I had been drifting in and out of the realization of my codependency for many years. The day it hit home for me was in a relationship with someone I cared about deeply.  My life became focused on this person in unhealthy ways.  I began to be controlling, trying to fix things, fix him.  I was judgmental, and very hurtful, then on the flip side, loving.  An abundance of emotions began to surface that I could not understand.  There was a lot of push and pull. I wanted to be close, but was afraid / guarded.  I didn’t want to keep hurting him, so we talked and I took a step back to figure things out.  Initially, I did not know where to look or what to do.

The word codependency came to mind.  I looked it up and sure enough, it described me. Then I found out about CoDA in my area.  This is where I began to take an honest look at my destructive patterns.  I began to understand where my other problems lay: with work, relationships, my life as a whole.  Everything had become unmanageable.   Hearing the stories of others as well as sharing a bit of my own helped me to gain perspective.  I started to evaluate all my relationships and realized that similar patterns existed in ways I hated to admit.  Taking ownership for my part, has been a difficult journey. It has been about 6 weeks in CoDA.  I have been reading the materials and other things to try to understand these patterns, choices and behaviors that got me to this point, learning how to make a change.  There is a lot of work ahead – a life-time journey, in-fact.  This is a second chance at learning to have healthy relationships, with myself and others and things.  Day by day.

I wear a portion of the serenity prayer on my wrist to remind me: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”  And so the journey is beginning.

Ale