Melody Beattie
Appearances
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
But by getting into my body, by getting out of the world around me, and not sticking my finger in the light socket of scrolling on my phone and just getting into who I am, relaxing with myself, remembering what I enjoy, remembering all I have right now. It's so ungodly easy to see what we don't have.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We are completely plugged in to the electrical circuits of almost every other human being on this planet. We pick up their anxiety. We pick up their fear. I mean, we're all like tapped into this big spider web of ethers.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
of course we're going to have anxiety and it gets, it gets to the point where sometimes if I'm not feeling enough anxiety, I'll scroll through my phone to start a little bit of it. So yeah, I spent a lot of time working on staying at peace. I think that's so much better than being happy because even being happy can be a distraction, but being peaceful really works for me. That's amazing.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Absolutely. It's all an illusion. This whole, I can control you, you're controlling me. It's all an illusion and it can crumble quite quickly and usually does. We can't control any human being. They are going to do what they want to do.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Okay. This happened, um, fairly deeply into my marriage after I had been, you know, trying to convince myself I could deal with it. It wasn't as bad as I thought, but yet it was. And I had already told David and we had two kids. I had two kids still in diapers. And I told him, you know, if you drink again, we are over. We're ended. And he went to Vegas and I said, well, promise me you won't drink.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
He said, of course not. So I, We were scheduled to hold a party at the home we had in Minneapolis for a neighbor who introduced me to Al-Anon and had put herself through nursing school. And he was supposed to be home. And it was a big deal to me to be able to thank her. She had helped me. And he didn't show up. I hadn't heard from him. I started calling him on the phone.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
The hotel would put me through and it would just ring into that. And I know, you know, when you're a good codependent, you know, you don't really need confirmation, do you? But ultimately he did pick up the phone and I heard, you know, literally almost a glug, glug, glug. As you know, he poured liquid into either into his throat, into something. And I went, oh man, here we go again.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
But what changed in me, first, it was a spiritual awakening I had when I realized I was as out of control with obsessing about him as I used to be about getting drugs. I had all these people coming over for this party and all I could think about was the other person, what someone else was or wasn't doing. And for the first time since I married him, I saw myself.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I thought, you know, he's out of control. But so am I. And that was the first part of my second spiritual awakening. The second part was I realized that I was real. God was real. I was real. I wasn't just an appendage to another human being. I was pretty much, I don't know about fully functioning, but getting there, a human.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And that was revolutionary to me because first I had been my mom's pet, you know, and then I just turned into an object of reaction to David. And so it was the beginning of me. Well, it's the journey we're all on our entire lives. The journey of continually, every day, rediscovering ourselves, who we are, how we feel, what we want, what we don't like.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
what we have to offer in the world, taking our seat at the table, all the different, there's so many different phases in life we each go through. And to learn to love ourselves and not turn on ourselves when we go through these phases or when we don't do them perfectly, that's the kind of self-love that we're now moving into it being an absolute necessity to have for ourselves.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
They're still calling and helping, huh?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Yeah, they're making the Dracula sign instinct. Please don't bring your help.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
But it's something much bigger than that. Okay. We consistently and without fail love the other person more than we love ourselves. That's where we step into the pit of codependency.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We do. I mean, Let's be very, very honest. Which one of us completely understands love? What it is. Not this guy. I mean, we're all pretty much on equal ground, I think. Stumbling through it alone. And yet, and this whole nonsense about the one. I mean, sometimes we have someone for right now. Sometimes for a while. We walk with others on this journey.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We gain, we give back. And if we're codependent, sometimes we keep repeating. We can get stuck in a little bit of a rut. But that's how we learn and grow. And in the end, it's all good. It's all okay. And we need to stop picking on ourselves for the way we've grown and changed. I was reading something the other day and it talked about how We never could see a baby grow, can we?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I mean, we can't sit there all day and say, oh, she just grew. I've never seen a plant grow. I've come out the next day and I've seen that it's grown, but I can never see it when it's growing. I can never catch it. And the same holds true with us. I don't know if it's having gone through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, but... We can get to expecting this parade for every time something important happens.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
