Breaking Codependency: Letting Life Happen with Melody Beattie AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast We Can Do Hard Things

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Episode: Breaking Codependency: Letting Life Happen with Melody Beattie

Author: Glennon Doyle and Audacy
Duration: 01:03:00

Episode Shownotes

Melody Beattie shares the difference between healthy and unhealthy helping: - The daily practice that helps Melody stop controlling others and “Let Life Happen.” - Why no one is able to gaslight you more than you. - The one area of life where Codependence is necessary. - All four of

us surrender to the truth that we will never be Codependent No More. About Melody A pioneering voice in self-help literature, Melody Beattie is the author of many bestselling books, including Codependent No More – a #1 New York Times bestseller, which has sold over 7 million copies – as well as The Language of Letting Go, Playing It by Heart, The Grief Club, and Beyond Codependency. An updated edition of the bestselling, modern classic, Codependent No More, is available now. Melody lives in Southern California. TW: @MelodyBeattie IG: @authormelodybeattie To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of 'We Can Do Hard Things', Glennon Doyle, alongside Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle, hosts Melody Beattie to explore codependency and its nuanced implications on personal relationships. Beattie discusses the dangers of self-gaslighting and emotional chaos stemming from a need for control. The conversation emphasizes the significance of self-love, acceptance, and the journey toward personal growth in overcoming codependency. Listeners are encouraged to detach from the emotional turmoil of relationships while embracing life's uncertainties as a path to inner peace.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Breaking Codependency: Letting Life Happen with Melody Beattie) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

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00:02:05 Speaker_02
Today, we are sharing our groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting conversation with Melody Beattie, the author of Codependent No More, who really helped us differentiate between healthy and unhealthy helping.

00:02:27 Speaker_02
Okay, how do we know when our help is helping and when our help is hurting? So this episode had us all stopping to take a good long look in the mirror and asking, am I kind or am I codependent?

00:02:44 Speaker_02
We learned that lots of pod squatters, including Amanda, who assumed they knew what codependent was and that it didn't apply to them, were sadly and codependently mistaken.

00:02:54 Speaker_02
In this episode, Melody shares the daily practice that helps her stop controlling others and let life happen, why no one is able to gaslight you more than you, and the one area of life where codependency is actually necessary.

00:03:09 Speaker_02
That was a big relief to me. By the end, we kind of all surrendered to the truth that we will never be codependent no more and kind of found something powerful and helpful even in that admission. Are you ready? Let's go.

00:03:36 Speaker_02
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Delighted to tell you today that with us is the Melody Beattie, a pioneering voice in self-help literature

00:03:49 Speaker_02
Melody is the author of many bestselling books, including, do-do-do, Codependent No More, a number one New York Times bestseller, which has sold over 7 million copies, as well as The Language of Letting Go, Playing It by Heart, The Grief Club, and Beyond Codependency, an updated edition of the bestselling modern classic, which really screwed us up, okay?

00:04:14 Speaker_02
Codependent No More is available now. Melody lives in Southern California. Melody, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

00:04:22 Speaker_08
Thank you for doing this wonderful show.

00:04:25 Speaker_02
Oh, we're so excited. I have to tell you, I haven't read your book a long time ago because I'm a recovering addict, so that was part of my whole shebang. But then recently, we all got it.

00:04:38 Speaker_02
All three of us got it because our friend Jen Hatmaker was on the show and reminded us of it in talking to us about how important it was for her. The book sat on our coffee table. We just stared at it for about a week.

00:04:52 Speaker_02
And then I said, are you going to read it? And Abby goes, I'm not reading it unless you read it. Which I felt like was very codependent of us. But then I read it. And what I need you to understand, Melody, is that I read the entire book as my sister.

00:05:10 Speaker_02
I pretended I was her reading and I had all of the arguments and the epiphanies that I imagined she would have as I was reading. And I want you to know that I truly let your words sink in and change her deeply through my reading.

00:05:26 Speaker_08
The comedian, Louis Anderson. once said that I haven't really sold 7 million copies of that book. It's just been sold to one really, really codependent woman who went out and bought all those copies for someone else.

00:05:42 Speaker_08
So somewhere between the two, I think there's truth.

00:05:45 Speaker_02
Yes. One of our beloved team members five minutes ago before this interview said, what does it say if four different people in different parts of your life and times of your life have gifted you that book over and over and over again?

00:06:01 Speaker_06
Either they're really codependent or you are.

00:06:03 Speaker_02
Well, yes, I think so because that's a little codependent, right? That's right.

00:06:06 Speaker_08
It is. But on the plus side, and I'm hoping this rings true, if we identify as codependent, we're in pretty good company. Yeah. We are.

00:06:19 Speaker_09
Oh, that makes me feel better.

00:06:21 Speaker_02
Sister, tell Melody about your experience with this.

00:06:25 Speaker_03
Well, I have always just assumed that among the many things that I have to worry about, codependency was not one of them because I was like, oh, codependent. That can't be me. I'm the one that everyone is dependent on.

00:06:44 Speaker_03
So codependency has nothing to do with me. And I just never revisited it until Hatmaker came on the pod and she had just read your book and was talking about how it is not letting others around you that you care about

00:07:04 Speaker_03
feel and experience the consequences of their own actions. And I was like, damn it, damn it. And so I newly understand myself also in this area.

00:07:20 Speaker_02
Can you tell us about how this human condition of codependency came into consciousness, like the beginning of this idea?

