I pray the Serenity Prayer. A LOT.
Sometimes - when I have been struggling with someone else's decisions impacting on my life - I even pray the codependent's version of it: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the person I can, and the wisdom to know it's me."
Acceptance of things I can't change is one thing. I talked about that in my last post on this blog.
The other side of the coin, and one which still is a challenge for me just as much as acceptance ever was, is courage to change what I can.
My responsibility is to work on myself, on my relationship with myself, on my relationship with God, on my relationships with other people. My responsibility - my realm, so to speak - is to concentrate on knowing and being true to my true self. Not the facade that I am sometimes tempted to dig out and put on, but the real me - the one I am becoming for what is probably the first time in my life. . . at least that I can remember.
Changing involves hard work - and most of all, courage.
I find it really interesting that we get the word "courage" from the Latin word for "heart" - in fact, the word "heart" in French (most of which comes from Latin) is cœur. In essence, courage means "heart-fulness."
That's cool.
It takes bravery, guts if you will, to live from the fulness of the heart, because the heart can so easily be injured, pierced through with unkindness, rejection, and anger... and so many more things.
Since I started living this lifestyle of rigorous honesty, of letting go, of being real, ... living from my heart is one of the main tenets, one of the foundational principles, on which I base my thinking and my decisions. I pray for courage in my daily life - nearly as much as I pray for serenity. The changes that have come about in my life have been due to having been given the heart-fulness - the courage - to live one day at a time AS ME. Nobody else, no masks or games. I spent the first year of my recovery from being a chameleon, a people-pleaser, a door-mat and a "fixer" ... getting to know that person who I really was, the one who was beneath all the layers of hurt and the walls of self-protection built up over decades of being put down so much that I believed those lies in the core of my being.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it ... real healing starts on the inside and goes toward the outside. An exterior change will stay exterior ... and it won't last. I want LASTING transformation. So, I've been focusing on the inside changes - the ones that only those who are closest to me would notice. How I think. How I react to things. What I consider important. What my priorities are. These are the things that will eventually - I believe - show on the outside. It might take some time because the habits of decades take time to reverse. However, they are possible.
I just need to keep focused on those internal, unseen changes that matter (not the external ones that don't) . . . even when the external ones eventually start showing up.
Sometimes - when I have been struggling with someone else's decisions impacting on my life - I even pray the codependent's version of it: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the person I can, and the wisdom to know it's me."
Acceptance of things I can't change is one thing. I talked about that in my last post on this blog.
The other side of the coin, and one which still is a challenge for me just as much as acceptance ever was, is courage to change what I can.
My responsibility is to work on myself, on my relationship with myself, on my relationship with God, on my relationships with other people. My responsibility - my realm, so to speak - is to concentrate on knowing and being true to my true self. Not the facade that I am sometimes tempted to dig out and put on, but the real me - the one I am becoming for what is probably the first time in my life. . . at least that I can remember.
Changing involves hard work - and most of all, courage.
I find it really interesting that we get the word "courage" from the Latin word for "heart" - in fact, the word "heart" in French (most of which comes from Latin) is cœur. In essence, courage means "heart-fulness."
That's cool.
Since I started living this lifestyle of rigorous honesty, of letting go, of being real, ... living from my heart is one of the main tenets, one of the foundational principles, on which I base my thinking and my decisions. I pray for courage in my daily life - nearly as much as I pray for serenity. The changes that have come about in my life have been due to having been given the heart-fulness - the courage - to live one day at a time AS ME. Nobody else, no masks or games. I spent the first year of my recovery from being a chameleon, a people-pleaser, a door-mat and a "fixer" ... getting to know that person who I really was, the one who was beneath all the layers of hurt and the walls of self-protection built up over decades of being put down so much that I believed those lies in the core of my being.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it ... real healing starts on the inside and goes toward the outside. An exterior change will stay exterior ... and it won't last. I want LASTING transformation. So, I've been focusing on the inside changes - the ones that only those who are closest to me would notice. How I think. How I react to things. What I consider important. What my priorities are. These are the things that will eventually - I believe - show on the outside. It might take some time because the habits of decades take time to reverse. However, they are possible.
I just need to keep focused on those internal, unseen changes that matter (not the external ones that don't) . . . even when the external ones eventually start showing up.
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