But I found that the changes I make on the journey to self-love are quieter. And they're the kind of changes I can't see any more than I can see a plant or a baby grow. But I can see the difference. You know, little by slowly, I can see the difference when I pay attention and give awareness to loving myself as much as I love others.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I'm not talking about to the exclusion of, I'm talking about as much as.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
How do you- Raising kids is one of the few legitimate circumstances that most closely resembles codependency, only it's legitimate. Thank you.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I know. And it's our job to love that baby through life and into life, which is also our job with us.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And I believe we all do. Who doesn't like being needed a little bit?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
You know, now and again, if nobody needs us, if we're not part of a community that would miss us if we weren't there, but we can set up systems where the need is there. I mean, it's a crazy, chaotic, pounding need that we've created of people leaning on us and us getting resentful. And why does this always happen to me? Well, because you keep doing it.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
It's not about pleasing anything or anyone outside of ourselves, just ourselves, our own heart, our own peace, our own life. That's pretty much who we're here to please. It's not as easy said as done though, because we have to get to know ourselves, don't we? To know what pleases us, what doesn't please us, what we'd like, what feels good, what doesn't feel good. And then when does it matter?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Because there's a lot of times when, you know, life will break our boundaries. It will do things to us we didn't want it to do, we didn't plan on and that aren't fair and aren't right. But we have a choice and we can go back to our victim's story. or we can surrender and we'll probably do some of both along the way. Life is messy. It's complicated.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
It doesn't happen neatly the way it does in books and movies. It's just much messier than that. And yet when we give up our control, And this thing we have with needing to know how everything is and how every detail will work out when we're willing to say, I don't know, and step into the unknown is when we find the magic. We really do. That's when the magic happens.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
What is detachment? Probably the first thing we need to learn to do at the beginning of our recovery journey and every day when we wake up. I am a Gemini. I get really obsessive. I like to attach. I attach to ideas. I'm overly loyal. I will hang on to people, places, and things long after they've lost their usefulness.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And so it's like trying to keep up with the way we attach fast enough to free ourselves so that we can live our lives. That is a worthwhile goal. And it's not easy.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And I want to say something else too, that the detachment didn't just occur when I had that realization, when I was on the phone, because what I did is I ended up telling him, you know, you got yourself to Vegas. If you want to get home, you'll get yourself home. I'm putting on a party. I'll see you later. That wasn't the moment I detached.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I detached in the three years incrementally that occurred and the experiences I went through that occurred before that. I mean, it's a process and those aren't just words. Everything is a process in life and we can trust our process. We don't have to invalidate it. We don't have to call ourselves names, although it's sometimes fun to rag on ourselves, isn't it?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Thank you for doing this wonderful show.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
The beginnings and endings aren't as clear as they may appear to be.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Little by slowly, little by slowly. And then in spring we go out and we go, oh, my garden's grown. And we need to do that with ourselves too. We need to also tell ourselves about the progress we've made. Being codependent isn't like, I can get a little ashamed of it. And I wrote the book. It's not a bad thing. It's a human thing. It's a human thing people do. Yeah.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We call it a dysfunction, but we call everything a dysfunction now, don't we?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And it's all a spectrum. It's all a spectrum. What I found when you had asked earlier about the progression of the awareness and consciousness of codependency is when I started talking openly about my experiences and especially growing up in an alcoholic home, how that had affected me.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Including ourselves. Yes. Acceptance. I mean, we don't have to like it. We just have to accept it.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Surrender, yeah. No, we're talking about surrender. A real... waving their white flag of surrender to the experience, to this new twist in our journey, to how this changes our lives. My life was blown up in 1990 when my son Shane went skiing on his 12th birthday and never came home. Disrupted my daughter's life. It disrupted my life. And
