It is almost impossible to have fun when we are bottled up with repressed emotions, worried sick about someone, saturated with guilt and despair, rig… - Melody Beattie

We can confuse love with dependency, manipulation, and neediness. None of those are love. Love is when we want other people to be who they are.

People and things don’t stop our pain or heal us. In recovery, we learn that this is our job, and we can do it by using our resources: ourselves, our Higher Power, our support systems, and our recovery program.

I worked with people who thought they were going crazy because they had believed so many lies they didn’t know what reality was. I saw people who had gotten so absorbed in other people’s problems they didn’t have time to identify or solve their own. These were people who had cared so deeply, and often destructively, about other people that they had forgotten how to care about themselves. The codependents felt responsible for so much because the people around them felt responsible for so little; they were just taking up the slack.