“To be gentle with ourselves requires a willingness to be exposed and perhaps be hurt. As I have already suggested, there is nothing weak or ‘cowardly’ about gentleness, especially when we are relearning to live in this world by minimizing our ‘numbing strategies’ so that we can practise super self-care. When we face our fears, we are acting courageously. Courage happens in the mundane. If we observe people in our local community, we can see courage being practised all around us. Just turning up for life every day requires courage, especially when we are prepared to be present.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“Guilt is imperative if we are to create and sustain a decent code of ethics and a sound moral compass. Guilt can help us to listen to our conscience, enhance empathy, and therefore have fulfilling relationships. Without guilt, we would live in an extremely dark world. However, misplaced guilt often triggers us to be over-apologetic and people-please. Many people repeat the word ‘sorry’ without needing to, while still others feel guilty for their very own existence. Emotionally wounded, shame-based people often feel that they are constantly ‘getting in the way’. This stems from a sense of feeling unlovable. To ask for one’s own needs to be met often results in a feeling of guilt. I call this misplaced guilt. Similarly, a person may feel guilty even if they have been abused or harmed by others. Misplaced guilt or excessive guilt stifles people’s chances to live happily and peacefully.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“Have you heard the saying by the actor Lily Tomlin, ‘The road to success is always under construction’? I like this concept. My spiritual journey has certainly been messy and uncomfortable at times. I had several emotional breakdowns before experiencing an emotional breakthrough. In essence, layers of deep denial and negative thought-patterns had to be unravelled and replaced with new and greater self-awareness.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“In my view, compassion takes empathy to another level. With compassion, there is an internal calling to move empathy into action. Compassion is love in action.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Feeling lost in life often occurs when we feel stuck and unable to progress. Feeling lost is often a symptom of isolation, unresolved grief and a lack of presence-awareness. Uncertainty, confusion, shame and excessive guilt often drive a sense of feeling lost.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“Jealousy and possessiveness in romantic relationships often destroy trust and mutual respect. Very often a jealous partner is re-enacting his pain from childhood. If he was emotionally and physically abandoned in childhood, he may be prone to jealousy in a romantic relationship. If a teenage girl was betrayed by her first love, and consequently was emotionally scarred, she may develop jealousy regarding future romantic relationships. Jealousy in a romantic relationship is based on control and possessiveness. A person suffering from jealousy unconsciously believes she is going to lose something or someone she does not own. The partner is afraid of losing her partner. She views him as an object, a possession. No one is a possession of another. The idea that we own or partly own our lovers, even if the sense of ‘ownership’ is purely emotional, is a delusion which brings suffering in its wake.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“The more we try to disassociate from our shame, relying solely on our own reasoning and will power in an attempt to get some emotional relief, the stronger the hold shame has over us. Our shame-based behaviour will find ways to reveal itself if we remain in denial about our pain. Shame can be very subtle and often operates at a subconscious level of awareness. However, when we accept we are carrying unresolved shame, we can heal and make peace with ourselves.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“The Karpman drama triangle is a classic model of codependent behaviour. First of all, a codependent will rescue someone. Then, when their ‘brave and charitable’ work hasn’t been acknowledged, they become very angry at the person they have attempted to rescue. And finally, they start to feel like a victim. They feel sorry for themselves and complain how the person they rescued never appreciated them. The important thing to learn here is that if a person wants to change, it’s because they have made a decision to do so.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Think of an untreated sex addict who spends hours every night until the early hours watching pornography on the internet instead of spending that time with their wife or husband, and then becomes so tired due to the late nights that their professional life suffers. The sex addict’s behaviour will cause resentment, destroy trust and create economic insecurities in the family and home.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“A sex addict is also emotionally anorexic – they must be in order to continue participating in isolated behaviour such as being addicted to pornography and being promiscuous or having multiple affairs. All of these secretive behaviour patterns affect a family and home.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Understanding why we are afraid to grieve is a prelude to transforming our lives. Getting in touch with our deepest fears and airing them in a safe space can be incredibly liberating.”