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And it's one thing to say the word grief and to talk about the journey. But I mean, my soul fell out of my heart and down onto the floor. And I spent the next 20 years trying to find more light and get through it and understand. But one of the first lessons I learned when after moving to California with my daughter was empathy.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I wasn't able to run into anyone on this planet who hadn't encountered some form of loss, some form of anguish. And I mean, as I traveled around the world, really deep, painful, big things. That was the start of the grief club that we're not being singled out, although sometimes it may feel like we are. And I don't know, they don't seem to tell us this stuff in kindergarten, do they?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
You know, carry an umbrella and a rock everywhere you go because life is going to be a little bit difficult. You're going to need to protect yourself often. No, we're not completely equipped for that.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Yeah, we don't want to get banged up anymore. It's not because we're bad. It's because we've already been through enough, we think. We just don't want to hurt anymore. And who can blame us?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I have learned that surrender is one of the few things in life that hurts most before I do it. Every time out of the box. It's my resistance. It's my resistance. When I'm in a state of resistance to a situation, to an emotion, to anything in life, when I'm resisting it, I'm putting myself through pain.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Yes. Contemplating the fact that we're not really in control. Yeah.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Life is a duality, isn't it?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
It really is a duality. There's no easy formula for anything in life that I've found that actually works.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
It can be a bit much at times, especially over the last, I would say 15 years. It's all, it all has been a bit much, but we're getting challenged at such deep levels about long held beliefs about right, about wrong, about who we are, about how to be in the world. If there's another thing I would encourage people to do and, Instead of telling ourselves stop controlling, we can start allowing life.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We can allow life to happen. We can allow ourselves to be and to happen as well. We can gentle up a little bit because, you know, it's just been batshit crazy for quite a few years now, hasn't it? really crazy and really intense. And even going on the cell phone, every time I start to scroll, it feels like sticking my finger in a light switch.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And it just aggravates everything. So the next challenge is to find doing things that calm us, that help us find our inner peace and that nurture the light each of us have inside of ourselves to share with the world. We don't have to change the whole world, we don't have to buy out the whole table. We just need to quietly take our seat at it and let our light shine, you know?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And to do that, I find meditation absolutely critical. Right now, I don't know how to get through any day successfully without meditating. The anxiety and the energy is so intense. And I live in a very natural, beautiful place. But it's not about where we live. It's about our home inside of ourselves and how that home feels to be in. And if we're comfortable in that home.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We move out of home. Out of home. We move out of home. And that's... What so much of life is about is about getting us comfortable. And how can I learn to make myself comfortable in my own home? No, I can't control everything in my environment, but I can make choices that lead to an optimum environment in my home, inside of myself for me to live in.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
The comedian Louie Anderson. Mm-hmm. One said that I haven't really sold 7 million copies of that book. It's just been sold to one really, really codependent woman who went out and bought all those copies for someone else. So somewhere between the two, I think that's true.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Right, well, and we're all a bit like that, aren't we? We find one circle and it works. And if we're growing, we outgrow it or another person outgrows it and it stops working.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
But we with our loyal, ever loyal codependence hearts will remain attached in that and to that and feeling guilty should we happen to neglect it for many years to come after it doesn't really work for us anymore or the other people. It's just like, I have to keep at this, don't I? Not necessarily. We can't discount the huge changes going on around us now either.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We're going through so many spiritual, global changes, transformation, upheaval. And just when it lands... It's like a butterfly. It flutters again and flies away. It never, it hasn't landed. It hasn't stopped changing for years. And so of all the times I've lived through, I've never felt the challenge to meditate and create a peaceful home in myself as I have now, as I have recently.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
That doesn't come natural. I don't know that it comes natural to anyone without a practice.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
That's such a great point. I think being flexible right now, being flexible in our ideation and our opinions in our what we expect of life every day, we need to be so flexible. Otherwise we're going to run into that resistance.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And then that need, I mean, the more we can actively be flexible every day, the better, not flexible with our values necessarily, but flexible enough to go with the flow of life as it shifts and changes at astronomical levels. And I think it's going to keep doing it for a little bit longer. Yeah.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Absolutely. We can be passionate as long as we're open. Sometimes we can just be so sure we know things. And we've maybe reached a certain level of understanding, but we don't necessarily really know it yet. And we're about to learn. I mean, life can be a very exciting journey. And I don't like to just throw that out because it can get very cliche-ish.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
