My Terror of Intimacy

What we want the most is also what terrifies us the most.  It was more comfortable for me to sabotage myself and beat myself up than to Truly open up to Love.  I was more comfortable beating myself up for being defective than I was in taking the risk of believing that I was Truly deserving of Love.

This was not at all a conscious thing – it was a result of the compulsive reactions of my codependency.  I was powerless to choose someone who was actually available, and capable, of Loving me as long as I was unconsciously reacting to life out of my childhood emotional wounds.

In our disease defense system we build up huge walls to protect ourselves and then – as soon as we meet someone who will help us to repeat our patterns of abuse, abandonment, betrayal, and/or deprivation – we lower the drawbridge and invite them in.  We, in our Codependence, have radar systems which cause us to be attracted to, and attract to us, the people, who for us personally, are exactly the most untrustworthy (or unavailable or smothering or abusive or whatever we need to repeat our patterns) individuals – exactly the ones who will “push our buttons.” 

This happens because those people feel familiar.  Unfortunately in childhood the people whom we trusted the most – were the most familiar – hurt us the most.  So the effect is that we keep repeating our patterns and being given the reminder that it is not safe to trust ourselves or other people 

Once we begin healing we can see that the Truth is that it is not safe to trust as long as we are reacting out of the emotional wounds and attitudes of our childhoods.  Once we start Recovering, then we can begin to see that on a Spiritual level these repeating behavior patterns are opportunities to heal the childhood wounds.

(Text in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

I compared myself to others and thought I saw that they had reached happily ever after – and since I had not, that was evidence which reinforced the false belief that I was shameful and defective.  My patterns caused me to pick people who could not give me what I needed because of my emotional wounds – and those repeating patterns seemed to be evidence that reinforced the false belief that I was unlovable and defective.  Insidious and incredibly powerful is this codependency.

As the quote in Discernment part 1 from my article Feeling the Feelings – grief / emotional energy release stated:

“4. We are attracted to people that feel familiar on an energetic level – which means (until we start clearing our emotional process) people that emotionally / vibrationally feel like our parents did when we were very little kids.  At a certain point in my process I realized that if I met a woman who felt like my soul mate, that the chances were pretty huge that she was one more unavailable woman that fit my pattern of being attracted to someone who would reinforce the message that I wasn’t good enough, that I was unlovable.  Until we start releasing the hurt, sadness, rage, shame, terror – the emotional grief energy – from our childhoods we will keep having dysfunctional relationships.”

We keep repeating patterns in an attempt to earn the love we are so starved for – on some level the little child within us is still trying to earn our parents love.  We are still trying to prove we are lovable by winning the love of someone who resonates as being similar to our parents.  Until we start learning to be discerning so that we can separate the child’s emotional truth from our adult reality, we keep looking for love in all the wrong places and wrong faces.  Until we start seeing life in a spiritual context that allows us to start understanding our powerlessness and forgiving ourselves for the “bad” choices / “mistakes” we have made in our adult relationship choices, we are blocked from Loving our self.  Discernment is necessary to start really owning our deep emotional pain from a perspective of having compassion for ourselves instead of shame and judgment.

In relationship to romance my patterns meant being attracted to women who were not available to me on some level, and rejecting any woman who was available.  This was the counterdependent pattern I mentioned in the update that spawned these Newsletters.

“It was vital for me in my recovery to see that I actually felt less loneliness when I was alone – because my patterns were more of the counterdependent type, trying to convince myself I didn’t need other people.  My fear/terror of intimacy issues were so powerful that I effectively had a relationship phobia.  Those of you whose patterns were more classically codependent, tended to make the relationship your higher power and hold on for dear life because of inner child fears of being alone.  These are two extremes in the patterns I have observed in how codependents react to fear of intimacy – to be isolated and alone most of the time or to stay in relationships that aren’t meeting our needs out of fear of being alone.  The third major pattern is to go from relationship to relationship, often being more codependent in some (trying to take a hostage / make the other person our drug of choice) and counterdependent in others (resisting being someone else’s drug / being taken hostage.)” 

I did not feel Loved in childhood because my parents were wounded – and because the concept of God that I was taught was a punishing one, the pain in my life felt like punishment. (The pain of life feels like punishment even to people who were taught a metaphysical, Loving concept of God in childhood, because the emotional experience of life does not match the metaphysical Truth.  Sometimes people who were taught about a Loving God in childhood have more trouble getting past their feelings of betrayal than someone who was raised in a shame based religion like I was.)  My inner radar caused me to be attracted to someone who felt on some emotionally energetic level like my parents.  The extremes of the spectrum that I experienced in childhood, dictated how I related to intimate relationships – to opening my heart to another human being.

“For most of my adult life, I effectively had a relationship phobia.  The extremes I learned in childhood were completely unavailable (my father) and completely enmeshed (my mother.)  In my first sexually and emotionally intimate relationship (not any true emotional intimacy because I was incapable of it then – more accurate would be to call it emotional attachment) I got completely enmeshed with a woman I met in college.  She was the one who really initiated me into being sexual.  We got engaged to be married.  I caught her in bed with my best friend – literally, caught them in bed.

I realized in retrospect in recovery, that she had almost certainly been the victim of incest from a young age – and was a sex addict.  The pain of that experience, was to say the least, incredible.  I was so much in denial of my feelings, and so codependent, that I stayed engaged to her for another year and a half.

I did not again in the next twenty years, make the mistake of getting involved with someone who was available enough to have the power to hurt me like that.  I pursued only unavailable women.  I always had someone unavailable that I was obsessing over, trying to figure out how to get her to see how wonderful we could be together.  (This was completely unconscious and something I only realized looking back at my patterns in recovery.)

The other extreme for me, was allowing myself to get physically involved with women I did not really want to be with, with women I did not feel a strong attraction / energetic connection to.  Then I would be the unavailable one.”  –  Joy2MeU Update May 2001 Newsletter 2

Since the only options I could see in a romantic relationship were unavailable or enmeshed, being alone was actually the option in between the extremes for me.  Settling for being in a relationship with someone who wanted me more than I wanted her (being the unavailable / counterdependent one) made me feel as if I were incapable of loving – and caused me to feel incredibly isolated and alone because I could not be (did not even want to be) the prince she thought she needed.  When I was in a relationship where my self worth was dependent upon her (codependent pattern) – where she was the princess who could turn me from a frog into a prince – then she was my higher power, my drug of choice.  Addicts have an incredible need to protect their supply.  When I was enmeshed in a relationship I needed to try to take her hostage, keep her under my control, to protect my supply.

In the May 2001 Newsletter processing about my fear of intimacy issues (quoted just above and referenced in the Update) I made a big breakthrough in consciousness by uncovering and discovering some layers where I was still empowering black and white thinking – and therefore victim feelings – in relationship to women.  It was a breakthrough that took me to a level of consciousness that for the first time felt like I had reached in my personal process the level of consciousness that my book had been written out of 10 years earlier. (Joy2MeU Update – August 2001)  I was rocketed into a whole new dimension of consciousness because it also helped me to make a great leap in my capacity to have compassion for myself.

“As I am putting the final touches on this Newsletter on June 15th so I can post it, I had another insight into why I have been so terrified of intimacy.  It was not just the shameful unworthiness that would cause a woman to go away, that was so painful.  It wasn’t abandonment that hurt so much – it was the betrayal, which I felt was the consequence, the punishment.  I am sobbing as I get in touch with the pain of that little boy who felt like he was punished for that unworthiness.

The excruciating pain of finding my fiancé in bed with my best friend was the proof of, and felt like punishment for, that unworthiness.  It was only in recovery when dealing with my emotional incest issues, that I realized how my mother had betrayed me.  She always told me how wonderful I was, how special and gifted – she acted as if the world revolved around me.  But she never protected me, or herself, from my father.  My mother was my first love.  She was my Goddess.  The fact that she allowed my father to terrify and traumatize me – she who was perfect in the eyes of that little boy – obviously meant there was something wrong with me. 

I got in touch with the fact that my mother betrayed me years ago.  What I had never seen before today, was the connection between the two betrayals – and the common theme. 

My fiancé’s betrayal was just a repeat of my earliest experience of loving a woman.  Both situations involved betrayal by the primary woman in my life, and the primary man.  The excruciating pain I experienced as a young adult was only a fraction of the devastation felt by that little boy.

That poor little boy.  His first experience of love, the first loves of his life – his God and Goddess – punished him.  Terror of intimacy is a pretty appropriate response.  I have some work to do with this issue”.  –  Joy2MeU Update May 2001 Newsletter 2

Intellectually accepting that we were powerless does not change the core programming.  Being willing to plunge into the grief (the black hole of emotional healing as I describe it in my book) was what led me to peeling away enough levels to really understand that powerlessness on a gut level – so that I can truly start having compassion for myself, Loving my self.  I needed to really own that little boys pain in order to start changing my patterns in my adult relationships.

(In Discernment 1, I mentioned that by learning discernment and peeling away the layers I was able to see the silver lining, to be grateful for, my relationship phobia – which means I came to see a silver lining to this betrayal I experienced in my early twenties.  What I realized is, that the combination of my alcoholism and the rage I was carrying towards my mother, would have made me powerless to not be abusive had I married this woman and started having kids.  I may have spent most of my adult life alone, but at least I didn’t have a family that I terrorized for those years.)

Set up to fail in romance

Codependency is on a very simple level giving power over our feelings of self worth to external sources.  Learning to be discerning – to separate / draw boundaries in our perspective of – our issues, and the levels and layers of those issues, is vital in seeing our self and life with more clarity.   It vital in the process of learning to Love and to create the potential for having a healthy romantic relationship.

“Starting to practice discernment in relationship to the mental level of our being helps us to start taking responsibility for the emotional level.

My attitudes, beliefs, and definitions set up my perspectives and expectations – which in turn dictate my emotional reactions.  It was vital for me to start seeing how the beliefs I was empowering were responsible for the expectations that were setting me up to feel like a victim of other people.  It was vital for me to start seeing myself clearly enough to stop buying into the illusion that what I was feeling was your fault.

“A very important part of my process of finding some balance in my life – of learning how to see myself and how I relate to others and life more clearly – was to get clear that everything in my process relates back to me and my growth process.   I had to get past my codependent belief that I was doing something for you – or you were doing something to me.” – Sharing Experience, Strength, and Hope – My Recovery Process

. . . . . . . .  It is vital to start learning how to be discerning in our relationship with life in order to achieve some integration and emotional balance.  It is empowering to start having a perspective of life that allows us to see a separation, a boundary, between the vertical – our Spiritual yearning to return home to Love, to reconnect with our Source – and the horizontal – our needs for human interaction and stimulation.  Once we stop unconsciously allowing our feelings of self worth to be emotionally enmeshed with our external relationships, then we can start seeing both our self and our Self more clearly.   Then we can start seeing other people and life with more clarity.” – Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Chapter 9: Codependency = Emotional Anorexia

Starting to discern the difference between a codependent relationship and a healthy relationship helped me to start seeing the concepts of romance and love with more clarity – helped me start to understand the difference between a healthy interdependent relationship and a dysfunctional, codependent relationship.

“Codependence and interdependence are two very different dynamics.

Codependence is about giving away power over our self-esteem. Taking our self-definition and self-worth from outside or external sources is dysfunctional because it causes us to give power over how we feel about ourselves to people and forces which we cannot control. Any time that we give power over our self-esteem to something outside of ourselves we are making that person or thing our higher power. We are worshiping false gods.