00:07:32 Speaker_08
very painfully in my life. I found myself, and I was in the program, in the recovery program, AA. And I was going to meetings and there was a fire going on and a fire among young people that this program and the recovery in it extended to us as well.

00:07:51 Speaker_08
And my sponsor introduced me to a guy, look at me, blaming, I'm not blaming. I married him. And then I began to learn what it meant to be truly codependent. The research from this book was heartfelt.

00:08:08 Speaker_08
And yet it was also an exciting time because there was so much passion for recovery back then. In the seventies in Minnesota, we were on fire, we were steaming. And when I started bugging everyone in AA, like, because my marriage didn't feel right.

00:08:26 Speaker_08
Nothing felt right about it, but nothing had really felt right my entire life. So I started bugging my sponsor and bugging people in the program and say, you know, this isn't, there's something going on here.

00:08:38 Speaker_08
And it's like, shh, just go to your meetings and don't make a problem. But I couldn't, I became obsessed with finding out what was going on with me, what I could be doing that didn't involve putting a substance in me.

00:08:55 Speaker_08
that could be causing and creating this kind of havoc inside of my entire being.

00:09:01 Speaker_02
Because you weren't using.

00:09:03 Speaker_08
No, I had been clean and sober for two or three years by then and working a program, but you wouldn't know it by the way I felt.

00:09:11 Speaker_08
And I thought, oh my God, here I am clean and sober and hard pressed to find a true reason to live other than caring for other people. And so I kept up this obsessive search, which began, I would say 1976 until 1985 when I wrote the book.

00:09:36 Speaker_03
Can we go to that havoc piece? Because one of the most revolutionary parts of your work to me is how codependence makes us feel crazy and leads us to this kind of ultimate self-harm, which is distrusting ourselves.

00:09:55 Speaker_03
So when you talk about feeling crazy, you say we feel crazy because we're lying to ourselves, because we are believing other people's lies.

00:10:04 Speaker_03
and that disrupts this core of our being, that deep instinctive part of ourselves that knows the truth, we push that away. And then we begin to not trust ourselves. Is that what you mean when you say that havoc in your life, that

00:10:23 Speaker_03
that kind of crazy-making piece?

00:10:26 Speaker_08
We go off. We go off. We're not tuned in. We become misaligned. When we're misaligned with ourselves, we really can't tune in to much else. And that's what happens. You know, there's so much talk now about people gaslighting other people.

00:10:41 Speaker_08
No one can gaslight me as well as I can gaslight myself. tell myself my feelings don't matter, what I want doesn't matter, I'm overreacting. All the things we do to invalidate our natural, normal human responses to life.

00:10:57 Speaker_02
And that happens a lot because the kind of codependency you're talking about right now is the definition that this began with, the someone who loves or is in relationship with an addict.

00:11:09 Speaker_08
Well, that wasn't really the first definition. It was, has let ourselves become obsessed or controlled by another person's behavior.

00:11:20 Speaker_08
And that can be like from little things like not picking up your socks to, you know, drinking away the family's finances. Everything is on a scale, isn't it? Of what we're doing and why we're doing it. We all have different impulses that motivate us.

00:11:36 Speaker_08
But when it comes to codependency, luckily we're in this lovely boat together and learning to do something that is meant to, for the most part, feel good. Although all things we do that are good are somewhat hard, aren't they? Sometimes really hard.

00:11:53 Speaker_08
But we're learning what it means to really love ourselves. I mean, I mouthed those words for so many years, but if you look someone in the eye and say, what does that really mean? I'm not sure we can talk about love from the head.

00:12:07 Speaker_08
I think we need to talk about it from the heart. Love yourself, take care of yourself. But what does that really mean? So the next 20, 40 years became dedicated to learning what that really meant.

00:12:19 Speaker_08
To going back, to going forward, to staying stuck, and to all the other journeys in between that we go through on the way.

00:12:27 Speaker_02
So it wasn't the original definition of codependency, it was kind of popularized within the groups, the wives, right, of the addicts, that there's a whole chapter in the big book about the wives.

00:12:41 Speaker_02
They just noticed that their behavior, their lives had become unmanageable, but they weren't using.

00:12:47 Speaker_08
They weren't substance abusing. No, they were just ticking off the addict or the alcoholic and reflecting their instability. And I'm going to be partial to genders, but I don't think that many women knew how not to be codependent.

00:13:03 Speaker_08
back in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. We had been trained, we had been embedded in it, starting with the days that being married to a man was inherent to our survival as a species on this planet. So we're talking about overcoming a lot of past karma.

00:13:21 Speaker_02
Yeah, your book lays out so well, it kind of began in these rooms where people were like, no, my life is, why is my life wild? I'm not even drinking. I'm just married to a drinker and their behavior has made me out of control.

00:13:38 Speaker_02
Then it expanded to people who maybe were loved and somebody who was mentally ill or loved somebody. Those types of people can be codependent.

00:13:46 Speaker_02
But as I'm reading your stuff, I'm like, but aren't all women in a patriarchy absolutely conditioned to be codependent?

00:13:55 Speaker_07
Of course they are.

00:13:56 Speaker_02
Right, so like if the highest definition of a woman is to be selfless, isn't that literally the definition of codependency, selflessness, and only obsession with someone else's pleasing or controlling someone else?

00:14:12 Speaker_08
It's a little frightening if you think about it, but I really believe we've come a long way. We've come a long way to nurturing and growing that soul within each of us.