Source: Drug Addiction Recovery: The Mindful Way
“Love addicts often pick partners who are emotionally unavailable because deep down, they don’t feel worthy of having a healthy, loving relationship. A love addict craves and obsesses about becoming enmeshed or ‘one’ with another human being at all costs, even if it means putting themselves in potential danger.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Mental stories can literally spoil a human life. It took me a long time to become aware of my mental commentary, such as: “Everything always goes wrong”, “I won’t be accepted”, “I’m a failure” or “What’s the point?” Those fears were deep-rooted and triggered many upsetting addictive patterns of behaviour”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“When we practise self-compassion, we look after ourselves just as though we are nurturing a small child. In fact, a major part of grieving our original pain work (so that we can heal and be emotionally liberated) is to re-parent ourselves and reconnect with our inner child.
This is what the author, John Bradshaw, meant by ‘reclaiming our inner child’. In recovery, we can begin to nurture our inner child and connect deeply with our heart and spirit.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“To stay true to ourselves and remain kind to others is an art. It does require daily vigilance and, at the same time, it’s important to remember that art can often get messy.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Healthy and non-shaming mirroring is an important part of the process. We can gain this from a highly emotionally intelligent and effective peer group that has our best interests at heart.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Isms’ are described as transference of addictive patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, passed down from generation to generation. For instance, if a mother was an alcoholic who never made it into recovery, her behaviour would leave a mark on her children, husband, etc. Unless her adult children join some sort of recovery programme and adopt the mindfulness practice, they will have very similar behaviour traits to their mother but minus the alcohol abuse. There is a strong possibility that they will become codependent and form relationships with other codependents or alcoholics.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“I don’t think I’ve ever met an addict in long-term recovery who hasn’t gone through at least one traumatic childhood experience. Research indicates that one traumatic event in childhood is as grave as continuous combat in a war zone. A traumatic event during childhood can leave a grave imprint on the human body.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“No one can control their results. We can, however, control our attitude. When we practise compassion, it is most effective when it is unconditional and free from seeking an outcome – compassion is a matter of choice rather than a self-seeking action. And so, if we assist another human being from a place of presence and compassion, we are not looking to find our happiness off the back of others’ suffering. Nor are we trying to control them. Compassion is a conscious choice rather than an emotional knee-jerk reaction.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“It was only when I started to reconnect with my inner child four years into recovery (I was over four years clean and sober off drugs and alcohol) and started to attend a love addiction support group that I was able to trust again and have faith that there are just as many honest and trustworthy women as there are women who are not interested in monogamy.
However, it was after ten years of continuous recovery that I started to really dig deep into my childhood grief work and was finally able to reclaim my inner child. I started to take risks again. On a practical level, you can’t get very far in this world if you resent and distrust the opposite sex and, sadly, many men and women suffer in this area. Rather than celebrating the opposite sex, they fear them. Empathy and self-compassion has helped me in this area too.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Let’s remind ourselves that to be compassionate and forgiving doesn’t mean we are endorsing dysfunctional behaviour. On the contrary, it’s essential the harm that was inflicted upon us is properly validated and grieved. Forgiveness isn’t an intellectual concept or an airy-fairy idea. It’s a painstaking process. To be compassionate and to forgive mean we are gradually letting go of poisonous, toxic feelings that are trapped in our minds and bodies.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“The process of recovering from addictiveness happens at a deeper level of consciousness and through feeling our pain without using old addictive fixes. There is no escaping that getting in touch with our original pain is the touchstone to mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Tragically, because many addicts are not given sufficient love, nurturing and non-shaming dialogue at crucial stages in their early emotional development, they are on a quest to find contentment from a source outside of themselves.