. . . . . . . . Interdependence is about making allies, forming partnerships. It is about forming connections with other beings. Interdependence means that we give someone else some power over our welfare and our feelings.” – Codependence vs Interdependence – healthy relationship vs dysfunctional

Giving away power over my self esteem and giving away some power over my feelings are two separate issues that I could only start discerning the difference between by starting to see what a dysfunctional concept of romance I learned in childhood.  Our fairy tale perspective of romance was compounded by our experience of love in childhood, so that we were totally set up to be incapable of having a healthy romantic relationship.  I had no idea what Love really is because of my childhood experience of love.

“I don’t remember how the particular insight that I am writing about here came about – whether I heard it, or read it, or just had the thought occur (which would mean, to me, that it was a message from my Higher Self/Higher Power – of course any of those methods would be a message from my Higher Power.)  In any case, this particular insight struck me with great force.  Like most great insights, it was amazingly simple and obvious.  It was to me earth shattering/paradigm busting in it’s impact.  The insight was:

If someone loves you, it should feel like they love you.

What a concept!  Obvious, logical, rational, elementary – like ‘duh’ of course it should.

I had never experienced feeling loved consistently in my closest relationships.  Because my parents did not know how to Love themselves, their behavior towards me had caused me to experience love as critical, shaming, manipulative, controlling, and abusive.  Because that was my experience of love as a child – that was the only type of relationship I was comfortable with as an adult.  It was also, and most importantly, the relationship that I had with myself.

In order to start changing my relationship with myself, so that I could start changing the type of relationships I had with other people, I had to start focusing on trying to learn the True nature of Love.

This, I believe, is the Great Quest that we are on.  Anyone in recovery, on a healing/Spiritual path, is ultimately trying to find their way home to LOVE – in my belief.  LOVE is the Higher Power – the True nature of the God-Force/Goddess Energy/Great Spirit.  LOVE is the fabric from which we are woven.  LOVE is the answer.

And in order to start finding my way home to LOVE – I first had to start awakening to what Love is not. . . . . . 

. . . . Love is also not an addiction.  It is not taking a hostage or being taken hostage.  The type of romantic love that I learned about growing is a form of toxic love.  The “I can’t smile without out you,” “Can’t live without you.” “You are my everything,” “You are not whole until you find your prince/princess” messages that I learned in relationship to romantic love in childhood are not descriptions of Love – they are descriptions of drug of choice, of someone who is a higher power/false god.

Additionally, Love is not being a doormat.  Love does not entail sacrificing your self on the altar of martyrdom – because one cannot consciously choose to sacrifice self if they have never Truly had a self that they felt was Lovable and worthy.  If we do not know how to Love our self, how to show respect and honor for our self – then we have no self to sacrifice.  We are then sacrificing in order to try to prove to ourselves that we are lovable and worthy – that is not giving from the heart, that is codependently manipulative, controlling, and dishonest.” – The True Nature of Love – part 1, what Love is not

We need to start being discerning in relationship to the concepts of love and romance – and start taking action to change that programming before we start to have any chance of having a healthy relationship. 

One of the core components of Codependency is black and white thinking.  For this reason it is possible to quit drinking and using without being in recovery from codependency – because to drinking and/or using is an “either or” “black or white” issue.  Life is not black and white.  Issues with food, spending, relationships, etc. are not black and white.  These issues exist in the gray area of life.  What we are seeking is balance – and in order to find balance we need to learn to practice discernment.

When I was learning how to take responsibility for my feelings by getting honest with myself about my expectations – one of that last layers I peeled was in relationship to romance, to “falling in love.”  My Higher Power – who can sometimes be quite literal and show an amusing sense of humor – brought a wonderful opportunity for growth to me on April First 1990.

“One of the biggest areas in this culture where we are trained to come from a victim perspective is in relationship to romance.  We are taught about “falling in love” as if it were a camouflaged hole in the sidewalk that we were powerless over falling into.  Falling in love is a choice – which is what I got to get real clear on starting on that April Fools Day in 1990 

Falling in love is a state of mind which is very different from Loving someone.  Love is a vibrational frequency that we can tune into (more on that in the article next month.)  What we learned growing up was love that was an addiction – with the other person as our drug of choice, our Higher Power.  (See Toxic Love )   Love is not something that someone else gives to us – it is something that another being can help us to remember and access.  (See Wedding Prayer or Adventure in Romance.)

I understood much of this only theoretically – and not that much – that afternoon in the meadow by the sea.  What I had gotten real clear on by that time is that buying into being a victim was disempowering and dysfunctional for me.  So that evening I got real clear with myself.  It went something like this:

“OK.  Let’s look at this.  Here is a beautiful woman who feels like she might be my soul mate.  Having that powerful an emotional, energetic reaction to her could mean that she is my soul mate but it is much more likely to mean that she is unavailable in a way that is perfect for my patterns.  I have choices here.  (Empowerment is all about owning that we always have choices – Empowerment & Victimization page.)  I can run away in fear that she is a repeat of old patterns but if I do that I won’t learn anything. I can choose to explore what this connection with her is – in which case I will probably get hurt.

Since getting hurt is an inevitable part of life and I definitely need to learn some lessons about romance and emotional intimacy – I think that I will explore what our connection is – but do it differently than I ever have before.  I will make a commitment to myself (our first commitment needs always to be to our self) to learn whatever lessons I need to learn from this woman and will remain alert so that I do not buy into any victim beliefs.  I am choosing to go into the emotional place that she will lead me to learn lessons about my self.  I will not buy into the belief that she is victimizing me.  When I am hurting because: she is not doing what I want her to;  when she is not opening up to the potential of how wonderful we could be together;  when she is reacting to her fears and wounds; I will always remember that I choose to venture down the path this way and that any feelings that result will be my responsibility – they will be the consequences of my choice.  They will not be her fault.  She does not have the power to hurt me unless I give it to her – and I am choosing to give her some power over my feelings.”  Joy2MeU Journal Premier Issue  Newsletter April 2, 1999

I learned to stop giving power to the illusion that I was the victim of love.  Since I realized that falling in love was a choice, I have played with the energy of falling “in love” a few times but have only chosen to dive in head first / “fall in love” one time.

“As a reminder (since it is a year later): in writing my May 2001 Update I realized I that my fear of intimacy and deprivation issues had broken the surface for me to look at.  That spawned 3 pages of Newsletter processing about my fear of intimacy issues.  In the second of those 3 pages I talked about the polarized, black and white, thinking that is a fundamental dynamic of the condition of codependency.  I described how this black and white thinking affected the way I related to romantic relationships.

“The rut for me in respect to romance is for my thinking to be either (1) I will never have another romantic relationship, or (10) we will move in together and be fully immersed in the relationship.  A watered down, less powerful version of the choices I learned in childhood from my role models – either completely unavailable or completely enmeshed.

My thinking in relationship to a relationship, is much healthier and more balanced than it used to be – but it still tends towards the extremes within the spectrum of what is I believe is possible.  It feels more natural for me to completely let go of the idea of having a romantic relationship or to think in terms of what it is going to be like when we are living together, then to think in terms of getting to know someone gradually.  Kind of like, either pretend the water isn’t there, or dive into the deep end without looking first to see what may be just under the surface.

It is easier for me emotionally to not even consider going in the water than to gradually ease myself into the shallow water – because if I am even looking at the water it gets me in touch with grief about being alone.  The abyss of wish-to-die pain and desperate loneliness from my childhood – the deprivation issues that I spent so much of my life either denying or allowing to run my life – do not have anywhere near the power they used to because of the healing I have done.  It is relatively easy now for me to separate out the childhood feelings of loneliness – and they do not any longer have a life threatening feeling of desperation to them.  But I also have been very deprived in my adult life – of Love, companionship, affection, touch, sexual fulfillment, etc. – because of my patterns.  So the grief around those deprivation issues still has power because the deprivation is still happening.” – Newsletter part 2 May 2001 – posted June 15

So, it is easier for me to let go of the idea of ever having a relationship, then to be open and willing to explore a relationship – because being conscious of wanting a relationship triggers my deprivation issues. . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . The romantic within who wants the fairy tale, is the archetypal part of me that I have talked of elsewhere as having always swung between the extremes of allowing the fantasy to rule or locking that part of me in an inner prison and wanting to ignore it.  The one who has the frog self image and wants to worship the princess who can turn me from a frog into a prince.  The romantic is always looking to dive right into any attractive swimming pool – never looking to see if there is even water in the pool, let alone if it is full of big rocks.” – Joy2MeU Journal The Path of one Recovering Codependent ~ the dance of one wounded soul My Unfolding Process – Dance 12 June 2002

In that instance – which I describe in my article An Adventure in Romance – Loving and Losing Successfully – the other person dove into the pool, fell “in love” with me, and invited me in.  When I accepted the invitation and dove in, she got scared and ran away emotionally.  And I was able, when that woman seemingly rejected me, to own my responsibility for my feelings and not blame her.  I also did not blame and shame myself.  There was great emotional pain / hurt / grief, but I did not buy into shaming and blaming myself for being hurt – an incredible gift!  I did Truly Love and lose successfully.

“I have learned:

That when I know who I am and have my self-esteem rooted in my Spiritual connection then I have nothing to fear from intimacy.  I can be hurt for certain because I will be choosing to give some power away over my feelings – but hurt is part of life and well worth the adventure of Loving and Losing.

That it is Truly possible to do enough healing to be able to open my heart to someone and then not take it personally when the other person “rejects” me – because I Truly know in my gut that she is just reacting to her wounds not to some inherent flaw in my being.

That I can have my worst fear of abandonment and rejection appear to come true and not give it any power because I do not have to buy into the disease telling me that it is my fault – that I did something/said something/am something that is wrong/a loser/a mistake/unlovable/unworthy.  This is such a gift – to know that I can keep the critical parent shut up and out of the game is Truly an Amazing Miraculous reward for being willing to do my healing.” – An Adventure in Romance – Loving and Losing Successfully

Having the freedom to not feel the victim of “falling in love” with someone who was unavailable in some way, has saved me countless hours of obsession and agony in those intervening years.  It has been an invaluable asset in learning how to be present in the moment to enJoy my life journey today without feeling I am incomplete because there is no princess in my life – instead of putting so much energy and time into trying to force someone else to play a part in my dream, or beating myself up for being unlovable.

And choosing not to fall “in love” doesn’t mean that I can’t be open to Loving a woman.  “Falling in love” is a temporary condition – a kind of temporary magical insanity that feels delicious and wonderful.  Loving another being in a romantic relationship can be a dynamic, growing, expanding gift if both people are committed to their individual healing so that they can keep returning to some kind of balance and clarity in the relationship.  It can include recurring periods of feeling “in love” for all of the years of the relationship – but expecting the magic of feeling “in love” to last, to be present all of the time, is a set up.

“Being in Love is a wonderful, magical feeling.  It fills us with energy and lightens our spirit so that we feel we are soaring on the wings of Love.  It is wonderful to feel that energy.  What is dysfunctional is expecting it to last forever.  It is important to know that the feeling of being in love is not going to last forever, or be there all of the time.  Two people who are working on emotional intimacy – who are communicating and working through issues – can recapture that feeling again and again for years and years, but it is not going to always be the reality of your relationship.” –  Healthy Relationships – Part 6, Romantic Love as a Concept

It is in some ways sad that since 1990 I have had only one occasion to choose to “fall in love” – a reality that is directly related to both my issues and to the fact that my “road gets narrower.”  I am actually not sure I am ever going to choose to dive in head first again – because I am don’t think that is part of a healthy, realistic relationship.  However by owning that I have that choice, I can play with the energy of falling “in love” while exploring the pool / learning to Love someone as a person in reality rather than just casting her in the role of the princess of my dream.  I can act as if, treat the other person as if, I am “in love” with her in the moment, while still staying grounded in reality enough to have boundaries and not lose myself in the illusion that the dream of happily ever after has come true.

