41 - Recovery From Codependency
Episode Highlights:
The Boy & The Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency by Chip Dodd
Real freedom awaits us in codependency recovery—if we take the risk of hoping and then trusting that a better way of living is on the other side of the risk. We have to admit that we are actually powerless over the symptoms we have talked about. We must admit that we need an emotional and spiritual “makeover.”
We must face that codependency is not a habit, one that we can just change by conscious action only, or mindfulness. It actually fits into the criteria of an illness, a disease.
Medical Definition of Disease: A morbid process (meaning destructive to health), with a characteristic chain of symptoms, of known or unknown origin, that are chronic, progressive, and can be fatal.
The disease of codependency is driven by stress. Many physicians have reported to me that the causes of most of the illnesses that are presented to them are stress-based sicknesses of not knowing how to live. In other words, the patient does not know what to do with or how to process feelings.
Feelings affect the body. Suppression, the lack of expression, makes us sick.
A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness by James J. Lynch
According to Dr. Gabor Mate’ the most important practice for living healthily is emotional regulation. He defines emotional regulation as the ability to feel your feelings and then express them to other people. This practice is the process of being connected, which is wellness.
When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Mate
In order to deal with stress successfully, you need to:
Feel your feelings.
Tell the truth about them to the “right” people.
Give yourself to the process of how life works (Remember that God owns the process.)
Brené Brown, John Bradshaw, Claudia Black, Pia Melody, Melody Beattie, Sharon Wegscheider-Cruze, among others, all agree with the need to process feelings for health.
In Matthew 7:7, Jesus tells us to “ask, seek, and knock.” Jesus wants us to express our neediness that comes from feelings. The expression of our feelings and needs supports our connection, our health, our prosperity, and our freedom in being able to live how God created us.
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” Matthew 7:7
We are feeling and needing creatures, who must experience needing others and God to live fully.
Jesus said He came to give us life and it to the full in John 10:10. In order to have this full life, we have to face our 8 core feelings and deal with them as God-given tools that will move us to live fully.
To learn more about the 8 core feelings, read The Voice of the Heart by Chip Dodd
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” John 10:10
We are going to have pain. We need to share our struggles with each other, or we will remain in isolation.
Hiding our pain is understandable. We all have pain in our pasts. However, it is still a form of unnecessary misery. We all need help, and we need to be able to let ourselves ask for it.
The power of the fear of rejection, abandonment, abuse, neglect isolates us from the solutions.
This fear leads to the control addiction of codependency. It has created a pandemic of codependency and other addictions that come out of it—related to stress.
The solution to stress is ultimately dealing with feelings. Stress, so often, is life happening like we wish it wouldn’t. Feelings—including grief—are a part of the solution.
The first focus of recovery from codependency is to learn about and reawaken to the 6 Freedoms.
Listen to “The Six Freedoms for Healing Codependency” Episode 33, August 20,2024
If we have feelings, two things are going to happen:
We are going to have an experience of the feelings.
We are going to have memories that go with the feelings.
Feelings and memories are “tied” together in the brain. Sadly, codependents “believe” that if they avoid their feelings:
They will not have to remember.
If they don’t remember, then they won’t have to have the feelings.
Feelings awaken us to the past we don’t want to revisit, but having feelings begins breaking denial.
Having feelings will also awaken us to how we live in the present. Our eyes will be opened to imagining ourselves living a full life. Sadly, this creates conflict because pain and risk are involved.
We must take action steps to relieve ourselves of the symptoms that have isolated us from the lives we are born to experience, BUT, we must be willing to feel. It works like an equation:
H.O.W + G.O.D. > E.G.O
H.O.W. is the acronym for:
Honest: telling the truth, though it may be clumsy.
Open: allowing myself to risk vulnerability.
Willing: taking the risk of hoping that things can be different.
G.O.D. is the acronym for Good Orderly Direction, which is seeking out people who we can ask, “How do I live out the way I am made?” It means asking for help from people who have identified their own issues; people who can relate to and know the struggles I myself have experienced.
I can be honest, open, and willing with the people who are simply more experienced in recovery than I am. They are just farther down the path, not superior, and are willing themselves to share their experience, strength, and hope with me.
We can ask questions, and they can give guidance. It is a form of reparenting—not having new parents, but having help with what our parents didn’t know how to do, or wouldn’t submit to learning how to do.
These people are sponsors, mentors, fellow travelers who can walk with us as we learn to live.
They help reconnect us with ourselves, others, and God. They become part of our Circle of Security.
These people support us in finding a life that is greater than E.G.O.
E.G.O. is the acronym for Easing God Out. Codependents unintentionally become their own little “g” gods. They hide behind masks and watch others’ faces in order to stay in control. They focus on control in order to not be rejected, harmed or humiliated again.
One’s ego becomes the mask that hides the true self.
That which hides or protects us actually isolates us from being connected.
Our self-sufficiency (not letting ourselves feel and need) actually defeats us because we cannot be honest, open, and willing and receive good orderly direction.
In self-sufficiency, needing help is an admission of defeat, rather than a freedom or opportunity to be connected.
We must remember that the potential “growth” of a new oak tree is actually contained by the shell of the acorn. Unless the shell dies, the roots are not released. Unless the mask of our egos is diminished, we cannot be known and grow. Unless we connect by being seen, we cannot see a new future.
The diminishment of the ego makes room for the true self to grow.
We start to share and trust being known from the “inside to the outside.” We are expressing the 6 Freedoms, and finding rewards in the people who relate to being human like us—in need of connection with others and God.
This equation is a very practical action we need to practice as we step into recovery:
H.O.W. + G.O.D. > E.G.O.
By admitting that we are powerless over how we are created as emotional and spiritual creatures, we actually begin to surrender to the process of risking and trusting. We actually begin to see that we really can live in a world of “laughter and tears; a world of hope and fears.” We find that there is “so much that we share, that it is time we are aware that it is a small world after all.”
We become regulated, find resonance, and create revision in our lives when we are responsible with and live what we:
feel
need
desire
long for
hope
Slow though it may be—we grow faster than we think we will.
The Voice of the Heart: A Call to Full Living by Chip Dodd
A free resource at chipdodd.com.
Let me encourage you to pray.
Ask God to show you your path to recovery from codependency.
Ask God to give you “safe” people who you can share your heart with.
(Circle of Security)
Ask God to take you into freedom, and help you return to how you are created and created to live.
Ask God to help you see who you are made to be, so you can do what you are made to do.
Praise God for giving us the craving to live fully.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center