Their parents might have provided bountifully for them; however, their parents were never fully emotionally present while parenting, which made their children feel starved of emotional nourishment.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Some addicts do not even have basic parenting and instead are beaten, sexually abused, left to be looked after by a dysfunctional ‘carer’, put in orphan homes or rejected by their community. If you calculate the millions of emotionally neglected children and observe them growing up together trying to ‘get by in life’, you will understand why many adults (adult children) have addictive personalities.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Regardless of the different stages in our human development, unless we learn how to create loving and fulfilling relationships (with ourselves and others), addiction will follow – not necessarily as a manifestation of substance misuse but in the form of codependence, compulsive thinking, unhealthy relationships, sex and love addictions, overeating, insidious incarnations of self-harm and so on.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Scores of high-powered men and women are addicted to substances or destructive addictive patterns of behaviour. As a matter of fact, it is easier to hide one’s addiction while maintaining a high-powered position compared to the addicts and alcoholics we see sleeping on street corners.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Drug and alcohol addiction almost killed me. I was a grave substance misuser in my teens. I started drinking at ten, smoking at eleven and by the time I attended high school aged twelve, I was regularly smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol on weekends. I was a full-blown alcoholic at thirteen. Tragically, I had my stomach pumped at fourteen and although I promised my family I would never drink again, I started less than two weeks later. I was completely hooked on alcohol.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“If we are continuing to attract partners that are emotionally unavailable, then it’s essential that we observe our own addictive patterns rather than focusing on theirs.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“It’s important to be aware that many families are dysfunctional, but we can change the patterns. Even if a child grew up in an aggressive or addictive household, they can heal and move past that with immense emotional resilience, wisdom and gratitude. This is what recovery can offer anyone who, like you, is open-minded, willing and ready to explore self-awareness and take action.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“When we observe the flow of our breathing, we transcend our thoughts and are able to bring mind and body into harmony with each other. Thus, we create calm.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Bottom lines are addictive behaviours that we make a conscious choice not to repeat. For example, a recovering cocaine addict would create a bottom line that they will not use a mind- or mood-altering substance to deliberately get high. A recovering sex addict might create a bottom line not to watch pornography or not to have sex without any emotional or spiritual connection. Bottom lines are a symbol of our intentions and are very useful at a practical level to address addictions. In many recovery communities, twelve-step fellowships and addiction rehabs, there is also a concept called ‘top lines’.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Top lines to a human being who tends to isolate (an avoidant) would mean they make an effort to talk to another human being when the opportunity arises. A top line can also mean that, whether we feel like it or not, we are committed to our recovery and to improving our emotional and professional life. The idea of ‘top lines’ is not to be hard on ourselves or to put us in a position where we feel unsafe or burnt out. It’s a way to avoid missing opportunities to learn, serve and grow.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Body scan meditation is mentally scanning through each part of the body with presence. It helps us be one with the body. Thus, we can feel if we are holding on to any tension or heaviness or any static emotions. And by doing so, we can find relief and internal freedom.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“In the addiction recovery community, we recognise that addicts can starve themselves of receiving social, sexual or emotional nourishment. Sex and love addicts starve themselves of a healthy, personal relationship and, consequently, deliberately avoid wholesome relationships with other human beings. We’re getting quite deep now, but there are many papers and books published on sexual and emotional anorexia. I have also suffered from emotional anorexia. It’s no myth!”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Hitting bottom is an inside job — it's something that happens within our consciousness.”