But it can be even now as we're challenged, as we're challenged. It's an exciting time for each of us to be alive. It is a challenging time. It's going to challenge us at levels we've not been challenged before. Yay. Yeah.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And the reason we've been getting all these superpowers from recovery since the 1970s is not so we can keep them on our vanity in our bedroom and use them when we want to do a powder puff on our face. It's because we're really going to need them. We're going to need these personal skills. It's not all been about nonsense. It's happening for a reason. So Do yourself another favor. We all do.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Keep track of your own growth. Don't just go out in that garden and look at how that plant has grown every year. Go out every month or every time you do something or you feel good about something you've done, you know, a little pat on the back doesn't hurt. We can, you know, humbly keep trying and we can humbly feel good about the good we've done. Keeping in mind, that's just my opinion today.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I'll let you know.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I will let you know. Until then, just please keep being yourselves.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Either they're really codependent or you are.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I think that would take more time than we have in this podcast. There's another book and follow this one. And it's called Living by Spirit. I don't want to mix the lessons up too much. But waking up at age 70 and having to start completely over again as a single woman in LA and 70 years old. So there's been a few challenges with that, you know, concerning surrender, concerning acceptance.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And then starting over again. I don't know if y'all have had to do it. I'm guessing the answer is yes. Is it? I never thought I'd have to do it again at age 70. And I would say for the most part, most days I'm pretty chill with it. I'm pretty good with it. Although sometimes I do feel like I've been hogtied and I'm just laying here trying to get out of the ropes.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
That's right. It is. But on the plus side. And I'm hoping this rings true. If we identify as codependent, we're in pretty good company. Yeah, we are.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I would say that is the biggest challenge I'm facing right now. Waking up alive, being told that you have life, a lot potentially of life left at age 70 in LA has been the biggest challenge that I've had to face.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I think you're wonderful, too. I think the group is wonderful. And it's been my pleasure to share light with you.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
That's pretty much how my home felt when I realized I had to start over at age 70. I... I wasn't gangbusters for it. And it wasn't necessarily pleasant, but it was surrendering to and going through the process of getting comfortable with it. And sometimes it felt like I was being burned with lasers, you know, on my brain, on my spirit, on my emotions.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
It's not always that painful, but sometimes it is. Sometimes it can be brutal. Life can actually be brutal in moments, but we get through them, don't we? The storms do pass. We get through them and... If we're looking, we'll see that we've grown, we've changed, and we will feel a little more confident in our ability to surrender to and trust life.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And start cleaning it and straightening it out as fast as you can.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
It is. When I started, uh, redoing my life at age 70, I also started remodeling my home. And remodeling your home while you're living in it is like making the bed while you're in it. It is just horrendously uncomfortable. And yet I was that uncomfortable within myself. And I had to be patient. And the most important thing I had to realize is if I couldn't be happy,
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
No one.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
No one.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Well, we were told we didn't have homes. Yeah. But we could clean up their homes. Yeah. And keep them nice and cozy. I know, I know, I know. But the good news is we're being evolved. We're being changed. We're growing. That's right.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Yes, please. All right, I will. She'll be thrilled.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Nicole. Hi, Nicole.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We mind fuck ourselves so much. Yes, we do. We do. Just continually, constantly pick on ourselves. It was my pleasure. I hope we meet this way again.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
very painfully in my life. I found myself, and I was in the program, the recovery program, AA. And I was going to meetings and there was a fire going on and a fire among young people that this program and the recovery in it extended to us as well. And my sponsor introduced me to a guy, look at me blaming, I'm not blaming. I married him.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And then I began to learn what it meant to be truly codependent. The research from this book was heartfelt. And yet it was also an exciting time because there was so much passion for recovery back then. In the 70s in Minnesota, we were on fire. We were steaming. And when I started bugging everyone in AA, like, because my marriage didn't feel right.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Nothing felt right about it, but nothing had really felt right my entire life. So I started bugging my sponsor and bugging people in the program and say, you know, this isn't, there's something going on here. It's like, shh, just go to your meetings and don't make a problem.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
