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My daughter in Hawaii... even she knows you never know what will fall :)
Sometimes in life, we have to reflect on the past and find away to move forward in our future, we experience good and bad and it teaches us to be strong or weak, to be open, or closed to others. We go through a metamorphis and just like a caterpillar, we change, we grow and become the person we were meant to be.
I started writing as a way to deal with a painful situation, sometimes it wasn’t a pretty portrayal of life as I knew it, but at the time it was a reflection of my reality, even if that reality was warped to my own viewpoint. We all go through various stages of loss, we grieve and then anger grows like a wildfire and at it’s at this point when life can be the most damaging. I look back on my earlier articles and I see that person that I used to be… you see I took very little responsibility for the disaster, which had ultimately become my life.
The sad reality is that I had become a victim of co-dependency in a very dysfunctional situation. My once easy going disposition, had become morose and on the verge of crazy at times. This isn’t something that I easily recognized with, I had never been in a dysfunctional relationship, but it attracted me quickly and it was a drug, much like heroin that I couldn’t walk away from.
“I used to spend so much time reacting and responding to everyone else that my life had no direction. Other people's lives, problems, and wants set the course for my life. Once I realized it was okay for me to think about and identify what I wanted, remarkable things began to take place in my life.”
― Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go
While I have seen my part in it, it doesn’t let the other person off the hook completely, there was infidelity, lies and mental distress and in return I played the victim and well, did some abusing of my own, I became someone I didn’t recognize and in the end I could see how much I had changed and how unhealthy we had both become.
When someone becomes more important than your own self preservation, then you know you have a problem. It took my life falling apart, before I could get my life together, getting healthy, doing things for myself, by myself and of course Life Coaching, counseling and the amazing Digits, here on the vine; to sort out the right and wrongs of my life. At some point you have to forgive, not only those who have wronged you, but yourself, because we are all guilty of something. I was guilty of much more than I ever would have admitted… You have to make the effort to see your part in it and make it right, through an amends, or giving back to others, when you do, you will find a peace that you never thought possible.
Over the last couple of years, I have learned to recognize dysfunction from a mile away, I have seen how dysfunctional people in my life are and they remind me of how it felt to be so out of control. I was the victim and the victimizer, you see we all play our part. I lacked the ability to stay within my own boundaries; I constantly worried about others more than myself; I didn't stand up for myself, or walk away when I should have; I would provide advice without solicitation, and if that didn’t work I would use guilt and manipulation to get my way and it’s constantly a work in progress to not fall victim to co-dependency again.