00:14:23 Speaker_08
I've heard this, I can't document it because my mother sometimes had a hard time with the truth. God bless her soul. But I believe she was the first woman in Minnesota that was allowed to get a mortgage and a property in her own name as a female.

00:14:40 Speaker_03
Wow, that's a big deal.

00:14:41 Speaker_08
Yeah, it is. It is. So I mean, while it's important to stay in now, it's important to not forget how we got here. And not much is guaranteed, is it? No.

00:14:56 Speaker_03
Since I'm relatively new to this, I will represent the people who are listening right now and thinking, this is so fascinating, but I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Let's just do a little, you might be codependent if.

00:15:10 Speaker_03
So as Melody said, her definition in her pioneering work was one who is affected by someone else's behavior and is obsessed with controlling that behavior.

00:15:23 Speaker_03
So this is people who they're always reacting, they're never acting, they are caretaking, they're in denial, repression, anger, they have low self-esteem, and they also are folks who might feel more safe giving than you are secure in receiving, you feel responsible for someone else's wellbeing,

00:15:49 Speaker_03
You have a habit of saying yes when you mean no, these kinds of things. And recently I have become aware of this high functioning codependence, which is the one that I am in tune with.

00:16:04 Speaker_03
And I heard it on Terry Quill's podcast, but it's this idea of like, if you are the, I got it person. You are, I got it. I'm the one that everyone goes to. I am the one who, if something is urgent to someone else, it automatically becomes urgent to me.

00:16:22 Speaker_03
And you're doing that to the detriment of yourself and your responsibility to yourself. So if any of those things ring true to you, Add one thing to that.

00:16:33 Speaker_08
And do you often become passively angry at all these people?

00:16:39 Speaker_03
Does it count if you become actively angry at these people?

00:16:44 Speaker_08
Slide right on down that scale, huh?

00:16:47 Speaker_02
That's so true, Melody. So you're doing all the things, but then you're secretly seething that you have to do all the things.

00:16:53 Speaker_08
Yeah, we're constantly angry about what we're doing instead of realizing that, yes, there is a connection between us and what we do. And then trying to intercept that connection and figure out what we're doing that we don't like.

00:17:04 Speaker_08
Who is the hardest person to control? Self. For each of us. So it's so much easier to try and control others. And at first we don't know them as well as we know ourselves, do we? But, and I would say that it's just not controlling other people.

00:17:23 Speaker_08
I would say that people with codependency issues, and I am included there, have control issues generally with life. Especially if we came from chaotic situations where we could never relax and allow life to unfold.

00:17:39 Speaker_08
We couldn't trust ourselves because someone was gaslighting us. And I would say it takes a couple hours of my energy every day to focus on letting go of my control issues.

00:17:51 Speaker_01
How do you do that?

00:17:54 Speaker_08
A lot of meditation, whole lot of meditation, yoga. I have a yoga routine that I'm able to do every day and actually in this podcast room. But by getting into my body, by getting out of the world around me,

00:18:11 Speaker_08
and not sticking my finger in the light socket of scrolling on my phone and just getting into who I am, relaxing with myself, remembering what I enjoy, remembering all I have right now. It's so ungodly easy to see what we don't have.

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00:21:53 Speaker_02
Can we talk about the phone? Because this is another thought I was having while I was reading your book. I... don't answer texts.

00:22:02 Speaker_02
It's just something that I just decided I cannot live my life just constantly responding to anybody, whoever wants to reach out at any time.

00:22:11 Speaker_02
This upsets people, not the people in my life who've texted me, but like if I post something and it, and people can see that I have like 300 unread tasks, it makes people wild.

00:22:22 Speaker_02
But my question Melanie is, aren't we all setting up a system where we're completely codependent on

00:22:28 Speaker_02
emails, and texts, because if codependency is reacting instead of acting, if picking up our phones and we're constantly waiting for the world, for anybody who tweets at us, for anybody who emails us, for anybody who texts us to tell us what they need from us, and then we live our entire lives just reacting to what everybody else needs from us or whatever ideas anybody else has from us, aren't we all totally codependent upon the interwebs, email,

00:22:55 Speaker_08
We are completely plugged in to the electrical circuits of almost every other human being on this planet. We pick up their anxiety. We pick up their fear. I mean, we're all like tapped into this big spider web of ethers.

00:23:13 Speaker_08
Of course, we're going to have anxiety. And it gets to the point where sometimes if I'm not feeling enough anxiety, I'll scroll through my phone to start a little bit of it. So yeah, I spent a lot of time working on staying at peace.

00:23:31 Speaker_08
I think that's so much better than being happy because even being happy can be a distraction, but being peaceful really works for me. That's amazing.

00:23:41 Speaker_02
Can you talk about the seeming to be in control? Like sometimes the people who seem to be in the most control are out of control. The characteristic being, well, I've got it all under control.

00:23:53 Speaker_02
Or if you are trying to control another person's behavior, really that other person's in control of you.

00:24:01 Speaker_08
Absolutely. It's all an illusion. This whole, I can control you, you're controlling me. It's all an illusion and it can crumble quite quickly and usually does. We can't control any human being. They are going to do what they want to do.

00:24:18 Speaker_03
Can you speak to your second spiritual awakening? You say that your first spiritual awakening, you realized God was real and your second spiritual awakening, you realized you were real. Can you can you speak to that moment?

00:24:31 Speaker_03
Because I think that exemplifies exactly what Glennon's going to right now.

00:24:38 Speaker_08
OK, this happened. fairly deeply into my marriage after I had been trying to convince myself I could deal with it. It wasn't as bad as I thought, but yet it was. And I had already told David and we had two kids, I had two kids still in diapers.