But I couldn't, I became obsessed with finding out what was going on with me, what I could be doing that didn't involve putting a substance in me. that could be causing and creating this kind of havoc inside of my entire being.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
No, I had been clean and sober for two, three years by then. And, you know, working a program, but you wouldn't know it by the way I felt. And I thought, oh my God, here I am clean and sober and, you know, hard pressed to find a true reason to live other than caring for other people.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And so I kept up this obsessive search, which began, I would say, 1976 until 1985 when I wrote the book.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We go off. We go off. We're not tuned in. We become misaligned. When we're misaligned with ourselves, we really can't tune in to much else. And that's what happened. You know, there's so much talk now about people gaslighting other people. No one can gaslight me as well as I can gaslight myself. Tell myself my feelings don't matter. What I want doesn't matter. I'm overreacting.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
All the things we do to invalidate our natural, normal human responses to life.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Well, that wasn't really the first definition. It was, has let ourselves become obsessed or controlled by another person's behavior.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
That can be like from little things like not picking up your socks to, you know, drinking away the family's finances. Everything is on a scale, isn't it? Of what we're doing and why we're doing it. We all have different impulses that motivate us. But when it comes to codependency, luckily we're in this lovely boat together.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And learning to do something that is meant to, for the most part, feel good. Although all things we do that are good are somewhat hard, aren't they? Sometimes really hard. But we're learning what it means to really love ourselves. I mean, I mouthed those words for so many years. But if you look someone in the eye and say, what does that really mean? Hmm.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
I'm not sure we can talk about love from the head. I think we need to talk about it from the heart. Love yourself, take care of yourself. But what does that really mean? So the next 20, 40 years became dedicated to learning what that really meant. To going back, to going forward, to staying stuck and to all the other journeys in between that we go through on the way.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
They weren't substance abusing. No, they were just ticking off the addict or the alcoholic and reflecting their instability. And I'm going to, you know, be partial to genders, but I don't think that many women knew how not to be codependent back in the 50s, 60s and early 70s. We had been trained. We had been embedded in it, starting with the days that being married to a man was
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
inherent to our survival as a species on this planet. So we're talking about overcoming a lot of past karma.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Of course they are.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
It's a little frightening if you think about it, but I really believe we've come a long way. We've come a long way to nurturing and growing that soul within each of us. I've heard this. I can't document it because my mother sometimes had a hard time with the truth. God bless her soul.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
But I believe she was the first woman in Minnesota that was allowed to get a mortgage and a property in her own name as a female.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Yeah, it is. It is. So, I mean, while it's important to stay in now, it's important to not forget how we got here. And not much is guaranteed, is it? No.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And do you often become passively angry at all these people?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Slide right on down that scale, huh?
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
Yeah, we're constantly angry about what we're doing instead of realizing that, yes, there is a connection between us and what we do. And then trying to intercept that connection and figure out what we're doing that we don't like. Who is the hardest person to control? Self. For each of us. So it's so much easier to try and control others.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
And at first, we don't know them as well as we know ourselves, do we? Yeah. And I would say that it's just not controlling other people. I would say that people with codependency issues, and I am included there, have control issues generally with life. Especially if we came from chaotic situations where we could never relax and allow life to unfold.
We Can Do Hard Things
Codependence: How to Stop Controlling Others with Melody Beattie (Best Of)
We couldn't trust ourselves because someone was gaslighting us. And I would say it takes a couple hours of my energy every day to focus on letting go of my control issues. Oh, wow. How do you do that? A lot of meditation, a whole lot of meditation, yoga. I have a yoga routine that I'm able to do every day and actually in this podcast room.