. In fact, my Higher Power had to trick me into believing the person I was involved with in 2004 was my twin soul in order to prepare me for the relationship that I am in now. I am adding this addendum to this page in August 2010 in order to bring it up to date as far at the personal references I make within the article. ~ Robert 8/13/10

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Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney is copyright 1995. Material on Joy2MeU web site (except where otherwise noted) is copyright 1996 thru 2010 by Robert Burney PO Box 235401 Encinitas CA 92023.

Codependent Defenses - Part 3 My Gatekeeper was originally published online October 31, 2004 on the Inner Child / Codependency Recovery topic page Robert used to write for the Suite101.com Directory.

Originally published at https://joy2meu.com/Codependent_Defenses.htm