00:24:56 Speaker_08
And I told him, if you drink again, we are over, we're ended. And he went to Vegas and I said, well, promise me you won't drink. He said, of course not.

00:25:09 Speaker_08
We were scheduled to hold a party at the home we had in Minneapolis for a neighbor who introduced me to Al-Anon and had put herself through nursing school. He was supposed to be home, and it was a big deal to me to be able to thank her.

00:25:26 Speaker_08
She had helped me. And he didn't show up. I hadn't heard from him. I started calling him on the phone. The hotel would put me through and it would just ring into that.

00:25:37 Speaker_08
And I know, you know, when you're a good codependent, you know, you don't really need confirmation, do you?

00:25:42 Speaker_08
But ultimately he did pick up the phone and I heard, you know, literally almost heard glug, glug, glug as, you know, he poured liquid into, either into his throat, into something. And I went, oh man, here we go again.

00:25:57 Speaker_08
But what changed in me, first it was a spiritual awakening I had when I realized I was as out of control with obsessing about him as I used to be about getting drugs.

00:26:13 Speaker_08
I had all these people coming over for this party and all I could think about was the other person, what someone else was or wasn't doing. And for the first time since I married him, I saw myself.

00:26:26 Speaker_08
I thought, you know, he's out of control, but so am I. And that was the first part of my second spiritual awakening. The second part was I realized that I was real. God was real. I was real. I wasn't just an appendage to another human being.

00:26:48 Speaker_08
I was pretty much, I don't know about fully functioning, but getting there, a human. And that was revolutionary to me because first I had been my mom's pet, and then I just turned into an object of reaction to David.

00:27:03 Speaker_08
And so it was the beginning of me, well, it's the journey we're all on our entire lives, the journey of continually every day, rediscovering ourselves, who we are, how we feel, what we want, what we don't like,

00:27:16 Speaker_08
what we have to offer in the world, taking our seat at the table, all the different, there's so many different phases in life we each go through.

00:27:24 Speaker_08
And to learn to love ourselves and not turn on ourselves when we go through these phases or when we don't do them perfectly, that's the kind of self-love that we're now moving into it being an absolute necessity to have for ourselves.

00:27:43 Speaker_02
It's interesting because it's almost like with codependency, the drug is control. It's not booze. It's not food. It's worry. It's control. I think sometimes when you say control, people don't identify with it until you say help.

00:27:57 Speaker_02
Like if you are obsessed with helping,

00:28:01 Speaker_08
They're still calling it helping, huh?

00:28:02 Speaker_02
I think so. I think so. I think I am. So, I'm sure they are. So, helping though, people obsessed with helping. Is it helping just a sweet word for control? And what's the right kind of help? Some help's got to be okay, right?

00:28:20 Speaker_02
It's helping that no one asked for.

00:28:23 Speaker_03
In fact, they said, please don't do that. Here I've come with my help.

00:28:27 Speaker_06
Yeah, they're making the Dracula sign and saying, please don't bring your help.

00:28:33 Speaker_02
Okay, so that's the sign, huh? Got these bags of help.

00:28:36 Speaker_03
They're like, we're closed, the big close sign on the door. And you're like, just got a few more bags I'm gonna bring in.

00:28:43 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's help, unwanted help, the budding in help that nobody asked for. But it's something much bigger than that.

00:28:50 Speaker_08
Okay. We consistently and without fail love the other person more than we love ourselves. That's where we step into the pit of codependency.

00:29:06 Speaker_03
And don't we also, believe that we are not worthy of love because we seek out those with whom we can settle to be needed as opposed to be loved.

00:29:26 Speaker_08
We do. Let's be very, very honest. Which one of us completely understands love? What it is? Not this guy. I mean, we're all pretty much on equal ground, I think, stumbling through it alone. And yet, and this whole nonsense about the one.

00:29:47 Speaker_08
I mean, sometimes we have someone for right now, sometimes for a while, we walk with others on this journey. we gain, we give back. And if we're codependent, sometimes we keep repeating, we can get stuck in a little bit of a rut.

00:30:02 Speaker_08
But that's how we learn and grow. And in the end, it's all good. It's all okay. And we need to stop picking on ourselves for the way we've grown and changed. I was reading something the other day and it talked about how

00:30:19 Speaker_08
We never could see a baby grow, can we? I mean, we can't sit there all day and say, oh, she just grew. I've never seen a plant grow. I've come out the next day and I've seen that it's grown, but I can never see it when it's growing.

00:30:36 Speaker_08
I can never catch it. And the same holds true with us. I don't know if it's having gone through the 80s, 90s and 2000s, but we can get to expecting this parade for every time something important happens.

00:30:51 Speaker_08
But I found that the changes I make on the journey to self-love are quieter and they're the kind of changes I can't see any more than I can see a plant or a baby girl. But I can see the difference.

00:31:04 Speaker_08
You know, little by slowly, I can see the difference when I pay attention and give awareness to loving myself as much as I love others. I'm not talking about to the exclusion of, I'm talking about as much as.

00:31:20 Speaker_09
And so if you do love yourself as much as you're loving others, then are you free of codependency? Because I read your book over 20 years ago, and one of the things that I have always struggled with codependency around is I have this huge heart.

00:31:40 Speaker_09
And I do agree that for a long time, I didn't have the ability to love myself more than other people. But now I feel like I do love myself. equally, and sometimes more than other people, but I do still exhibit similar behaviors that I did then.

00:32:00 Speaker_09
Am I still codependent now? Do you heal from this travesty? What, of being human? Of being codependent, because I don't know the difference between codependency and love. That is my big question, like marriage and my children.

00:32:19 Speaker_09
Raising children feels like a big pile of codependency. How do you-?

00:32:25 Speaker_08
Raising kids is one of the few legitimate circumstances that most closely resembles codependency, only it's legitimate. Thank you.

00:32:37 Speaker_03
Thank you, Melody.

00:32:38 Speaker_09
Okay, this makes me feel better.

00:32:40 Speaker_03
Because we got to that and we're like, we don't know how to make this work. This is where the theory really breaks down.

00:32:50 Speaker_08
I know, and it's our job to love that baby through life and into life, which is also our job with us.

00:32:58 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because in parenthood, the needing thing is real. The needing is real. But in adult relationships, I just keep coming back to the part where you said codependents settle for being needed. It's like, I don't know what love is.

00:33:24 Speaker_02
I don't trust that I'm enough. So I create these situations where it seems like everyone's dependent on me to do things for them or be things for them because that legitimizes my worthiness.

00:33:39 Speaker_08
And I believe we all, who doesn't like being needed a little bit, right? You know, now and again, if nobody needs us, if we're not part of a community that would miss us if we weren't there, but we can set up systems where the need is.

00:33:54 Speaker_08
I mean, it's a crazy, chaotic, pounding need that we've created of people leaning on us and us getting resentful. And why does this always happen to me? Well, because you keep doing it.

00:34:04 Speaker_08
It's not about pleasing anything or anyone outside of ourselves, just ourselves, our own heart, our own peace, our own life. That's pretty much who we're here to please.

00:34:16 Speaker_08
It's not as easy said as done though, because we have to get to know ourselves, don't we? To know what pleases us, what doesn't please us, what we'd like, what feels good, what doesn't feel good. And then when does it matter?

00:34:28 Speaker_08
Because there's a lot of times when, you know, life will break our boundaries. It will do things to us we didn't want it to do, we didn't plan on and that aren't fair and aren't right. But we have a choice and we can go back to our victim's story

00:34:44 Speaker_08
or we can surrender and we'll probably do some of both along the way. Life is messy, it's complicated. It doesn't happen neatly the way it does in books and movies. It's just much messier than that. And yet, when we give up our control,

00:35:06 Speaker_08
And this thing we have with needing to know how everything is and how every detail will work out when we're willing to say, I don't know, and step into the unknown is when we find the magic. We really do. That's when the magic happens.

00:35:19 Speaker_02
Does it make sense? But I know every single thing I struggle with in my entire life, all of my battles, the questions are many, but the answer is always let go of control in a million different ways. That's just always the answer.

00:35:33 Speaker_02
Can you talk to us about detachment? What is detachment?

00:35:38 Speaker_08
Probably the first thing we need to learn to do at the beginning of our recovery journey and every day when we wake up. I am a Gemini. I get really obsessive. I like to attach. I attach to ideas. I'm overly loyal.

00:35:59 Speaker_08
I will hang on to people, places, and things long after they've lost their usefulness. And so it's like trying to keep up with the way we attach fast enough to free ourselves so that we can live our lives. That is a worthwhile goal and it's not easy.

00:36:22 Speaker_09
You just solved my life right there. I'm a Gemini too, Melody. Thank you for making me feel seen and heard.

00:36:38 Speaker_02
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00:38:56 Speaker_03
When I was thinking about detachment, I just assumed that detachment meant you put up this boundary, this person is not in your life.

00:39:06 Speaker_03
So basically, again, my sense of control, like, okay, I can just reorder everything and then these people are in and these people are out. But you say that the detachment isn't being detached from the person,

00:39:20 Speaker_03
It is detaching from the agony of the involvement with the person.

00:39:25 Speaker_08
I do. And I want to say something else too, that the detachment didn't just occur when I had that realization, when I was on the phone. Because what I did is I ended up telling him, you know, you got yourself to Vegas.

00:39:39 Speaker_08
If you want to get home, you'll get yourself home. I'm putting on a party. I'll see you later." That wasn't the moment I detached. I detached in the three years incrementally that occurred and the experiences I went through that occurred before that.

00:39:52 Speaker_08
I mean, it's a process and those aren't just words. Everything is a process in life and we can trust our process. We don't have to invalidate it. We don't have to call ourselves names, although it's sometimes fun to rag on ourselves, isn't it?

00:40:10 Speaker_08
The beginnings and endings aren't as clear as they may appear to be.

00:40:14 Speaker_03
I heard you say that you think that the changes that have happened in your life or the changes you've made in your life have all started two years before anyone could say, oh, there's a change.

00:40:34 Speaker_03
And that felt so comforting to me because it feels sometimes you're like, God, I'm just doing the same damn thing I'm always doing and I'm not making. But all those little bitty baby micro Mental shifts.

00:40:50 Speaker_08
Little by slowly, little by slowly. And then in spring we go out and we go, oh, my garden's grown. And we need to do that with ourselves too. We need to also tell ourselves about the progress we've made.

00:41:02 Speaker_08
Being codependent isn't like, I can get a little ashamed of it. And I wrote the book, but it's not a bad thing. It's a human thing. It's a human thing people do. We call it a dysfunction, but we call everything a dysfunction now, don't we?

00:41:21 Speaker_02
We do.

00:41:22 Speaker_08
Mm-hmm.