Source: The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
“Being gentle with ourselves in an organic way allows us to find refuge and access serenity. Gentleness helps us to learn from our mistakes without being hard on ourselves. We can learn from making a mistake without attacking ourselves.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“Meditation is a powerful practice which can help us to heal our emotional pain. To observe our thoughts and feelings requires willingness and gentleness. We cannot be rigid and harsh on ourselves and hope to feel serene. We have to be willing to go easy on ourselves. The only way to be present and gain the benefits of mindfulness is to love ourselves unconditionally. This is a gradual process.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“Overcoming love addiction is possible, just as it is possible to transcend co-dependence and rebuild a healthy relationship with ourselves and others.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“The more we uncover who we are not and discard our disempowering unconscious behaviours, the more closely we can be in sync with our true, authentic selves.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“My very best thinking led me to a therapist’s office weeping and pleading for help regarding my alcoholism at the age of 19. I thought I could ‘manage’ my alcohol addiction, and I failed miserably until I asked for help. My older friends in recovery remind me that I looked like ‘death’ when I started attending support groups. I was not able to give eye contact, and I covered my eyes with a baseball cap. I had lost significant weight and was frightened to talk to strangers. I was beset with what the programme of Alcoholics Anonymous describes as ‘the hideous Four Horseman – terror, bewilderment, frustration and despair’. Similarly, my very best thinking led me to have unhappy, co-dependent relationships. I can go on. The problem was I was dependent on my own counsel. I did not have a support system, let alone a group of sober people to brainstorm with. I just followed my own thinking without getting feedback. The first lesson I learned in recovery was that I needed to check in with sober and wiser people than me regarding my thinking. I still need to do this today. I need feedback from my support system.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“Having personal boundaries is an act of love. When we are able to assert a boundary, we are practising super self-care. We are being honest with ourselves about what is both acceptable and unacceptable to us. When we are honest with ourselves about what we wish to discuss with and disclose to others, we are being authentic and honest. This might seem perfectly obvious but a lot of people struggle with asserting personal boundaries due to co-dependency, people-pleasing and low self-worth.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“Most people are trying to change the outcomes in their lives, rather than changing themselves as a person. They want to have meaningful, loving and trustworthy relationships, generate more capital, get physically fit or set up a business, without truly putting in the effort to rewire their brains and change their subconscious programming. This is putting the cart before the horse.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“Getting in touch with our frozen grief can be a sacred act. Grief work is healing. Grieving allows us to make peace with the past and the present. Grieving helps us to come out of hiding and unravels our masks and false self. We grow stronger and wiser when we get in touch with our original pain. We are no longer chained to our traumatic buried feelings and memories—we are liberated.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“Long-term, loving, erotic relationships take a lot of work, willingness, patience, compromise, deep listening and humility. Many people struggle in long-term erotic relationships, especially after the fleeting ‘falling in love’ phase has passed. Very often during the first year in a romantic relationship, euphoric and intense emotions, together with high levels of lust, sweep both parties involved off their feet. Excitement, a boost in confidence, and a carefree mood are felt by the couple. This is often described as ‘falling in love’. The couple will very often disclose sensitive secrets about themselves, yearning to feel closer to each other. They are high on life and engaged in intense, sexual romance. This can last up to 18 months depending on the couple, but more than likely it will fizzle out after just one year. All too often after 18 months, when hormone levels and feelings of lust having reverted back to normal levels, couples come crashing back down to reality. This can be very disheartening for both parties.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“The problem is that many of us rely on our everyday, repetitive, mundane thought-life (which is mostly memory), and neglect to monitor our emotions and feelings. This is what keeps us feeling trapped, and therefore stops us from behaving differently towards making positive changes in our lives. We consciously say we want to do something, but feel at odds with what we have declared we wish to do. We think we want to change, but we feel otherwise. How baffling! The deep feelings we have, which we can detect by mindfully paying attention to our body, is what we call our subconscious programming. Such subjective programming is what determines how we behave most of time.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“The difficulty in overcoming self-abandonment is that it is very often unconscious behaviour. Some of us are so deeply ingrained in our survival traits, and swamped in self-delusion, that we cannot see when we are neglecting ourselves. It is extremely difficult to heal from self-abandoning behaviour without help. We need non-shaming people to mirror back to us our disempowering behaviour.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“A deeper, mature love with your spouse/partner is much more fulfilling and richer than the act of ‘falling in love’. A mature love requires trust, honesty and friendship. This cannot be experienced months into a romantic relationship. Mature love is a process which usually begins to develop after 18 months. It is a practice which can be applied one day at a time. When we are in a deeper, mature love, we can share our joys and sadness with our spouse/partner. We can share our desires and build on those dreams. We can support each other when we are grieving or coming to terms with a loss. We can share intellectual curiosity and laugher and have a strong, healthy attachment figure in our lives.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles
“It is our unconscious thoughts, emotions, sensations, feelings and beliefs which will paint our reality. The difficulty for many of us is attempting to build a new fulfilling reality if we have experienced something different. When something goes ‘wrong’ while we are untangling from a co-dependent relationship or creating a new goal, our automatic reaction is to immediately revert back to old thinking and habits.”
Source: Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles