Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light
Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light
Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life
Chapter 4: False Self Image
“This is part of what makes codependency such a ridiculous, dysfunctional, tragicomedy. The character I was playing, my false self image, was not really false. It contained a great deal more Truth in relationship to who I really am - to my personality, my essential character in this lifetime - than falsehood. But I was incapable of seeing that because I was focused externally to keep from having to look at myself and admit how defective and shameful I felt.” “One of the payoffs in codependency recovery, is that as we strip away the layers of denial - the twisted distorted perspectives and false beliefs - we learn that we are the person we always wanted to be. As we start to uncover and discover the lies and distortions in our subconscious intellectual paradigm and become willing to get emotionally honest with ourselves by owning the grief and rage, we start to see ourselves clearly for the first time. Codependency is about having a dysfunctional relationship with our selves as human beings - and the key to unraveling the puzzle of self, to stripping away the distortion and the lies, is to get emotionally honest with self.” “My behavior did not match my words because my behavior patterns were driven by my emotional wounds. As long as I had no capacity to be emotionally honest, my codependency defended me based upon the programming it adapted in reaction to the emotional trauma I had experienced in early childhood.” “My ego adopted an emotional defense system - codependency - to try protect me and keep secret the fact that I was a shameful and defective, a pitiful excuse for a man. Since I felt unlovable and unworthy, and I thought I was the only person who felt that way, I had to keep what a loser I was secret. I had to be emotionally dishonest with myself to try to stay unconscious to how I felt at the depths of my being.” “Codependency is very dysfunctional. It hurts just as much to be rejected by an unavailable person as by an available one. As long as we are reacting out of our inner child wounds, we will take any perceived rejection as personal - as a reflection of our shameful defectiveness.”
On this page is the fourth chapter of an online book by codependency therapist/Spiritual teacher.
codependency = a ridiculous, dysfunctional, tragicomedy
Opening our hearts
Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Go to Chapter 5: Codependency = conditioned reactive programming - Published online May 27, 2002
September 2005 - Chapters 3 through 15 of this work are now exclusively available in the Dancing in Light pay to view component of Joy2MeU.com
Author’s Foreword to Codependency RecoveryMay 23, 2001 Joy2MeU UpdateCodependent Dysfunctional Relationships Dynamics
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 2008 by Robert Burney PO Box 235401 Encinitas CA 92023.
Originally published at https://joy2meu.com/codependency_self.htm