00:41:23 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'm a recovering addict, so I am partial to us, but I always feel like all of these conditions or things that we call, label as, what did you just call it? A dysfunction? Yeah.

00:41:37 Speaker_04
Mm-hmm.

00:41:37 Speaker_02
They're all just extreme forms of the human condition. Yeah. Always. Like, I drank and did drugs and it really, to numb, but everybody numbs. in maybe less dramatic ways.

00:41:49 Speaker_02
A codependent who's really, really, really out of control with everybody in one way or another is dependent upon someone else's behavior.

00:41:58 Speaker_08
And it's all a spectrum. It's all a spectrum.

00:42:00 Speaker_02
Yeah, absolutely.

00:42:01 Speaker_08
What I found when, and you had asked earlier about the progression of the awareness and consciousness of codependency, is when I started talking openly about my experiences and especially growing up in an alcoholic home, how that had affected me, I found that all these people whose lives I envied and looked at in my neighborhood growing up were dealing with the same issues.

00:42:23 Speaker_08
I wasn't that special. I was just the only one opening my app about it.

00:42:30 Speaker_02
I feel that, Melody. I feel that. Can you talk to us about acceptance? Because Sister has been really thinking about this idea in your work.

00:42:39 Speaker_03
I was fascinated by, you talk about Esther Olsen's work where she calls grief the forgiveness process. And obviously the last stage of grief is acceptance.

00:42:55 Speaker_03
And it just made me think, is all of this, our process of detaching, is it really all just about forgiving others for being who they are?

00:43:11 Speaker_08
And- Including ourselves. Yes. Yes. Acceptance. I mean, we don't have to like it. We just have to accept it.

00:43:20 Speaker_03
Damn. Some people think, okay, if I'm going to accept this, I just have to adapt to it, or I just have to resign myself to it, or I have to just tolerate it. And that isn't what acceptance means, correct?

00:43:33 Speaker_08
Surrender, yeah. No, we're talking about surrender, a real waving their white flag of surrender to the experience, to this new twist in our journey, to how this changes our lives.

00:43:46 Speaker_08
My life was blown up in 1990 when my son Shane went skiing on his 12th birthday and never came home. Disrupted my daughter's life. It disrupted my life. And

00:44:00 Speaker_08
And it's one thing to say the word grief and to talk about the journey, but I mean, my soul fell out of my heart and down onto the floor. And I spent the next 20 years trying to find more light and, and get through it and understand.

00:44:16 Speaker_08
But one of the first lessons I learned when, after moving to California with my daughter was I wasn't able to run into anyone on this planet who hadn't encountered some form of loss, some form of anguish.

00:44:32 Speaker_08
And I mean, as I traveled around the world, really deep, painful, big things. That was the start of the grief club. That we're not being singled out, although sometimes it may feel like we are.

00:44:48 Speaker_08
And I don't know, they don't seem to tell us this stuff in kindergarten, do they? You know, carry an umbrella and a rock everywhere you go because life is going to be a little bit difficult. You're going to need to protect yourself often.

00:45:04 Speaker_08
No, we're not completely equipped for that.

00:45:07 Speaker_02
Melody, thank you for sharing that. It's really the ultimate acceptance as opposed to codependence is not necessarily a singular person that we're trying to control, but life itself.

00:45:22 Speaker_08
Yeah, we don't want to get banged up anymore. It's not because we're bad, it's because we've already been through enough, we think. We just don't want to hurt anymore. And who can blame us?

00:45:36 Speaker_02
But it's going to happen no matter what, whether we're in control mode or in surrender mode. Life is coming at us anyway.

00:45:42 Speaker_08
I have learned that surrender is one of the few things in life that hurts most before I do it. Every time out of the box. It's my resistance. It's my resistance.

00:45:52 Speaker_08
When I'm in a state of resistance to a situation, to an emotion, to anything in life, when I'm resisting it, I'm putting myself through pain.

00:46:03 Speaker_02
It's not the surrender that hurts, it's the considering surrender that hurts.

00:46:07 Speaker_08
Yes. Contemplating the fact that we're not really in control. Yeah.

00:46:14 Speaker_03
And that is the grief, right? Because if we get to surrender, which is acknowledging that we accept our circumstances, including ourselves and including the people in our lives and our lives themselves as they are in this moment,

00:46:32 Speaker_03
The grief is that we can't make ourselves and our lives and other people any different than they are in this moment.

00:46:45 Speaker_02
The good news is we're not God. The bad news is we're not God.

00:46:52 Speaker_08
Life is a duality, isn't it? It really is a duality. There's no easy formula for anything in life. that I found that actually works.

00:47:03 Speaker_09
How do you approach the idea of every single day needing to surrender? Because there's so many of us, myself included, I want to do it once and be done with it. How do you approach feeling okay with the idea that every day

00:47:23 Speaker_09
Because it's not a forever finished, done thing.

00:47:26 Speaker_02
It's like every time you get on a website and it says, do you accept the cookies? And I'm like, is there anywhere that I can just accept all the cookies for once? And just, yes!

00:47:41 Speaker_08
It can be a bit much at times, especially over the last, I would say, 15 years.

00:47:48 Speaker_08
It all has been a bit much, but we're getting challenged at such deep levels about long-held beliefs, about right, about wrong, about who we are, about how to be in the world. If there's another thing I would encourage people to do and

00:48:04 Speaker_08
instead of telling ourselves stop controlling, we can start allowing life. We can allow life to happen. We can allow ourselves to be and to happen as well.