In my personal process, my terror of intimacy was so huge that it has taken years of pealing away layers to discover pockets of black and white thinking that were blocking me from being available to explore a romantic relationship.  One of the gifts to me of this web site – and especially the processing I have done in my Joy2MeU Journal – is that it has brought me to the point where recently I have been getting to play with the magical energy of “in love” while learning about giving and receiving Love in relating to a woman in recovery.  The processing that I did in those May 2001 Newsletter pages peeled off a huge layer – as did subsequent processing first in July of 2002 and then in October and November of last year.  More will be revealed about whether this relationship opportunity will continue and/or where it will take me, but it has led to breakthrough after breakthrough in my process of learning to open up to Love.  It has been / is a magnificent gift in my life.

By learning:  to separate my self worth from emotional attachment to another person;  to separate the emotional truth of my childhood from the emotional energy of Truth which is my intuition;  to see romance and love from a more realistic, adult, recovery perspective;  to recognize the reactions coming from the magical thinking romantic part of me so that I don’t deny reality in my desire to have the dream come true;  are all areas where learning to practice discernment has helped me to make major progress in getting past my terror of intimacy.

As I have stated elsewhere in my writing, in every relationship break up that I have ever dealt with, it was letting go of the illusion / dream of the relationship that caused more grief than letting go of the actual person.  We want the dream so desperately that we deny and rationalize abuse and deprivation in a relationship – blame the other person or blame our self – and sometimes settle for the illusion of not being alone.  We hold onto the dream – deny and rationalize the reality of the relationship – because of the desperate loneliness of the wounded child within us.  Separating the dream from the person can help us to see more clearly – can help us to let go.

It was not possible to become an empowered, conscious co-creator in my life until I could see my self and my issues with more clarity – until I could start to separate the different issues and levels of those issues.  As long as my self worth was bound up in the outcome of a relationship, it was necessary for me to try to control that relationship – to try to manipulate the other person to live up to the role I had cast her in as the princess who could turn me from a frog into a prince.  As long as my inner child terror of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection was involved in determining my perspective of a relationship, the thought of the relationship ending felt life threatening.  Until I could start separating the reality of romantic relationship from my fairy tale of what a relationship “should” be – I was incapable of having a healthy romantic relationship.

I realized early in my recovery, that I had a pattern in my human relationships – friendships as well as romance – of sacrificing my self and my needs in the now for illusion of connection.  With a woman whom I was romantically attracted to, I sacrificed my self for the “potential” of the future, the possibility that she would be the princess who could transport me to happily ever after.

No one can transport me to “happily ever after” because there is no happily ever after in these bodies on this plane of existence.  It is not part of the reality of this human experience we are having.  The reality is that a romantic relationship takes a lot of hard work and willingness to work through issues that come up.  It is not a destination, it is the start of a new chapter in our life adventure, a new stage of our journey.  It is an opportunity for growth and healing.  We do not get to know how long any particular stage of our journey is going to last – and if we try to make it into what we think it “should” be, we miss out on experiencing what it is.  By letting go of the destination and being present in the moment, we can “Love as if we have never been hurt” – some of the time.

“The more you do your healing and follow your Spiritual path the more moments of each day you will have the choice to Truly be present the moment.

And in the moment you can make a choice to embrace and feel the Joy fully and completely and with Gusto.

In any specific moment you will have the power to make a choice to feel the Love in that moment as if you have never been hurt and as if the Love will never go away.” – A Wedding Prayer / Meditation on Romantic Commitment

I cannot stress enough how important it is, how empowering it is, to start to see life as it is and learn to make the best of it – instead of allowing false beliefs about life and love to cause us to be blocked from learning to Love our self.  We were emotionally traumatized in childhood and programmed with a bunch of false beliefs that cause us to have an appropriate and unavoidable fear of taking the risk of loving and losing.  Discernment is a key to learning how to move through that fear so that we can take the risk of Loving

Learning to separate feeling hurt from blame and shame – so that we can stop beating our self up for having our hearts broken;  learning to see life, our self, and other people more clearly so that we don’t deny reality in our quest for the dream;  learning to own and release the grief from our childhood and our adult life so that we can be present in our own skins in the moment instead of reacting out of regret for the past or fear of the future;  learning to see life as a journey of growth and healing, of experiencing and learning, instead of as a test we can fail;  are all parts of the process of learning to give and receive Love.

It was vital for me to stop buying into the belief that I was a victim:  of love;  of deprivation;  in romantic relationships – so that I could stop allowing fear to run my life.

“Love as we have been programmed to understand the concept, is one of the great victimizers in our culture – and one of the biggest excuses for unhealthy behavior. 

Whenever someone I have been working with answers the question “Why do you stay?” – in a relationship that is abusive or with someone who is unavailable – with the line “because I love him/her,”  my response is “No, what is the real reason.”  Because the “love” is never the bottom line.  The bottom line is always fear.  Fear of being alone, of not being able to support self, of never having another relationship, of getting in a worse relationship, etc. 

If we are living life in reaction to fear, we are being victims – and there is no chance of us being healthy in a relationship if we are making our choices in reaction to fear.”  –  Healthy Relationships – Part 6, Romantic Love as a Concept

We will always feel fear – the key is to not allow fear to define and dictate our lives for us.  That is why it is so important to have a spiritual belief system that gives us the courage and faith to move forward in life and in Love.  We need to enlarge our perspective of life so that we can separate Truth from false beliefs in order to open up to accessing the Love that is our True nature.

The more we enlarge our perspective, the closer we get to the cause instead of just dealing with the symptoms.  For example, the more we look at the dysfunction in our relationship with ourselves as human beings the more we can understand the dysfunction in our romantic relationships.

Sophisticated Discernment

When I refer to the sophistication of the online book I have been writing for the past year, it is primarily the levels of discernment that I discuss in that work that I am referencing.

“I do not have any idea at this time when I will be writing the new chapters for the beginning of this book, or how many more chapters I will be adding at the end – as I say, to be revealed.  I just felt that it was time to begin this separation because as written, the chapters from 3 onward took on a whole new tone and focus than the first two had.  It has been obvious to me for quite awhile that they were different works.  Now the process of separating them has begun.  Another ironic note since separation is one of the themes in this online book.  As the detachment section of this Author’s Foreword states: 

“One of those paradoxes is that in order to get in touch with our ONENESS with everything, we must first be able to define our self as separate from others.  And in order to become an integrated whole being, we must first separate and own all of the different parts of our self within.”

In Book 2, I discuss the importance of separation on multiple levels in regard to a number of different issues, including:  separating ego strength from self worth and separating our feelings of self worth from our emotional relationships to external sources.” – Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Author’s Foreword

Learning to separate our feelings of self worth from our emotional relationships to external sources is a complicated and complex process that involves reprograming our ego defenses to align with how life really works instead of how we learned it worked in childhood.  The attitudes, definitions, and beliefs we learned in childhood have been dictating our perspective and expectation of life – have been the determining factor in our relationships and emotional reactions to life.  In recovery we need to be willing to take a clear look at all of those attitudes and beliefs in order to change our perspectives and relationships.

One of the reasons that our perception of, and relationship with this life business has been so out-of-balance is that we have lacked the ability to discern between different levels.  The twisted, distorted perspective of life that humans have evolved is, in part at least, the result of trying to apply the Truths of one level to the reality of another. . . . . .

. . . . . . So we have four levels, perspectives, on which “happily ever after” is a concept that contains at least some Truth.  However, applying that Truth to the physical plane in the form of believing that you will achieve “happily ever after” when you get married or find your mate is obviously a false and dysfunctional belief that has resulted from human inability to discern between levels.

Human beings have also tried to apply realities of the physical level to the Spiritual level with the disastrous result that humans have come up with an image of the God-Force that fights wars.  This image of the God-Force, with the characteristics of a war-like male, is completely out of balance because it is not the image of a balanced male warrior – it is the image of a male with no feminine side.

In Chapter 14 I talk about separating the Metaphysical power of the name, message, and symbolism of the Master Teacher Jesus Christ from the angry, vengeful, Old Testament male image of god that is at the foundation of so much of the war we see manifesting in our world today.  In Chapter 15 I talk about the masculine feminine imbalance that has dominated human evolution on this planet and how the message of Love taught by Jesus brought feminine energy into the concept of god in Western Civilization.  I also point out how this is one of those good news / bad news situations.  It is bad news because people that are stuck in black and white thinking don’t have the capacity to pick the baby out of the bathwater – thus truth is seen as a question of right and wrong, us versus them.  Some people feel the resonance of Truth in the message of Love and accept the dirty bathwater with the baby – while others reject the shame and judgment and throw out both.  I used to throw out both because of the shame based religion I grew up in.  My recovery helped me to find the wisdom to separate and discern so I could pick the baby out of the bathwater.  The wisdom to discern the difference is the key to balance, inner peace, and freedom.

The teachings of all the Master Teachers, of all the world’s religions, contain some Truth along with a lot of distortions and lies.  Discerning Truth is often like recovering treasure from shipwrecks that have been sitting on the ocean floor for hundreds of years – the grains of Truth, the nuggets of gold, have become encrusted with garbage over the years.

In the process of escaping from my black and white thinking and trying to discover a Spiritual belief system that supported the belief that I was Lovable and worthy, I was led to question any belief that didn’t support Love and my intuitive belief that we are all ONE.

In my personal recovery, I found that I needed a Spiritual container large enough to allow for the possibility that I was not a defective, shameful being.  I searched until I found some logical, rational means to explain life in a way that would allow me to start letting go of the shame I was carrying and start learning how to be Loving to myself. – Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light   Chapter 14 Spiritual Manifesto

The bottom line for me in my quest to find a concept of a Higher Power that could Love me can be summed up in a couple of places I quoted myself in Chapter 12: Codependency in New Age Movement. 

“What matters are questions like:  How does this information apply to my healing process today?;  How can this message help me see myself more clearly?;  Can the information help me to forgive myself and be more Loving to myself?;  Is the information and the way it is being presented about Love – does it support Love or is it empowering separation?” – The True Nature of Love part 6 – Twin Souls, Souls Mates, and Kindred Spirits

“There is Truth in all religions, spiritual belief systems, esoteric practices, etc. – but there is also twisted, distorted misinformation in them all. . . . . If our intellectual paradigm is limited, then we cannot see and hear clearly.  If our emotional wounds are being allowed to unconsciously run our lives then we are incapable of Truly understanding our intuition.” – My Spiritual Belief System and the New Millennium

The bottom line to my message in the Spiritual Manifesto of Chapter 14, is that the meaning and purpose of life is Spiritual.  We are on a journey to reconnecting with Love – to learning how to Love our self so that we can open up Loving, and being Loved by, other human beings – by our neighbors.

The reason that we have not been Loving our neighbor as ourselves is because we have been doing it backwards.  We were taught to judge and feel ashamed of ourselves.  We were taught to hate ourselves for being human.

We are here to learn to Love ourselves so that we can Truly Love our neighbors.  We’ve been doing it backwards:  hating our neighbors like we hate ourselves.

It is kind of a cosmic joke, see.  We have been taught that we are human and that it is bad and shameful, and that we have to somehow earn the right to be Spiritual.  The Truth is that we already are Spiritual and there is nothing bad or shameful about “being human.”

