veil of perception...

I’ve been reading a bunch of memoir lately -research on voice. I find it fascinating that the way a writer puts words together creates voice and in the end character. But that’s not my topic for today. The other thing I find fascinating is the ending of a memoir. The genre of memoir I’ve been reading most is “chic lit” and if the girl doesn’t end up with a man the story often ends with something like, “I knew I was going to be OK.”

Which translates to –I love myself. But my question is how does a fucked up co-dependent who has never been shown how to love by the people who were suppose to teach her how to love even know how to begin to love herself? (Yes, I’m talking about me.) I believe we all know that loving ourselves is the answer but getting there often feels like being in a dense forest covered in fog –lost and not knowing where to begin.

The veil of codependence masks everything. In order to learn to love one’s self you basically have to throw out the bath water of your perception of reality. You have to choose to create a different reality from the inside out. As a recovering codependent, I have to learn how to reinterpret and create a different reaction to every little event that happens to me.

And we wonder why there are so many alcoholics and drug addicts –because it is easier to numb our shame and sadness than learn to reinterpret our reality. Co-dependence comes first than addiction. You can take away the addiction but that is only the beginning.

This is no easy task and for a psychic-co-dependent even tougher because you are playing on two levels of the game at the same time. The first level is the manifest world, what is created and playing out (although ever changing) it is what is. The other level is what has yet to manifest and one receives “information” about people. Throughout my life I’ve been given information about people (it has only been in the past two years I’ve learned how to discern it). Thinking if I knew this about them, than they must know this about themselves and I would just say it leaving a trail of wounded images behind me, not aware that I was hurting and harming because I did it from a place of love, unconscious love but love all the same.

Thinking you know how another should live their life is a trait of codependence.

Luckily, I’ve learned to bite my tongue –for the most part. I still mess up sometimes.

So what does it feel like to love one’s self? To be honest, I’ve only recently experienced this fully. I’ve been working on it consciously for over five years but only a few months ago did I feel it in my core.