00:48:16 Speaker_08
We can gentle up a little bit because it's just been batshit crazy for quite a few years now, hasn't it? really crazy and really intense.

00:48:25 Speaker_08
And even going on the cell phone, every time I start to scroll, it feels like sticking my finger in a light switch. And it just aggravates everything.

00:48:36 Speaker_08
So the next challenge is to find doing things that calm us, that help us find our inner peace and that nurture the light each of us have inside of ourselves to share with the world. We don't have to change the whole world.

00:48:51 Speaker_08
we don't have to buy out the whole table. We just need to quietly take our seat at it and let our light shine. And to do that, I find meditation absolutely critical. Right now, I don't know how to get through any day successfully without meditating.

00:49:11 Speaker_08
The anxiety and the energy is so intense. And I live in a very natural, beautiful place, but it's not about where we live. It's about our home inside of ourselves and how that home feels to be in. And if we're comfortable in that home.

00:49:25 Speaker_02
And returning to the place that is the only place you can control. I mean, I think about this all the time because of anxiety. And it feels to me like the reason why yoga and meditation helped me are because

00:49:37 Speaker_02
then my awareness is returned to the place that I can control and that is safe.

00:49:43 Speaker_02
When you're scrolling or when you're even talking to someone else or when you're looking outside of the world, your awareness is on everybody else and what you can't control. That's why we're all anxious when we're watching the news.

00:49:54 Speaker_02
We're looking at this carnage and our awareness is on something that we can do nothing about.

00:49:59 Speaker_08
We move out of home. Out of home. We move out of home and that's What so much of life is about is about getting us comfortable. And how can I learn to make myself comfortable in my own home?

00:50:13 Speaker_08
No, I can't control everything in my environment, but I can make choices that lead to an optimum environment in my home, inside of myself for me to live in.

00:50:21 Speaker_03
Yeah. And moving out of our home is in that way that you just described, but it's also in the way of understanding that a lot of these very well ingrained strategies and ways of seeing the world that are making us crazy now,

00:50:50 Speaker_03
are there because we've never moved out of our metaphorical home because a lot of those strategies were strategies that were letting us survive when we couldn't make that choice for ourselves.

00:51:04 Speaker_03
You talk a lot about how a lot of the things that you had to move away from later were the very things that kept you safe earlier.

00:51:16 Speaker_08
Right, well, and we're all a bit like that, aren't we? We find one circle and it works. And if we're growing, we outgrow it or another person outgrows it and it stops working.

00:51:27 Speaker_08
But we, with our loyal, ever loyal codependence hearts, will remain attached in that and to that and feeling guilty should we happen to neglect it for many years to come after it doesn't really work for us anymore or the other people.

00:51:42 Speaker_08
It's just like, I have to keep at this, don't I? not necessarily we can't discount the huge changes going on around us now either we're going through so many spiritual global changes transformation upheaval and just when it lands

00:52:02 Speaker_08
It's like a butterfly, it flutters again and flies away. It never, it hasn't landed. It hasn't stopped changing for years.

00:52:09 Speaker_08
And so of all the times I've lived through, I've never felt the challenge to meditate and create a peaceful home in myself as I have now, as I have recently. That doesn't come natural.

00:52:21 Speaker_08
I don't know that it comes natural to anyone without a practice, you know.

00:52:26 Speaker_02
I guess we think of detachment as not caring saying that's enough or letting go. But really to me, it has to do with the idea of just not depending on solid ground.

00:52:40 Speaker_02
Like that everything is like riding a wave as opposed to trying to find somewhere to stand still. Because I feel like I'm always trying to find solid ground, like somewhere to stand still.

00:52:52 Speaker_02
And life is just constantly requiring, is constantly movement, movement and requiring me to not be rigid but to just be agile.

00:53:04 Speaker_08
That's such a great point. I think being flexible right now, being flexible in our ideation, in our opinions, in the way we think, what we expect of life every day, we need to be so flexible.

00:53:24 Speaker_08
Otherwise we're gonna run into that resistance and then that need.

00:53:27 Speaker_08
I mean, the more we can actively be flexible every day, the better, not flexible with our values necessarily, but flexible enough to go with the flow of life as it shifts and changes at astronomical levels.

00:53:42 Speaker_08
And I think it's gonna keep doing it for a little bit longer.

00:53:46 Speaker_02
Yeah, forever.

00:53:47 Speaker_08
Yeah.

00:53:48 Speaker_02
I really relate to the idea of strong opinions loosely held, right? Like I come into every situation knowing exactly how I feel about the thing, and then I just try, and then I'm just like, huh, shift, shift based on what the other person says, right?

00:54:06 Speaker_02
So it doesn't mean you can't be a passionate person.

00:54:09 Speaker_08
Absolutely, we can be passionate as long as we're open. Sometimes we can just be so sure we know things. And we've maybe reached a certain level of understanding, but we don't necessarily really know it yet. And we're about to learn.

00:54:22 Speaker_08
I mean, life can be a very exciting journey. And I don't like to just throw that out because it can get very cliche-ish. But it can be, even now, as we're challenged. As we're challenged, it's an exciting time for each of us to be alive.

00:54:37 Speaker_08
It is a challenging time. It's gonna challenge us at levels we've not been challenged before. Yay.

00:54:48 Speaker_08
And the reason we've been getting all these superpowers from recovery since the 1970s is not so we can keep them on our vanity in our bedroom and use them when we want to do a powder puff on our face. It's because we're really going to need them.