We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.  We are here to experience feelings and touch and Love.  The goal of the healing process is not to reach someplace where we are above all the human experiences and feelings. We are here to feel these feelings.

As I say at the end of that chapter:

“It is certainly not necessary for you to agree with my beliefs – but please for the Love of Jesus (or Allah, or The Goddess, or Jehovah, or whatever name resonates for you as a representation of a Loving Higher Power) and for your self, question any belief you are carrying that is blocking you from opening up to Love.” – Chapter 15 Spiritual Manifesto

Love is our quest.  Recovery from codependency – the inner child healing work – is a path to reconnecting with Love, to learning to give and receive Love.  It is a terrifying, painful, Joyous, fascinating, awe inspiring journey.  I recommend in highly. 😉 ~ Robert 7-7-03” – Joy2MeU Update Newsletter 2 June 2003

The Update Newsletters I used to write regularly are often very long and contain a lot of really valuable information about the recovery process as I share my processing through my issues.  This is the rest of a page on Loving and Losing that I first published in July 2005.   The page both were taken from is the second page of the Newsletter portion of the June 2003 Update.  (the sharing there starts off with The Road gets Narrower – and begins a discussion about being alone and loneliness that continues in Newsletter Discernment Part 1).

In that Update and the Newsletters I was talking about the latest chapters in the online book I was publishing at that time.   The sophisticated discernment was referring to that work: Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life – which is part of Dancing in Light a subscription area of the site that includes “some of the most sophisticated of my writings – dealing with very advanced levels of recovery and some revolutionary and controversial perspectives on metaphysics, spirituality, and enlightenment.”

Joy2MeU Journal

There are quotes in this excerpt from The Joy2MeU Journal.  The Joy2MeU Journal is “a body of work in a password protected part of the site where Robert is publishing the story of his Spiritual Path (11 part), a ongoing personal recovery journal (58 installments), and portions of his Trilogy (14 Chapters of a Magical, Mystical, Spiritual Fable) and Attack on America (11 Chapters) books not available on regular Joy2MeU site.

Special offers for either / or both subscription areas of my site are on this sale page.  For the rest of July 2020, I am offering a free subscription to either The Joy2MeU Journal or the Dancing in Light sections of my website to anyone who emails me at joy2robert7@gmail.com

Due to the pandemic I am now offering myA Empowering & Life Changing Workshop on Zoom. An Intensive Training in Robert Burney’s Spiritual Integration Formula for Inner Healing / Codependency Recovery / Inner Child Healing – on Zoom – https://www.joy2meu2.com/workshop-zoom 

 

Chapter 3: Emotional honesty

““We learned about life as children and it is necessary to change the way we intellectually view life in order to stop being the victim of the old tapes.  By looking at, becoming conscious of, our attitudes, definitions, and perspectives, we can start discerning what works for us and what does not work.  We can then start making choices about whether our intellectual view of life is serving us – or if it is setting us up to be victims because we are expecting life to be something which it is not.” – (Text in this color is used for quotes from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

In the course of writing this article – which seems to be turning into another online book – I realized that though I talk a lot about the importance of emotional honesty in my work, I probably do not give a lot of down to earth, easily understood examples of what the term means to me.  So, I decided to start this Chapter 3 with an example. 

It was focusing on the dynamic of expectations that was the key for me in starting to get emotionally honest with myself.  Starting to understand the cause and effect relationship between my emotional reactions and my expectations was essential for me to start understanding why my relationship with life was so dysfunctional.  I, of course, in my codependency, had swung between the extremes of feeling, and believing, that it was all my fault because of my shameful defective being – and being angry and resentful at other people, the system, something or someone external to my being. 

The twelve step recovery application of the disease model in the treatment of alcoholism – the concept that I had been powerless over my past behaviors because I had a disease – helped me to take enough shame out of my perspective of myself to start seeing my life with a little bit of objectivity.  The spiritual approach of the twelve step program – that there is a Power greater than myself that is on my side, The Force is with me – helped me to shift my intellectual paradigm enough to start to see life as something other than a test I could fail by doing it “wrong.”  The definition of insanity that I heard in my first days of recovery – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – caused me to start focusing on cause and effect. 

It was the concept of powerlessness that led me to start becoming empowered to take responsibility for my life.  Instead of viewing life through a perspective that was black and white – either I had to be perfect or I was shameful – I was able to start to see what my part had been in how painful and miserable my life experience had been.  How I had some responsibility – how I was creating cause in my life that had negative consequences – but that it did not mean that there was something inherently wrong with me.  I started seeing that my relationship with life was dysfunctional, was not working, and that I could take some action to change that relationship.

Insane Expectations – Road Rage

The specific area that opened me up to a new perspective on my insanity, was starting to understand what my part was in the road rage I was experiencing driving on the streets and freeways of Los Angeles.  Looking at the cause and effect relationship between my expectations and the rage I was feeling at all the stupid blankety blank drivers in Southern California greatly accelerated my process of becoming emotionally honest with myself – and opening up my mind to a Spiritual Awakening, a paradigm shift in consciousness.

“There is an old joke about the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic. The psychotic truly believes that 2 + 2 = 5.  The neurotic knows that it is 4 but can’t stand it.  That was the way I lived most of my life, I could see how life was but I couldn’t stand it.  I was always feeling like a victim because people and life were not acting in the way I believed they “should” act.

I expected life to be different than it is.  I thought if I was good and did it “right” then I would reach ‘happily ever after.’  I believed that if I was nice to people they would be nice to me.  Because I grew up in a society where people were taught that other people could control their feelings, and vise versa, I had spent most of my life trying to control the feelings of others and blaming them for my feelings.

By having expectations I was giving power away.  In order to become empowered I had to own that I had choices about how I viewed life, about my expectations.  I realized that no one can make me feel hurt or angry – that it is my expectations that cause me to generate feelings of hurt or anger.  In other words, the reason I feel hurt or anger is because other people, life, or God are not doing what I want them, expect them, to do.

I had to learn to be honest with myself about my expectations – so I could let go of the ones that were insane (like, everyone is going to drive the way I want them to), and own my choices – so I could take responsibility for how I was setting myself up to be a victim in order to change my patterns.  Accept the things I cannot change – change the things I can.” – Serenity and Expectations – intimately interrelated

Expecting other drivers to drive the way I think they “should” is absolutely, incredibly insane.  Talk about egotistical and arrogant.  I, being an excellent driver myself (how many people do you know that don’t think they are excellent drivers?), knew how people should drive – I was right and anyone who didn’t drive the way I thought they “should” was wrong.  I felt extremely, righteously justified in ranting and raving and cussing out other drivers – sometimes cutting them off and giving them the finger, while wishing I had a laser mounted on the roof of my car so that I could just vaporize them.  Luckily, this was in the days before people started shooting each other on the Freeways, or I may not have ever made it into recovery.  Actually, this was something I continued to do into my first few years of recovery.

Detaching enough to look with some objectivity at how I was relating to driving a car in L. A., allowed me to awaken to how insane it was to allow my emotions to be dictated by such a ridiculous expectation.  Then I was also able to look at my emotional reactions and get in touch with how dishonest I was being emotionally in relationship to other drivers.

What I came to understand about my emotional experience of driving, was that one of two things was happening.  One was, that other drivers were scaring me.  The way they were driving – either too slow or too fast, cutting me off, swerving back and forth between lanes, etc. – was causing an actual fear of survival reaction.  That kind of primal human emotional response that is generated by a sudden loud noise or any perception of a threat of physical harm.

When something scared me, and I reacted to the fear with anger – that was emotionally dishonest.  I wasn’t owning my true feelings.  In reaction to the jolt of fear energy that shot through me, I became the angry, self righteous victim of the other drivers “idiocy.”  The reality that this happened almost every time I drove on the freeway, just proved to me how many idiots there were out there – because I was relating to the experience from a victim perspective.  It was impossible for me to have any serenity because I was giving other drivers the power to throw me into anger – which often triggered the suppressed rage I was carrying at how unfair, unjust, and painful life was.

Once I started to look at what my part was in those emotional reactions, at how I was setting myself up with my expectations, then I could start to take responsibility for changing that which I have the power to change.  I learned to accept the thing I cannot change – other drivers – and change the thing I can, my attitude towards other drivers.  It was when I realized that this anger was emotionally dishonest, and what my part in empowering that emotional reaction was, that I was able to start taking back the power over my feelings that I was giving to those “idiots.”

After that, when something another driver did scared me, I would own the fear.  I would say out loud, “That scared me.”  Then I would say a prayer for the other driver.  I would ask that the other driver be helped to become happy, joyous, and free (knowing that the process of them opening up to that possibility would involve having their denial ripped away so they were not so unconscious – a prayer both Spiritually aligned and humanly selfish 😉 – and would offer up the incident as an amends for one of the thousands of times I had done something while driving that scared other drivers.

(During my years pursuing an acting career in Hollywood – the role of suffering artist being perfect for both my alcoholism / addiction and my codependent martyrdom – I lived out the romantic vision of the struggling actor by making my living by waiting tables and parking cars and driving a taxi.  Driving a cab for several years – often stoned – really built up the number of driving amends I owe.  Seeing those incidents as Karmic – what goes around comes around – also played a part in helping me to stop buying into the belief I was being unfairly victimized on the freeway.)

The second thing that I realized was happening, had to do with fear also.  This was the fear that caused me to try to control life.  That fear caused me to be very self obsessed.  I was getting angry because those people were getting in my way.  The immature, self centered perspective of life which was dictating my relationship with life, caused me to think and act as if I was the only person who was important.  I reacted out of an ego selfishness that told me these idiots should get out of my way because I had places to go and things to do that were much more important than anything they were doing.

This ego driven, self centered fear was directly related – both as cause and effect – to my unconsciousness, my inability to be present in the moment.  I was always caught up in the past or the future, and related to driving in traffic as a great inconvenience that was slowing me down. (Which, also, sometimes led to me driving too fast and cutting between lanes.)

The society I grew up in taught me that reaching the destination was what I should focus upon, was the thing that was vitally important.  I was always striving to reach the destination where I would be fixed, where I would be respected and loved.  When I reached that destination (college degree, fame and fortune, the right relationship, the Academy Award, etc.) then I would live “happily ever after.”

I was forever in pursuit – either of the illusive “happily ever after,” or for something to distract me from, or kill the pain of, feeling defective because I had not already reached the destination.  I was always bouncing between the extremes:  trying to figure out how to control my life, how to do the “right” things, to get “there” – or working on going unconscious (with alcohol, drugs, obsession, rumination, food, whatever) to escape the pain of being “here.”  Being “here,” being present in the moment in my own skin, was too painful because I had a dysfunctional relationship with my own emotions – and was carrying a ton of suppressed grief energy.

And it was so painful emotionally because the subconscious intellectual paradigm that was dictating my relationship with self and life, was insane, delusional, and dysfunctional.  I could never relax and enjoy life (without some chemical help, either from a substance or from an illusion/fantasy about love or success that would affect my brain chemistry) because wherever my life was at that point – according to the critical parent voice in my head – was not good enough and was my fault, or their fault.  I was always feeling like a victim. (Empowerment and Victimization – the power of choice)

I needed to start letting go of that destination programming and start learning how to be in the moment.  To actually be present and conscious while driving my car.  (What a concept!)  To start relating to driving as being a perfect part of my journey, a classroom – a wonderful arena for Spiritual growth.

