CoDa meeting this week was pretty huge for me.

It was my second attempt at “letting myself cry”

During last group, I told everyone how I have started going for CoDa again after quite a while. And that I teared almost the whole time during the sharing portion. Steve said I need to be able to be ok with crying. So this week, I told myself that I will let everyone else share while I allow myself let go and cry. I was not able to let go fully still, I held myself back at times. BUT, a miraculous thing happened. At one instance, I could feel L, my inner child, surface. It was HER crying. (I basically cried during almost every member’s turn to share.) That soft whimpering. There is a deep sense of devastation or feeling lost whenever L cries.

I was moved by the sharing of others

This is today’s reading (which was read aloud during CoDa):

Being Right

 

Recovery is not about being right; it’s about allowing ourselves to be who we are and accepting others as they are.

 

That concept can be difficult for many of us if we have lived in systems that functioned on the “right-wrong” justice scale. The person who was right was okay; the person who was wrong was shamed. All value and worth may have depended on being right; to be wrong meant annihilation of self and self-esteem.

 

In recovery, we are learning how to strive for love in our relationships, not superiority. Yes, we may need to make decisions about people’s behavior from time to time. If someone is hurting us, we need to stand up for ourselves. We have a responsibility to set boundaries and take care of ourselves. But we do not need to justify taking care of ourselves by condemning someone else. We can avoid the trap of focusing on others instead of ourselves.

 

In recovery, we are learning that what we do needs to be right only for us. What others do is their business and needs to be right only for them. It’s tempting to rest in the superiority of being right and in analyzing other people’s motives and actions, but it’s more rewarding to look deeper.

 

Today, I will remember that I don’t have to hide behind being right. I don’t have to justify what I want and need with saying something is “right” or “wrong.” I can let myself be who I am.

 

Quoted from the book Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie.

• Someone outed himself to the group as gay — grappling with his sexual identity coupled with the struggle to reconcile this with his faith
  I am always inspired by anyone from the LGBT community who have came out of the closet and living life in their own terms. Maybe I view their outing themselves parallel with finding my true self. I know a number of gays in the same struggle with their Christian faith. I was also reminded of the time I used to go to church  and slightly numbed to his description of Christians being the Potter’s clay (i.e., God being the Potter)…
• I learnt about “Dark night of the soul“
• Someone seemed to fully fit the “typical” Codependent description – Narcissistic parent, drug addict brother; like what I’ve read in the books
• Someone shared their therapist told them to grieve the “loss” of his father and sibling, because they are simply not able to love him, nor be who he hopes they’ll be
  This is EXACTLY what I was/am going through!!!
• Someone pointed out that since she has an illness (being an addict) and is “unhealthy”, she used to be attracted to similarly unhealthy people of the opposite sex
  This made a lot of sense to me. Because of how we are, we are naturally drawn to those who exhibit behaviour that are not good for us, because we either want to change them (due to perceived superiority or the need to control) or we want to “save” them. Like how Steve told me my husband is a Narcissist and Codependents are naturally drawn to such character.
• Based on someone’s sharing, I had a small aha moment on why I stopped going to church and decided to become agnostic
  Subconsciously, the Christian faith made me feel a lot of shame, that there is a lot that is wrong with me. I guess that is the nature of that religion — to make you feel inadequate, so that you feel that you have to “depend on God”. And I guess I was tired of feeling like there was something inherently wrong with me — my mom already has done a life’s work of making me feel this way — though we were taught that despite our inadequacies (and Original Sin), “God loves us”. It’s an entirely divisive notion: Either one feels well comforted by that thought, or… isn’t it extremely patronising??