Welcome,
My love,
To the sacred space for meditation and learning.
My name is Pamela.
I am a sobriety coach and the founder of My Badass Recovery.
But more importantly,
I'm a human in recovery from alcoholism and codependency.
Thank you for spending time with me and with yourself.
Today we will talk about how to identify codependency in our path of sobriety.
I want to bring you awareness and tools that you can use as you continue growing your path to freedom from substance and behaviors.
So let's begin by finding a good spot where you can settle in comfortably.
Now let's enter our meditation with some deep breaths that we will take together.
I invite you to focus on your breath as you continue listening to my voice.
I want to share a story with you today,
My love.
It's about my journey of recovering from alcohol addiction and how,
As I started my sobriety,
I found myself stuck in a cycle of codependency.
Now,
Codependency might sound like a fancy term.
Perhaps you are familiar with it.
Perhaps you're not.
For me,
Back then,
It wasn't even on my radar.
I didn't know what it meant.
I didn't know,
Of course,
What it looked like or what it felt like,
And much less that I was living it.
As I started figuring out myself how to do life without the alcohol,
Without that solution that for so many years actually allowed me to survive,
I had to relearn how to feel,
How to feel whole and serene and grounded and happy.
I put down the wine,
But I picked up a toxic way of thinking and behaving in my personal relationships.
The toxic way of going about them was that I was seeking those relationships in the way that I used to seek wine.
I needed those relationships to fill something in me,
To give me a sense of serenity and joy and completion,
To make me feel seen and enough,
Very much like alcohol used to do.
So here is what the pattern looked like for me.
I would obsess about something in one of these relationships,
And that obsession created a story in my head,
Which would not go away until the person actually proved it right or wrong.
In other words,
I wanted people to do or say certain things so that I could feel okay.
It was like I was playing puppet master,
Pulling the strings to find my own sense of peace through something outside of me,
Much like I used to reach for the wine to fix something inside of me.
I was now looking at my relationships to do the same for me.
I was finding something external,
Needing it to fix my inner mess and to give me peace.
I depended on other people doing something so that,
That phrase was so key,
So that there was a condition attached so that I could feel happy.
Looking back,
I realized how this toxic way of thinking about the people in my life and about life itself was very similar to the toxic thinking that I used to have around alcohol.
So instead of the bottle,
I used my relationships to try and fill the void.
Codependency in this sense could be defined as a lack of connection with oneself.
It's needing something external to fix something internal.
A lot of us put down the drink but pick up codependency.
Have you put one thing down but picked up another?
Maybe an obsession with relationships,
Trying to control,
Trying to manage,
Always obsessing about something external,
Rarely finding peace within you.
Does this sound familiar,
My love?
There is no judgment.
There is no shame.
There's only self-compassion and tenderness as you recognize this kind of behavior in your own life.
This is in fact a moment for honesty,
For acknowledging,
For grace,
And for compassion.
The path of recovery is a beautiful one because it helps us understand ourselves better,
Layer by layer.
And you know what's wonderful?
The more you take responsibility for your healing and for owning these things are in fact yours,
The more freedom you will find on the other side.
The degree of responsibility that you take is directly correlated to the degree of freedom.
This is one of the most beautiful things that gets unveiled to us in the possibilities of sobriety,
Where clarity has begun and we have a new way of diving deeper,
Of taking agency of our own path of healing,
Of growing.
So as we reach the end of our time together,
I want to invite you to feel empowered,
To just feel that sense of agency that this is part of your journey.
A chance to learn more about yourself,
To release things that don't work any longer,
And to do things differently.
The work of codependency is so beautiful because it allows you to become fiercely loyal to you,
To you before anyone else,
To you before anything else,
To you no matter what,
No matter what other people do,
No matter what even you do.
The love and the loyalty for you becomes the grounding point of your relationship with yourself.
So that's your invitation.
I invite you to take some deep breaths with me as you hear these intentions with your heart.
I love and accept myself with my beautiful humanness.
I choose to be honest with myself today and recognize the possibility of letting go of these ways of thinking and acting with those around me.
I take ownership of my healing and I open my heart to a new way,
To seeking the truth of a new way.
I lovingly forgive myself for my obsessions,
For trying to control and manage behaviors and people around me.
I didn't know another way.
I now can learn new ways so that I can live my own life and let the people around me live their own.
I breathe in serenity.
I release controlling.
I breathe in grounding.
I release managing.
I breathe in peace.
I release obsessing.
I flow with life and I claim my inner freedom.
I see your hard work and our time together today my love.
I am so fiercely proud of you and I am so very grateful for the beautiful work that you are doing,
Showing up for yourself on this path.
Thank you for being here.