When the rush hour traffic was disrupting my plans of getting someplace by a certain time, I would practice my Spiritual program.  I would take some deep breaths to get into, and conscious of, my body.  Then I would thank the Universe for this wonderful opportunity to practice patience and acceptance.  I would take some steps to let go of the urgency I felt – the inner child’s fear of doing it “wrong,” the feeling that the world would come to an end if things did not go the way I had planned them.  I would remind myself that life was a journey, and that this moment was a perfect part of that journey.  I would talk to my inner children and tell them it was okay – that if I was going to be late, that was a perfect part of God’s plan.  I would let go of my picture of how I thought things have to unfold for me to be okay.  I would affirm that I am Unconditionally Loved and am being guided on my journey.

I would look around me, to see if there was something the Goddess wanted me to see – and that perhaps, was the reason I was stuck in traffic.  I would remind myself that it was possible that this delay was really a wonderful gift.  That perhaps because I was being delayed:  I would not be in a traffic accident later that day:  or the timing would be perfect for me to run into someone I needed to see, that without the delay I would have missed;  or something to that effect.

I would remind myself that I am not in control of life, I am not writing the script, so:

I need to surrender the illusion that I am in control; 
remember that I have a Loving Higher Power who is in control; 
and be willing to accept reality as it was being presented to me, and take whatever action I could to make the best of the situation – to align with God’s will so I could flow with the Universal plan.  (Work steps 1, 2, & 3 – the dance of recovery.)

That action may just be to relax, be in the moment, and do some prayer and meditation (talk and listen to The Great Spirit – which can certainly include expressing my irritation for the delay.)  The action may be to figure out an alternate route, get off the freeway at the next opportunity and take surface streets – but not with that feeling of life and death urgency, rather with sense of adventure.  “This is an interesting twist, let’s see how this unfolds.”

I started to learn to take responsibility for my feelings – to own the things I have some control over.  Learning how to be emotionally honest with myself allowed me to start becoming empowered to take responsibility for my life and stop empowering insane expectations.  By focusing on letting go of the belief in victimization that was caused by my attitudes and perspectives – the mental level of my being – I could greatly decrease the feelings of victimization, the amount of emotional energy that was being generated on an emotional level.  I still had some feelings of being victimized, but I could be nurturing and Loving in relationship to those feelings – and set some Loving boundaries with my inner children who were reacting out of the immediate gratification urgency of a child.  (I am just going to die if I don’t get what I want!)

I learned to develop an observer self – a mature, recovering adult with a Spiritual perspective – that could tell the critical parent voice to shut up with all the shame and fear messages, and assure my inner children that everything was going to be okay because there is a Higher Power in charge of my life. (Learning to Love our self)

Twisted and Distorted is the Dance of the Emotional Cripple

“We are set up to be emotionally dysfunctional by our role models, both parental and societal.  We are taught to repress and distort our emotional process.  We are trained to be emotionally dishonest when we are children.”

Early in my recovery, it was vital for me to start realizing how emotionally crippled I had been by the role modeling and messages I had experienced growing up in an emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional culture.  I had to become conscious of how dysfunctional my relationship with my own emotions was, in order to start healing the dysfunction in my relationship with my self and life.

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.

“In order to find out who we are, we have to start being emotionally honest with ourselves.  And in order to be emotionally honest with ourselves, we have to start changing our perspective on our own emotional process.

As a child, I learned from the role modeling of my father that the only emotion that a man felt was anger.  From my mother, whose definition of love included the belief that you cannot be angry at someone you love, I learned that it was not okay to be angry at anyone I loved.  That left me with very little permission to feel anything.  That did not mean that I did not have feelings – it meant that I was at war with my own emotions, that I could not be honest with myself about having them.  As long as I could not be honest with myself emotionally there was no way I could know who I was.  Until I started owning the grief and rage from my childhood, the sadness and hurt and fear that I had denied all of my life, I was incapable of being honest with myself, incapable of knowing who I Truly was.”

I remember very distinctly the thoughts I had in one of my first AA meetings when several people at a podium spoke of being afraid.  My thought was, “Who are these people – talking so much about being afraid.  I was never afraid.  They stuck guns in my face and it didn’t scare me.”

I did not have permission from my self to acknowledge that I felt fear, because I had learned growing up that real men do not feel fear.  I was emotionally crippled because I did not have permission to own my fear – or my pain or sadness.  I had no permission to be emotionally vulnerable – “weak.”  So, like the manly man I was trained to be, instead of owning that I was afraid or hurt, I got angry.

The Truth, as I soon came to understand it, is that I had really been scared of everyone and everything.  I was scared because I knew I was not perfect, and I was sure that other people would discover what a shameful loser I was.  Scared that I would fail the life test – that I would never reach “happily ever after.”  Afraid that I would never find someone to Love me.  The little boy inside of me was scared that god would punish me for being unworthy – scared of being condemned to burn in hell forever.

While pursuing an acting career, I would pontificate to other actors, sharing my wisdom about the key to building a true character – which was to understand the characters gut level fears.  I maintained that all people were driven by their gut levels fears, and that any other levels of motivation were in reaction to that level of fear.  I was a very good actor.  I could really make characters come alive because of my insights into the human emotional process.  However, I personally was not afraid of anything.

Talk about emotional dishonesty.  The power of denial is truly awesome.  I could see other people with some degree of clarity, but I did not have a clear perspective of my my self.

What is so insidious about codependency, is that it is entrenched in our core relationship with self and life.  The intellectual paradigm that determines our perspective of our self – and therefore how we behave in relationship to life and other people – is subconscious until we get into recovery and start becoming conscious enough to stop being the victim of false beliefs, of delusional and insane expectations.  Until we start becoming conscious, we are powerless over our behavior because we cannot see our self with any objectivity.  Since the only choices in the polarized perspective of life (that was imposed upon me in childhood) were right or wrong – and wrong was shameful – my ego tried to protect me from the toxic shame I felt at the core of my being with denial and rationalization.

To own the incredible pain and shame I felt at the core of my being, the self hatred I felt towards myself for being imperfect and unlovable, felt like a threat to my survival.  So, my ego kept me in denial of any feelings which were not acceptable to the perspective of being a man I learned in childhood.

The subconscious beliefs that were dictating my relationship with self, told me that fear was not an acceptable emotion for a man – so I had to deny that I had any fear.  My subconscious intellectual paradigm, the beliefs that were defining my relationship with my own gender and emotions, severely limited my perspective of myself.

As long as I had a distorted and twisted perspective of my own emotions it was impossible to see my self with any clarity.  I was powerless to understand my self and my behaviors until I started to get emotionally honest with my self.  It is not possible for a person to be honest in relationships until they start getting emotionally honest in their relationship with self.

Control and fear – thinking to avoid feeling

Attempts to control are a reaction to fear.  I attempted to control life because I was so afraid.  As I explain in my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls, human beings have been doing life backwards due to a condition of reversity in the planetary energy field of Collective Human Emotional Consciousness.  One of the effects of this condition, is living life focused externally – trying to control things over which we have no control – while simultaneously judging and shaming ourselves because the way we are living life is not working.

“I spent most of my life doing the Serenity prayer backwards, that is, trying to change the external things over which I had no control – other people and life events mostly – and taking no responsibility (except shaming and blaming myself) for my own internal process – over which I can have some degree of control.  Having some control is not a bad thing; trying to control something or somebody over which I have no control is what is dysfunctional.  It was very important for me to start learning how to recognize the boundaries of where I ended and other people began, and to start realizing that I can have some control over my internal process in ways that are not shaming and judgmental – that I can stop being the victim of myself.”

I had to deny any emotions that were not acceptable to my subconscious programming in order to feel that I had some control of my life.  Since the only acceptable emotion to the definition of being a man I had learned growing up was anger – and even anger was only acceptable to feel in relationship to other men – I had to deny almost all of my feelings.

As a child I had to learn to disassociate, to not be present in the moment in my own skin, because the emotional pain was too great.  The primary way I learned to be unconscious early on was to be in my head to avoid the feelings.  Later on, I would use drugs and alcohol to escape being present “here” – in my body in the moment – but even then being in my head was my primary defense against feeling my feelings.

I would fantasize, intellectualize, and analyze.  I would focus on something or someone outside of myself – and was always caught up in the past or future.  I was not capable of being present in my own skin in the moment because it was not okay to feel my feelings.  Because I was living in so much fear – at the same time I could not acknowledge that I felt any fear – I had to put a great deal of energy into denying that fear.

I would escape from my emotional reality by thinking about the future – creating grandiose fantasies of a positive nature (rehearsing my Academy Award acceptance speech, or fantasizing about the unavailable woman I was currently obsessing about) or of a negative nature (worry, impending doom, financial insecurity) – or ruminating on the past, either beating myself up for something “stupid” I said or did, or wallowing in resentment and self pity about how someone had victimized me.  This is very dysfunctional because it generates more emotional energy.

“Worry is negative fantasizing.  It is a fantasy that is being created in reaction to feeling fear.  It is not real – it is something that is being created because my mind has slipped into the old familiar rut of right and wrong thinking.  Worry is not a feeling – it is a reaction, an negative emotional state, that is created by the perspectives of a belief system that empowers illusions like failure.  The sooner that we can pull ourselves out of that rut and start seeing the situation as part of a learning process – shift back into a recovery perspective – the less negative emotional response we will generate in relationship to the situation.

Emotions do not have value in and of themselves – they just are.  What gives emotions value is how we react to them.  We were programmed to react negatively to emotions and adapted defenses to try to keep from feeling emotional energy.  Being in our head worrying about the past or the future, is a defense against being in our own skin and feeling our feelings.  But it is dysfunctional – it does not work.  Reacting negatively to our feelings generates more feelings.   The more we worry, the more fear we generate. . . . . . .

When I catch myself worrying then I know that I am not being emotionally honest with myself.  Worry is a symptom that tells me I am avoiding some feelings.” – Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility ²

In order to start getting emotionally honest with myself, I had to start becoming aware of the ways in which I was avoiding my feelings.  I learned to observe myself so that I could be conscious enough to catch myself when I was thinking to try to avoid feeling.

I realized that any time I was worrying about “what if,” or fantasizing about “if only,” or obsessing about a woman or the outcome of a situation, it was sign that I was being dishonest with myself emotionally.  I started to become aware of all the ways I had been taught by society to keep my feelings at bay.  The ways I talked and thought that helped me stay in denial of my feelings.

“Emotions are energy.  Actual physical energy that is manifested in our bodies.  Emotions are not thoughts – they do not exist in our mind.  Our mental attitudes, definitions, and expectations can create emotional reactions, can cause us to get stuck in emotional states – but thoughts are not emotions.  The intellectual and emotional are two distinctly separate though intimately interconnected parts of our being.  In order to find some balance, peace, and sanity in recovery it is vitally important to start separating the emotional from the intellectual and to start setting boundaries with, and between, the emotional and mental parts of our self. . . . . .

. . . . . . . I had to become aware that there were such things as emotions that lived in my body and then I had to start learning how to recognize and sort them out.  I had to become aware of all the ways that I was trained to distance myself from my feelings.  I am going to mention a few of them here to help any of you reading this in your process of becoming emotionally honest.

Speaking in the third person.  One of the defenses many of us have against feeling our feelings is to speak of ourselves in the third person.  “You just kind of feel hurt when that happens” is not a personal statement and does not carry the power of speaking in the first person.  “I felt hurt when that happened” is personal, is owning the feeling.  Listen to yourself and to others and become aware of how often you hear others and yourself refer to self in the third person.

