For me personally, I've recently (in the past 3 years) learned that I'm what's called a co-dependent. I take others feelings and ideas and problems personally. I do things out of a need to feel loved not out of love. Someone summed co-dependency up by saying this: Co-dependency is doing for someone what they should do for themselves.
This may not seem harmful or awful or bad even, but it's become my life. I do for others and I don't take my feelings into consideration. I don't always know what I'm feeling even. Because I take others feelings as my own, I allow their thoughts and feelings to dictate my life. If they are sad, then so am I. If they are angry, then so am I. If they need something then I am there to help. If they are too lazy to do it for themselves then I get up and do it for them even if I'm tired. It has to be done, so I take care of it. I don't feel great pleasure or accomplishment from these things, except for the fact that they are done. That's what's important. I would rather that person to have done it, but since they weren't doing it, I felt compelled to do it for them. Someone has to do it, right?
With now knowing a little more about me it's caused me to feel frustrated with me and a desire to change me has been growing inside. This could be a good thing, but with being a co-dependent I want everything to be perfect, and everyone to be happy. So I've struggled with stepping out of my co-dependency to take care of me, but the fact is, I'm still a co-dependent and a people pleaser. I need to find balance in this, but lately I've just felt like a mess as I've tried to fix me. Instead of stepping out of my co-dependency and into a normal life, I've been trying to step out of my co-dependency and find myself stepping into food addiction. Mainly sugar addiction, but it doesn't have to be sugar, it just makes the pain dull more. At least that's the lie I've been believing. I noticed it even more clearly yesterday as I sat in my van, eating a candy bar, unwinding from a long co-dependent day at work. This week God gave me a word thru a friend that just blew me away. He said that I'm perfect.
Now this could've gone really bad if I'd been in a different mind set when I'd received this word. But God's timing was perfect. Along with the word. It didn't go to my head in that I took it personally and patted myself on the back thinking I'd made it. It could've gone that way, but instead it went a little different than that. I got that word in the morning before work. It had been a rough week leading up to this time, where I'd been feeling like a mess, a failure. I had asked the ladies in my 12 step group to pray that I would be able to know God's love in my heart vs my head. Then comes this word from God, that He thinks I'm perfect. The way I received it was that I didn't have to try and fix me to make me better. I was already perfect. God thought so. How can He be wrong? So I dwelt on that all that day and into the next. Wow! God thinks I'm perfect. I don't have to change to please him. That was a freeing thought. So I didn't mind eating that candy bar on the way home. I didn't feel guilty about it either. Then I started eating peanuts. That's when it hit me that I was trying to dull a pain in my life. To hide from it. I don't know what pain or thought it is, but I've been doing it for a while. Avoiding my feelings. Eating them instead.
Knowing that I can just be, makes my life easier and less stressful. I don't have to try harder to please him, but to just rest in His love for me. Because even in my mess, my brokenness, He thinks I'm perfect. What a place to be.
