The first challenge before any person who wants to find a way out of some hurtful codependent relationship is to see that while we do have the awareness required to interact with life -- and even to learn challenging new skills -- this level of awareness is not enough.
True enough, we are awake in the physical world, but the continuing and often mounting evidence of our own heartaches reports that we must be asleep to ourselves in the psychological and spiritual realms within us. And these are the subtle regions that count when it comes to being in real control of our lives.
If we wish to be free of destructive or otherwise self-compromising conditions that always attend being unaware of ourselves, then we must do the inner work of becoming aware of ourselves in a whole new way.
Our inner work is first about being awake and aware in the moment and then, to consciously meet the moment unfolding before us through a newly acquired understanding of ourselves. Instead of allowing difficult moments to make us react mechanically -- where we simply fall into familiar passive forms of unconscious behavior -- our awakened state allows us to actively detect and then negate these self-limiting tendencies.
Who we really are cannot be compromised without our unconscious consent. We are neither the weakness we feel, nor are we the one in contempt of ourselves for its power over us. We have just been asleep to ourselves, that's all. Now we wake up!
We must learn to say NO to those unconscious parts of ourselves that want us to believe that the way our life has gone is the only way it can go. We must say NO to the lies this lower nature throws at us when it tells us we will lose ourselves if we end a destructive relationship we had been deceived to live in.
The truth is it won't be our life that comes to a close as we walk away from what we now see never worked. No! What will begin to die is the dark nature whose will we had done, because it cannot live in the light of our new wish and inner work to be free.
We must never allow ourselves to forget that there are many sleeping parts of ourselves that secretly feel good while they get us to do wrong! Remember: No form of externalized codependent behavior can exist or exhibit itself without some unseen character at work within us providing it the right conditions it needs for its foul life to flourish. With this in mind, here are some common codependent areas where we all ache (often without knowing it) because we fail to stay awake:
Making "peace" with people who would punish us: There are parts of us that would rather be punished by unkind people than have to spend one minute being alone by ourselves, because the only way these same parts in us can exist is if they have someone to resent or somehow fear. In this case we remain in these ruinous relationships because the fear or emptiness we feel in even considering leaving them is felt to be too much to bear on our own. Here is the key to escaping this captivity: This fear that we experience does feel real, no doubt; but it belongs to an imagined self. Collecting and then consciously cultivating this new knowledge of ourselves points the way out if we will walk with its truth in our hand. To begin, walk away from anyone who "helps" you to feel that it is necessary to hurt; leave anyone who causes you pain for "your own good." Here's the rule to remember: Never make peace outwardly -- or inwardly -- with any person or any psychological state that punishes you. Say NO and go! A whole new and independent life awaits you.
Blaming others: Whenever we allow angry parts of us to cast blame upon others for the conditions that we find ourselves in, we enable the sleeping nature within us to stay in its dream that if it weren't for others doing us wrong, we would never be so upset and angry, defeated or depressed. The truth is there are unconscious parts of us that readily find fault with others in a misguided effort to remain infallible in our own eyes. Each time we blame someone else, we agree to remain asleep in this misery-making mistaken identity. Saying NO to this nature is saying goodbye to a host of imagined enemies this false self needs to remain itself, as well as to a war that can never be won.
Complaining about our life: The self that looks out at life and complains about what it sees cannot see that if it weren't for a false picture it holds of how things should be, connected with the mistaken sense of self created by clinging to this picture, it wouldn't have anything to be negative about. The more this nature compares what life isn't to its own idea of imagined happiness, the more it complains, and the more complaints it makes, the more real it feels. Say NO to this codependent negative nature by learning to choose consciousness over resentfulness.
To speed your journey to freedom from all forms of codependent relationships, it is very helpful to make a list of areas in your life where you find yourself aching for one reason or another. To get you started with this special study of yourself, following is a short list of suspect places where we tend to fall into wrong relationship with those around us, or with our own familiar thoughts and feelings.
We are in unconscious codependent relationships with others whenever we find ourselves:
- Meddling in the lives of others or allowing others to tinker with our troubles.
- Gossiping about anything, but especially taking part in denigrating others we know and otherwise associate with.
- Standing around and spreading any form of "gloom and doom" either in a casual conversation or in the confines of our own thoughts.
- Agreeing with the hatred of anyone else for any other person, group, or condition.
- Taking part in any form of a dark inner dialogue with ourselves about some imagined enemy or otherwise unwanted circumstance.
- Allowing others to make their problems our own so that we have to carry the weight of their discontentment.
- Entertaining any thoughts from any source -- coming from within ourselves or from those outside of us -- telling us that our life is without meaning.
What should be clear now is that we must do a special kind of inner work if we wish to catch and cancel self-harming codependent behavior. We must learn what it means to put the truth of ourselves before all things. When we will strive to do this one thing, then little by little we will attract to ourselves a higher strength that has no problem saying NO to what has never cared for us. This new NO then becomes a YES to self-wholeness, the secret source of the happiness we have been seeking in all the wrong places.
The reward that rises out of this special inner work is new freedom from habitually self-defeating codependent behaviors. Among some of the many rewards for our willingness to meet reality anew is that old fears fall away. Doubts disappear. Pains born of past regrets lose their hold over us. Simply put, the more awake we are, the less we ache. We begin to awaken the presence and the power within us to let go and let God.