Avoiding using primary feeling words.  There are only a handful of primary feelings that all humans feel.  There is some dispute about just how many there are primary but for our purpose here I am going to use seven.  Those are: angry, sad, hurt, afraid, lonely, ashamed, and happy.  It is important to start using the primary names of these feelings in order to own them and to stop distancing ourselves from the feelings.  To say “I am anxious” or “concerned” or “apprehensive” is not the same as saying “I am afraid.”  Fear is at the root of all those other expressions but we don’t have to be so aware of our fear if we use a word that distances us from fear.  Expressions like “confused,”  “irritated,” “upset,” “tense,” “disturbed,” “melancholy,” “blue,” “good,” or “bad” are not primary feeling words.

Emotions are energy that is meant to flow: E – motion = energy in motion.  Until we own it, feel it and release it, it cannot flow.  By blocking and repressing our emotions we are damming up our internal energy and that will eventually result in some physical or mental manifestation such as cancer or Alzheimer’s disease or whatever.” – The Journey to the Emotional Frontier Within

Someone could ask me if I was afraid, and I would respond, “No, I’m not afraid.  A little concerned perhaps, but certainly not afraid.”  Saying, “I am feeling some fear.” is a quite different energetic experience from saying, “I am a bit apprehensive.”  Naming and claiming the feeling is an important part of emotional honesty.  There is power in the way we express ourselves.  It is very important to start becoming aware of the emotional energy in our bodies.  In order to be present in our own skins in the moment, it is necessary to be consciously in touch with our feelings.

There was no way that I could start changing the way I was relating to life until I started to own my fear.  Fear is not a bad thing – just as sadness, pain, and anger are not negative or bad in and of themselves.  Emotions are a vital part of our being that need to be owned, honored, and respected.  Denial and repression of emotions is what leads to negative consequences.

“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.”

Human beings have a fear of the unknown for a reason.  It is part of our survival programming.  Because I did not have permission to own my fear, I was very out of balance emotionally.  It was impossible for me to own that I had fear and still feel that I had worth as a man, so the only options I had – according to the subconscious programming of my childhood – were to deny my fear or feel that I was defective as a man.

“Fear is an emotion that exists to serve us.  It provides a warning system to help us be aware of potential danger.  It is appropriate and healthy to be aware when we are driving.  To be conscious of potential threats.  It is important for us to be in touch with our fear so that we can pay attention to it when it sends us a message.

What is not functional is to completely empower fear or to deny it.  The 1 or 10 extremes of the disease.

Emotions are an incredibly powerful and important part of this experience we are having of being human.  Emotions are a vital part of our being – and dictate the quality of our life experience.

“Emotions have two vitally important purposes for human beings.  Emotions are a form of communication.  Our feelings are one of the means by which we define ourselves.  The interaction of our intellect and our emotions determines how we relate to ourselves.

Our emotional energy is also the fuel that propels us down the pathways of our life journey.  E-motions are the orchestra that provide the music for our individual dances – that dictate the rhythmic flow and movement of our human dance.  Our feelings help us to define ourselves and then provide the combustible fuel that dictates the speed and direction of our motion – rather we are flowing with it or damming it up within ourselves. . . . . . .

 . . . . there are two primary transformers from which emotional energy is generated.  Our ego self and our Spiritual Self.  Our ego was traumatized in childhood and programmed very dysfunctionally. The ego is the seat of the disease of codependence.” – Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility ²

The ego is the part of us that composed the score and conducts the music for our dance of codependence.  It composed that score based upon the definitions, attitudes and beliefs it adapted in early childhood due to what our emotional experience of being a human child felt like.” – Newsletter part 2 May 2001 Update

Denying my fear was dysfunctional and emotionally dishonest.  Focusing on fear, giving it a great deal of power, is also dysfunctional – and can be immobilizing.  The extremes of the disease of codependency.

In writing the May 2001 Joy2MeU Update just quoted, I shared how I caught myself making a statement that set off alarm bells in my codependency control center – my observer self.  Observing and listening to myself made me aware that my fear of intimacy issues were up to be looked at again.  I subsequently did 3 Newsletter web pages of processing about those issues (and another 3 pages in my journal pages of the Joy2MeU Journal) in which I uncovered a level where I was being emotionally dishonest with myself – and was empowering some black and white thinking.

Recovery is on an ongoing process of uncovering, discovering, and recovering.  We have layer upon layer of wounding – which means layer upon layer of denial, emotional dishonesty, and rationalized perspectives.  We keep peeling another layer of the onion and getting to a deeper level of honesty – both intellectually and emotionally.

June 3rd will mark the 16th anniversary of my codependency recovery.  (I write this some time ago – my anniversary is June 3rd 1986: The Story of Joy to You & Me)  There are still times when I find the process irritating.  But the benefits have been incredible.  It is through healing my relationship with my self that I have found an incredible inner peace.  That I have learned to be present in the moment – and have some moments of Joy – every day.   Recovery works.

Focusing on the future or the past, blaming them or blaming me, underreacting or overreacting (stuffing my feelings until they exploded forth in ways that made me feel crazy and ashamed,) feeling triumphant over “winning” or wanting to die because I was such a loser, were the rhythms of my dance of codependency.  As long as I was in denial and unconsciously reacting to life I was doomed to “keep doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.”  Unconsciousness doomed me to ride on a merry go round of cause and effect – never getting anywhere different emotionally.  As long as I was incapable of being emotionally honest with myself, I was doomed to keep repeating the patterns that dictated my emotional reality.

Codependency recovery is the path to finding enough freedom from the past to find happiness and Joy in being alive today.  I highly recommend it. 😉 – Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light  Book 2:  A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life  Chapter 4: False Self Image

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 chapter of this online book is available through my regular website: The codependency movement is NOT ruining marriages!

I have published some other chapters of this work as blogs including: Chapter 8 Codependents as Emotional Vampires,  Chapter 13: Changing the Music: Love instead of fear and shame, and Chapter 4: false self image.

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.)

The True Nature of Love – part 2, Love as Freedom

“The Universal Creative Force, as I understand it, is the energy field of ALL THAT IS vibrating at the frequency of Absolute Harmony.  That vibrational frequency I call LOVE.  (LOVE is the vibrational frequency of God; Love is an energy vibration within The Illusion which we can access; love is, in our Codependent culture, most often an addiction or an excuse for dysfunctional behavior.) 

LOVE is the energy frequency of Absolute Harmony because it is the vibrational frequency where there is no separation.

Energy moves in wave-like patterns; what enables movement is the separation between the valley of the wave and its peak.  The distance from peak to peak is called it’s wavelength.  It is a law of physics that as vibrational frequency rises, as it gets higher, the wavelength gets shorter.  The frequency of LOVE is the vibrational frequency where wavelength disappears, where separation disappears.

It is a place of absolute Peace, motionless, timeless, completely at rest:  The Eternal Now. 

The Peace and Bliss of The Eternal Now is the True Absolute Reality of the God-Force.”

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

What is Love?  That is the question.  I have been quite balled up the last week in attempting to write this column.  No, that is not quite true – I have been unable to get into a space to even attempt to write this column.  I need to get into a certain space – need to be feeling a special kind of creative energy – to write about a topic such as this.  It was much easier to write last month’s column about “what Love is not.”  Then I was writing about something much more concrete, much more black and white (the irony of this – since one of the characteristics of the disease is black and white thinking – is fodder for a completely different column.)  The dynamics of the disease and the wounding process are very clear in my eyes.  I have experienced the type of love that is shaming, abusive, manipulative, smothering, intrusive, addictive, etc., my whole life. 

In fact, I learned a new word while writing this column.  As I was composing the above paragraph, and taking note of how much easier it was to write last month’s column, the word empirical came to mind.

So, I did what comes naturally when a word pops to mind – I looked it up.

empirical  1. Relating to or based on experience or observation.  2. Relying entirely or to excess upon direct, repeated, and uncritically accepted experience: opposed to metempirical.

Aha, a new word.

metempirical  1. Lying beyond the bounds of experience, as intuitive principles; not derived from experience; transcendental.

So, even though I just said that it was easier to write ‘what Love is not’ because of my experience – in Truth when I say that Love is not shaming and abusive, I am actually stating my intuitive Truth.  If I were just relying on my experience, I would say “love is shaming and abusive and controlling,” “love is being responsible for other people’s feelings and well being,” etc. – and that would be the Truth about love with a small l.  When I say Love is not shaming, I am talking about the True Nature of Love as I intuitively understand it.  Once I started to awaken to the reality that civilized society on this planet was based upon some false beliefs, then I started to be able to validate my intuitive feeling that something was dreadfully wrong here.  I Knew deep inside, from a very young age, that this was not my home.  I Knew that Love, if it was really such a wonderful thing, should not be so painful – just as I Knew it was ridiculous for both sides in a war to think that God was on their side and would help them kill the enemy.

Love that is Freedom

I could feel that Love must be something much greater than I had learned growing up.  If Love is so wonderful, if Love is the answer – then Love should set us Free.  That is what is coming up as I write this column – Love that is Freedom.  Love that is Joy.  Love that is the only Truth that has ever mattered.

Love that is Freedom – what does that mean?  To me it means the Freedom to be OK with being me.  The Freedom to relax and enJoy the moment.  The Freedom to be – just be, without having to strive, to work for, to try to reach, to prove myself, to earn Love, to get “there.”

It means: Freedom from shame.  Freedom from judgment.  Freedom from loneliness.  Freedom from feeling separate, different, not a part of, not acceptable.  Freedom from the endless, aching longing for something more.  Freedom from the hole in my soul – from the bottomless abyss of pain and shame and sadness that I feel at the core of my being.

This place is not my home.  When I yearn for Love, I am longing to go home.

“I was ‘transported with Joy’, and my ‘spirit was soaring’, as I danced on the rock.  And in my dancing and singing I Truly understood what those expressions meant.  For in being ‘transported’ and ‘soaring’ I was merely tuning into the vibrational frequency that is Joy and Love and Truth.  I could see clearly now how human beings throughout history had been trying to tune into Love.  The primal urge that has caused humans to attempt to ‘alter their consciousness’, through drugs or religion or food or meditation or whatever, is no more than an attempt to raise one’s vibrational frequency.  All any soul in body has ever done is to try to return home to God – we were just doing it all backwards because of the reversity of the planets energy field.” – The Dance of The Wounded Souls Trilogy Book 1 “In The Beginning . . . “ (Chapter 4)

“Humans have always been looking for a way home.  For a way to connect with our Higher Consciousness.  For a way to reconnect with our creator.  Throughout human history, human beings have used temporary artificial means to raise their vibrational level, to try to reconnect with Higher Consciousness.

Drugs and alcohol, meditation and exercise, sex and religion, starvation and overeating, the self-torture of the flagellant or the deprivation of the hermit – all are attempts to connect with higher consciousness.   Attempts to reconnect with Spiritual Self.   Attempts to go home.”

Part of the reason that I have had trouble in writing this column is because of the intellectual context I was approaching it from.  I was thinking that I had to know what I was talking about, had to be able to communicate to you the Truth about Love.  That was pretty silly of me.*  Love is what I am learning about.  Love is what recovery and healing are all about.  Love is the goal.  Love is home.

*[Actually, it was my disease at work – causing me to judge and shame myself for not feeling competent to write about the True Nature of Love. This disease of codependence is so incredibly insidious, treacherous, and powerful.  It continually turns back in on itself.  The disease doesn’t want me to take the risk of Loving and trusting my self and then it turns around and causes me to judge myself because I don’t Love my self.  I don’t Love myself because of the disease – the ego programming that is a result of being wounded and traumatized by being Spiritually orphaned in an alien environment.  By being born into and raised in an emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional, Spiritually hostile, shame based, Love mutilated (mutilate – 1. To deprive of a limb or essential part. 2. To damage or injure by the removal of an important part.) civilization on a planet where civilized societies have evolved based on the belief in separation and fear-based hostility – separation between beings, separation between humans and their environment, and separation between the flesh and the Spirit.  The civilization I was raised in is so sick and twisted that it took the teachings of the Master Teacher who came into body to teach us about Love and twisted those teachings into something shameful and hate-filled.  Jesus Christ carried a message of Love – not shame and judgment.]

“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

Now what I thought last month was going to be one column about the True Nature of Love has turned into at least a 4 part series.  In dealing with the shame I was feeling about not knowing enough about Love to write about it’s True Nature, I have in fact been processing through that shame to get to a place where I can be free to write about the type of Love that can set me Free.  So, I will save “Love as a vibrational frequency” and “Love and romance” for future columns.

I have only a little experience with feeling Love that sets me Free – and that has come primarily since I have been in recovery.  In those moments when I am able to connect with Love in it’s True form, then I feel that all of the pain and suffering has been worth the experience.  Then I get a taste of what home really feels like.  Then I get to feel the Joy and Truth and Love that Truly does set me Free from the illusion of separation.  In those moments, I can sometimes even feel grateful for that illusion.  Because without the illusion of separation from The Source Energy, from Love – I would never have gotten the opportunity to experience Love.

I am going to end this column with a continuation of the quote from my book “The Dance of Wounded Souls” which I started it with.   This quote is from the very end of my book.  This is my intuitive Truth.  This is an important part of the understanding which has led to the beginning of my liberation from the shame.  This Truth has helped me to start Loving myself a little bit – to start Loving myself enough to be Free to start believing that maybe, just maybe I am Lovable and Loved.

“The Peace and Bliss of The Eternal Now is the True Absolute Reality of the God-Force.

The illusion of separation – the distance, the separation, between the peak and the valley – is what makes motion possible.  Separation is necessary for energy to be in motion.  The illusion of separation was necessary to create The Illusion.

As part of the ONENESS of ALL THAT IS, we are God and God is LOVE.  We are part of the Truth of ONENESS vibrating at LOVE.  As part of the ONENESS of LOVE we would never have been able to experience Love.  It is kind of like, “If you are sugar then you never get to taste sugar.”

In God we are LOVE.  Without the illusion of separation we would never have had the opportunity to experience Love.  Would never have been able to Love and be Loved.

Separation was necessary to allow us the incredible gift of experiencing Love, of Loving and being Loved.

The Illusion that caused all of the pain is also the vehicle for allowing us to feel and be Loved.

If you pursue your path of healing, I think that you will find as I have that it is very much worth it.  It is worth it to be able to experience Love.

This is the Age of Healing and Joy.  It is time to start remembering who you Truly are, to start feeling and tuning into the Truth which exists within you.

We are all butterflies.

We are all swans.

We are Spiritual Beings.

The Springtime of the Spirit has arrived:  It is possible to learn to Love yourself.

It is possible to be happy, Joyous, and free – if you are willing to be scared and hurt, angry and sad.

You are Lovable.

You are Loved.

You are LOVE.”

Robert Burney is a pioneer in the area of codependency recovery / inner child healing. His 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  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.  The Joy2MeU website is designed in an ancient design program which is not mobile friendly.  A new site – joy2meu2.com – is a redesign of joy2meu.com in a mobile friendly format. The Joy2MeU2 siteindex page that will help you to access most of his articles on mobile friendly sites (around 170.) 

Robert recently posted a sale page to generate some income prior to his birthday on July 23rd.  Special Birthday Sale in honor of Robert’s 70th (Egad!!) Birthday!!!  https://www.joy2meu2.com/special-birthday-sale

Articles 3 through 6 of this series are now exclusively available in the Dancing in Light pay to view component of Joy2MeU.com  There are special offers for Dancing in Light and Joy2MeU Journal (where the Trilogy quoted can be accessed) subscription areas of Joy2MeU.

 

Chapter 19: Taking self worth out of the Romantic equation

Codependence The Dance of Wounded Souls

“One of the false beliefs that it is important to let go of, is the belief that we need another person in our lives to make us whole. As long as we believe that someone else has the power to make us happy then we are setting ourselves up to be victims.

A white knight is not going to come charging up to rescue us from the dragon. A princess is not going to kiss us and turn us from a frog into a prince. The Prince and the Princess and the Dragon are all within us. It is not about someone outside of us rescuing us. It is also not about some dragon outside of us blocking our path. As long as we are looking outside to become whole we are setting ourselves up to be victims. As long as we are looking outside for the villain we are buying into the belief that we are the victim.

As little kids we were victims and we need to heal those wounds. But as adults we are volunteers – victims only of our disease. The people in our lives are actors and actresses whom we cast in the roles that would recreate the childhood dynamics of abuse and abandonment, betrayal and deprivation.

We are/have been just as much perpetrators in our adult relationships as victims. Every victim is a perpetrator – because when we are buying into being the victim, when we are giving power to our disease, we are perpetrating on the people around us and on ourselves.

We need to heal the wounds without blaming others. And we need to own the responsibility without blaming ourselves. As was stated earlier – there is no blame here, there are no bad guys. The only villain here is the disease and it is within us.” – quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

I state in my book that codependence is a lousy word to describe the phenomena it has come to be associated with. A more accurate term would be outer or external dependence. We are programmed to give power over our sense of self worth – over how we feel about our self – to external sources and outside conditions.

Nowhere is the result of this programming more disastrous on a personal level than in the area of romantic relationships. Our subconscious and emotional programming started with fairy tales that taught us that when we meet our prince or princess we will live happily-ever-after. Movies and books and songs reinforced the original programming that in order to be whole and happy we must be in a relationship.

The result of this programming is that we are set up to feel like failures in romantic relationships. When we give power over how we feel about our self to another person in a romantic relationship we are practicing toxic love – making the other person our drug of choice, our higher power.

A healthy romantic relationship is an interdependent relationship – not a codependent one. An interdependent relationship is one where two people who have a healthy sense of Self worth, choose to become partners, to form a union. Two whole individuals – or more accurately (since as I have stated, we are all wounded and learning to access a True sense of self/Self worth) two people who are in recovery from their codependency working on owning their inherent worth and wholeness as beings, working on learning to be emotionally healthy and honest – who form an alliance / partnership with each other, not two half people who come together to feel whole.

In a healthy interdependent relationship as I mentioned in Chapter 9, we give the other person some power over our feelings – not over our self worth. Giving another person some power over our feelings is a completely different thing than giving them power over our self worth.

When we choose to give power away over our feelings we give the other person the power to help us feel happy. That also means we are giving them the power to hurt us. Caring for anyone or anything means we have an emotional investment in our relationship with that person or thing. To emotionally invest in a relationship is to take the risk of getting hurt – of getting our hearts broken – if we lose that relationship.

But it is not having our heart broken – it is not pure grief / emotional pain – that can be so debilitating, paralyzing, and agonizing when a relationship ends. It is the loss of self worth that we feel – the level to which we have invested, are dependent upon, the relationship to feel good about ourselves – that causes us to feel like we are going to die, that can make us feel like we want to die. The blame and shame and judgment caused by our codependency creates artificial feelings of inadequacy, of trauma, of agony. The unresolved abandonment / rejection / betrayal issues from our childhood are triggered and throw us into a place where we feel the hopelessness and powerlessness that we felt as a child.

The critical parent disease voice – old tapes / subconscious and conscious intellectual ego programming – tells us what losers and failures we are. The wounded inner child places react out of pain and shame from our childhood – the places within us where we feel unlovable and defective. We blame ourselves for the relationship ending with codependent messages like: if only I had not said that; I should have done that; I will never have a good relationship; I will always be alone; etc. Or we go to the other extreme and try to blame it all on the other person. People stalk and murder ex lovers because of the blow they feel they have suffered to their self worth – because they feel they have lost the source / drug that was making life bearable.

Getting our hearts broken is a normal and natural part of life. Blaming our self or the other person is codependency. The emotional pain of a heart break is very painful, but it gets better over time. The blame and shame of codependency causes us to be bitter and resentful, causes us to avoid relationships or to pick another person who will recreate our wounds – another person to try to fill the hole we feel inside of our self.

“Loving and losing is better than never loving” when all we experience is a broken heart. It is the blame and shame of the disease that makes us feel like failures who are incapable of loving – like a victim of our own unworthiness.

At the end of 1998, when I had reached a place in my recovery where I was secure in my self/Self worth, the Universe presented me with an opportunity to experience a romantic relationship in which my worst fear of rejection seemed to manifest – and I did not blame her or me. It was an incredible experience – very painful, but also very liberating.

“It Truly is a completely different experience to have a relationship where my self-worth is not at risk . . . . . if my self-worth is not at risk then another person can only add to me, they have no power to diminish me. What a gift.” – An Adventure in Romance – Loving and Losing Successfully

As that relationship was ending, before it ended, I wrote what I think is one of the most beautiful pieces I have ever written which I mentioned in a previous chapter and will include as the next chapter. It is called: A Wedding Prayer /Meditation on Romantic Commitment.

“You are not the source of each other’s Love. You are helping each other to access the LOVE that is the Source.

The Love that you see when you see your soul in the others eyes is a reflection of the LOVE that you are. Of the Unconditional Love that the Great Spirit feels for you.

It is very important to remember that the other person is helping you to access God’s LOVE within you – not giving you something that you have never had before.” – Chapter 20 A Wedding Prayer / Meditation on Romantic Commitment

Anytime we see another person as our source of love, we will feel a need to control and manipulate that person to be what we want them to be – to be there for us to feed off of emotionally so we can feel good about our self. There is nothing Loving about using another person emotionally because we do not know how to feed ourselves by accessing the True Source.

Love can feel magical and wonderful – can help us feel like we are soaring as the other person helps us to access the higher vibrational frequencies of Love and Joy. To have the opportunity to experience Love is one of the major reasons we have come into human body – but thinking a romantic relationship is what give us worth is codependent and dysfunctional. Romantic relationships can be wonderful opportunities for growth and Spiritual Awakening when we start seeing them realistically, when we stop allowing the perspective of the magical thinking romantic within us to dictate our relationship with romance.

“You are not going to live happily-ever-after once you find your prince or princess. There is no happily-ever-after on this plane of existence. You may find your prince or princess but they will have issues to deal with. Relationships are something that needs to be worked on – not some magic wand that makes everybody happy.” – Chapter 9 Interdependent, not codependent“

From Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth Chapter 19 – Taking self worth out of the Romantic equation

I am living on the Central Coast now (1/2020) and only doing myIntensive Workshops in Morro Bay at the moment.

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, Amazon.UK, or Barnes & Noble.

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, on Amazon UK, on Barnes & Noble, or in Kobo format.

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, on Barnes & Noble, or in Kobo format.

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 on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.

Discernment part 2: Loving and losing

December 10th, 2015 – someone made a comment on this blog that I published 6 months ago while I was out of town over the weekend and I decided to post it again.  It is good stuff.

Emotional pain, feeling hurt, is an inevitable part of this human experience we are having – just as loss and grief are unavoidable parts of life. There is no happily ever after when we find our Prince or Princess, when we do life “right.” Judging and shaming our self for having been hurt is part of the inner war that is codependency.

“The dysfunctional dance of Codependence is caused by being at war with ourselves – being at war within.

We are at war with ourselves because we are judging and shaming ourselves for being human. We are at war with ourselves because we are carrying around suppressed grief energy that we are terrified of feeling. We are at war within because we are “damming” our own emotional process – because we were forced to become emotionally dishonest as children and had to learn ways to block and distort our emotional energy.

We cannot learn to Love ourselves and be at peace within until we stop judging and shaming ourselves for being human and stop fighting our own emotional process, until we stop waging war on ourselves.” – Quotations in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

I realized in my codependency recovery that getting hurt was not the biggest problem for me – it was the way I beat myself up, and blamed myself, when I got hurt that felt unbearable. Judging and shaming myself for the pain and heartbreak I experienced caused me to live a life of suffering.

“When I had first gotten sober, I had noticed a saying on some bumper stickers or wall hanging or someplace. That saying was “The pain is mandatory, the suffering is optional.” What I was really beginning to realize at this point in my process was that the suffering came about because of resistance to feeling the pain – and anger and fear. By changing my attitudes, I was changing my perspective and giving myself permission to feel the feelings. I was starting to allow them to flow instead of putting all my energy into damming them, suppressing them. That is where the suffering really comes from – denying my own emotional reality.” – Joy2MeU Journal – My Spiritual Path: 30 Days in the Desert – Falling Apart and Breaking Through II

I had to deny my own emotional reality in childhood because in my parents were my Higher Powers whom I was incapable of seeing as anything but perfect. I felt like it was my fault I was hurting, because something was inherently wrong with me. In my adult life I was still emotionally reacting to life out of the intellectual beliefs I had adapted in childhood – out of the interpretations of an immature egocentric mind. Until I started separating my adult perspective of reality from my childhood subconscious and emotional programming, I was incapable of having compassion for my own pain.

Until I started to learn discernment intellectually, I was set up to keep allowing my childhood experiences to dictate my relationships with life – and with love. In this quote from one of the articles in my Healthy Relationships series, I have done what I suggest in the article – that is, I have inserted “love” into the quote from my book everywhere it says “life.”

“We learned about life (love) as children and it is necessary to change the way we intellectually view life (love) in order to stop being the victim of the old tapes. By looking at, becoming conscious of, our attitudes, definitions, and perspectives, we can start discerning what works for us and what does not work. We can then start making choices about whether our intellectual view of life (love) is serving us – or if it is setting us up to be victims because we are expecting life (love) to be something which it is not.” – Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney

Consciousness raising is a process of enlarging the intellectual paradigm which we base our relationship with life upon. As I have stated previously in this series, our beliefs, attitudes, and definitions determine our expectations and perspectives – which in turn dictate our emotional relationships to everything and everyone in our environment. And when I say everything, I am not just talking about objects. Everything includes ideas, concepts, opinions, etc.

In order to have healthier romantic relationships it is very important to examine our concept of romantic love. If we do not have a healthy concept – realistic definitions and beliefs about – romantic love, then we do not have much chance of having a healthy relationship. If our concept of romance is based on the fairy tales and books, songs and movies, from our childhoods, then we are set up to be disappointed in our romantic relationships.

Read the quotation above and substitute “love” everywhere it says “life” and you might better understand why you have felt like a victim in romantic relationships. We were set up to be victims in romance because we were taught that it is a magical paradise where we will have all of our needs met – and live “Happily ever after”. We were taught that getting the romance was the goal and that after that everything was smooth sailing.” – Healthy Relationships – Part 6, Romantic Love as a Concept

As long as I saw love / life as a black and white test of my worth, as a competition that could be won or lost – with winning taking me to happily ever after and losing causing me to judge myself as unlovable because of my hurt and heartbreak – I was not only incapable of loving and allowing myself to be loved, I was incapable of really living.

Living our life trying to avoid getting hurt keeps us from Truly being alive. It is Truly better to love and lose than to never love – but until I started changing the programming that told me I wasn’t lovable I was powerless over my patterns. I was unable to be discerning in the choices I made about who to get involved with because of my codependency. I was incapable of really receiving love because I did not believe I was lovable at the core of my relationship with myself.

My ego interpreted emotional pain in childhood as a threat to survival, and adapted a defense system to try to protect me from being hurt emotionally. That defense system – my codependency – does not want me to relax and be in the moment, because then I might get hurt. It does not want me to take risks, to venture into the unknown. In one of the first installments of my personal journal in the Joy2MeU Journal, I shared part of an email I had written to a friend about how important it was for me to start learning how to take power away from the old tapes – from the codependent programming that had been running my life.

“. . . . . . A client was admiring the bouquet of flowers that I had in my office and I told her the story of why I often buy flowers for my office. About two years ago I did a workshop at a church in the San Fernando Valley on a Sunday afternoon. When I was packing my stuff up getting ready to leave they gave me the flower arrangement from the Sunday service. I didn’t want it. I watched my reaction – which was I didn’t want the flowers – and the thought that I saw pass through my mind was “Why do I want those flowers, they will just die.” I immediately recognized that for what it was, an old tape. When I discover old tapes dictating my reactions I need to do something to counter them – so I started buying flowers to put in my office.

Why have flowers when they are just going to die? . . . . . .

Why take a risk if I will fail?

Why open up to Love if I am just going to get hurt?

Boy is that my old stuff! – my disease talking.

I don’t remember if you ever heard me give my talk before it became a book – but I used to always end my talk with quoting the words to a song that was perfect for ending the talk. I couldn’t use it in the book because they wouldn’t give me copyright permission. The song was The Rose.

“Some say Love it is a river that drowns the tender reed,
Some say Love it is a razor that leaves your soul to bleed.
Some say Love it is a hunger – an endless aching need …
I say Love it is a flower – and you it’s only seed.

(This next part is the part that really speaks to me of the way that I lived most of my life)
It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance,
It’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance.
It’s the one who won’t be taken that never learns to give,
It’s the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.

When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long,
and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong.

Just remember in the winter far beneath the winter snow,
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes the Rose”

So once more I get to work on countering all the old tapes and all the seemingly concrete evidence to the contrary and tell myself that: YES :

It is better to Love and lose than never Love,

it is better to have flowers that are beautiful for a few days than not to enjoy the flowers. . . . .” – Joy2MeU Journal  The Path of one Recovering Codependent ~ the dance of one wounded soul My Unfolding Process – Dance 2 July 1999

As long as I was not in recovery from codependency I was trying to avoid being hurt by not taking the chance of opening up to someone who was available to love me. This was my codependency’s way of trying to keep my shameful, defective being a secret. In my unconscious codependent defense system this translated behaviorally into being attracted to women who were unavailable so that I could blame them. Thus my attempts to have a relationship became self fulfilling prophecies – repeating behavior patterns. Having my heart broken meant that either I was a loser or it was the other person’s fault – so I needed to blame it on her to keep from falling into the bottomless abyss of pain and shame within me.

The ridiculous thing about this, one of the things that makes codependency such a stupid, dysfunctional defense system, is that feeling rejected by anyone could throw me into that abyss.

“It is a defense adapted by my ego in an attempt to keep me from opening my heart so that it can be broken again. If my heart is broken again, I have to make it your fault because the only other option in a polarized perspective of life is to admit that I am to blame. To blame myself is to plunge into the abyss of pain and shame at the core of my being – the unendurable, hopeless, want to die, place within me where I feel shamefully unlovable and unworthy.

This is the behavior that I was powerless to change until I started to get emotionally honest with myself. The intellectual and emotional programming from my childhood set me up to be incapable of having a healthy intimate relationship.

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.

Until I started to consciously work on changing the ego programming which was keeping me in denial and emotional dishonesty, I was unable to change my core relationship with self – I was unable to see through the false self image, was unable to see my self with any clarity.” – Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Chapter 4: False Self Image

There is nothing we humans beings want more than to feel Loved – in my opinion.

“On one of my web pages I state that romantic relationships are the greatest arena for Spiritual growth available to us. I believe that this is the Truth because it is the area that is most important to us. Recently I saw a communication from the Dalai Lama in which he stated a very simple Truth: we all want to the same thing, to be happy and feel Loved. I would simplify that even further to say: feeling Loved makes us happy – so ultimately we all want the same thing, to feel Loved.” – Healthy Relationships – Part 5, Healthy Joyous Sexuality

This is a reflection of our desire to return home to LOVE – to reconnect with our Source. On a human level it manifests as a desire to feel Loved by other human beings – and especially to feel Loved by one other human being in a romantic relationship, in a relationship that includes physical union.

“Everything on the physical plane is a reflection of other levels. Ultimately, the strong sexual and sensual desires of human beings really have very little to do with the actual physical act of sex – the True compulsion to unite is about our wounded souls, about our endless, aching need to go home to the God/Goddess Energy. We want to reunite in ONENESS – in LOVE – because that is our True home.” – Jesus & Mary Magdalene – Jesus, sexuality, & the bible

Our codependent programming causes us to believe that love has to come from external sources and validation. That feeling loved by another person will fill the hole in our soul. It cannot. When we think another person is the source of love for us, then we are making that other person our higher power.

I believe that the great quest for all of us old souls who are doing this healing is to feel Loved. Before we are open to that however, we need to heal our relationship with ourselves enough to start believing that we deserve Love. Doing the inner child healing work is an act of Love that is a Loving thing to do for our self.

As long as we are looking for that Love externally, we are looking for love in all the wrong faces and wrong places. That doesn’t mean that another person can’t help us access that Love – what it means is that it is important to remember that the Source of that Love is accessed internally, not found externally.

“You are together because you resonate on the same wave lengths, you fit together vibrationally, in such a way that together you form a powerful energy field that helps both of you access the Higher Vibrational Energy of Love, Joy, Light, and Truth – in a way that would be very difficult for either one of you to do by yourself. You are coming together to touch the face of God. You are uniting your energies to help you access the Love of the Holy Mother Source Energy.

You are not the source of each other’s Love. You are helping each other to access the LOVE that is the Source.

The Love that you see when you see your soul in the others eyes is a reflection of the LOVE that you are. Of the Unconditional Love that the Great Spirit feels for you.” – A Wedding Prayer / Meditation on Romantic Commitment

If we are not open to accessing Love internally – through our Spirit – then we will not be able to take in and hold love coming from another person. We won’t feel like we deserve it on a gut level – so we will sabotage it in some way.” – Joy2MeU Update Newsletter 2 June 2003

The Update Newsletters I used to write regularly are often very long and contain a lot of really valuable information about the recovery process as I share my processing through my issues.  This is taken from the second page of the Newsletter portion of the June 2003 Update.  (the sharing there starts off with The Road gets Narrower – and begins a discusses about being alone and loneliness that continues in Newsletter Discernment Part 1)

This excerpt is actually less than half of that Newsletter 2 page – the page continues with My Terror of Intimacy – which I am publishing on this blog in July 2020.

Joy2MeU Journal

There are two quotes in this excerpt from The Joy2MeU Journal.  The Joy2MeU Journal is “a body of work in a password protected part of the site where Robert is publishing the story of his Spiritual Path (11 part), a ongoing personal recovery journal (58 installments), and portions of his Trilogy (14 Chapters of a Magical, Mystical, Spiritual Fable) and Attack on America (11 Chapters) books not available on regular Joy2MeU site.

Also quoted is Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life – which is part of Dancing in Light another subscription area of the site that includes “some of the most sophisticated of my writings – dealing with very advanced levels of recovery and some revolutionary and controversial perspectives on metaphysics, spirituality, and enlightenment.”

Special offers for either / or both subscription areas of my site are on the special sale page.