00:55:06 Speaker_08
We're going to need these personal skills. It's not all been about nonsense. It's happening for a reason. Do yourself another favor. We all do. Keep track of your own growth.

00:55:19 Speaker_08
Don't just go out in that garden and look at how that plant has grown every year. Go out every month or every time you do something or you feel good about something you've done, you know, a little pat on the back doesn't hurt, does it?

00:55:32 Speaker_08
We can, you know, humbly keep trying and we can humbly feel good about the good we've done. Keeping in mind, that's just my opinion today.

00:55:43 Speaker_02
We like it. We live to please you, Melody. We just want you to like us. And if there's anything we can do to help you.

00:55:53 Speaker_08
I'll let you know.

00:55:54 Speaker_02
Okay, thank you. Thanks.

00:55:55 Speaker_08
I will let you know. Until then, just please keep being yourselves.

00:55:59 Speaker_02
So this is, we can do hard things.

00:56:01 Speaker_02
Besides dealing with the world and all the anxiety in the world, what is the thing that you are working on right now in terms of this, that you're trying not to control, that you're trying to live from your home with?

00:56:16 Speaker_08
I think that would take more time than we have in this podcast. There's another book and follow this one, and it's called Living by Spirit. I don't want to mix the lessons up too much.

00:56:29 Speaker_08
But waking up at age 70 and having to start completely over again as a single woman in LA and 70 years old. So there's been a few challenges with that, you know, concerning surrender, concerning acceptance. And then starting over again.

00:56:49 Speaker_08
I don't know if y'all have had to do it. I'm guessing the answer is yes. I never thought I'd have to do it again at age 70. And I would say for the most part, most days I'm pretty chill with it. I'm pretty good with it.

00:57:08 Speaker_08
Although sometimes I do feel like I've been hog tied and I'm just laying here trying to get out of the ropes. I would say that is the biggest challenge I'm facing right now.

00:57:16 Speaker_08
Waking up alive, being told that you have life, a lot potentially of life left at age 70 in LA has been the biggest challenge that I've had to face.

00:57:27 Speaker_02
That's amazing. I gotta tell you, I had strong opinions loosely held.

00:57:32 Speaker_02
I thought we were gonna come on this interview and you were gonna just give us a bunch of lists and reasons we were codependent and instead I feel like, I just feel like you gave us just some peace.

00:57:43 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:57:44 Speaker_02
I've just loved this hour with you. I feel more in my home than I did when we started. I just think you're wonderful. But I also think I'm wonderful, Melody, and I'm not focusing on the fact that you're wonderful, but that I'm wonderful.

00:57:59 Speaker_08
I think you're wonderful too. I think the group is wonderful. And it's been my pleasure to share light with you.

00:58:05 Speaker_03
Can I just ask one teeny tiny question? Here she goes. For those of us for whom we hear you on The Returning Home, good idea. Great, let's do that. What if our home is like a bit, disorderly, their home is under construction.

00:58:24 Speaker_03
It's just, it's kind of chaotic in there. So we're not totally sure that returning home is going to feel as comforting as it seems to be for y'all. So do you have any suggestions on that?

00:58:39 Speaker_08
That's pretty much how my home felt when I realized I had to start over at age 70. I wasn't gangbusters for it. And it wasn't necessarily pleasant, but it was surrendering to and going through the process of getting comfortable with it.

00:58:57 Speaker_08
And sometimes it felt like I was being burned with lasers, you know, on my brain, on my spirit, on my emotions. It's not always that painful, but sometimes it is. Sometimes it can be brutal.

00:59:08 Speaker_08
Life can actually be brutal in moments, but we get through them, don't we? The storms do pass. We get through them and

00:59:20 Speaker_08
If we're looking, we'll see that we've grown, we've changed, and we will feel a little more confident in our ability to surrender to and trust life.

00:59:29 Speaker_03
Amen. So you don't wait until it's orderly to go home. You just go home and work on it until- And start cleaning it and straightening it up best you can.

00:59:40 Speaker_02
Because there's also a place Like I'm not 70, I'm 46, but I'm just starting this whole new fricking level of therapy that I just didn't work things out before. So now I'm back to the damn work. And I have never felt more

00:59:58 Speaker_02
like it's more important to get back to home. But there's different levels of home. You go home and you're scattered a horrible place where all the memories and the thing are coming.

01:00:08 Speaker_02
But then there's like a sinking to like this little safe room that was never affected by any of the ghosts in the house. There is a place to get to that is not the rest of the cluttered house, like this little room.

01:00:25 Speaker_08
It is. When I started, Redoing my life at age 70, I also started remodeling my home. And remodeling your home while you're living in it is like making the bed while you're in it. It is just horrendously uncomfortable.

01:00:42 Speaker_08
And yet I was that uncomfortable within myself. And I had to be patient. And the most important thing I had to realize is if I couldn't be happy, and grateful for everything in my life right now.

01:00:55 Speaker_08
I would not be happy or grateful when those things came along. They would be like something else that was just passing by. We make ourselves happy at home or not, or we accept it when we're not.

01:01:08 Speaker_08
Whoever is happy all the time when they're home, no one, no.

01:01:15 Speaker_09
I mean, on behalf of my 20-year-old self, I'm now 42, I just want to say thank you so much for giving me the language back then to know that I had a life's work ahead of me.

01:01:28 Speaker_09
And I think that, I don't know if you meant this at the time, but it's really a feminist manifesto of women returning to their homes. On behalf of all women everywhere, I want to thank you for your work and sharing this hour with us.

01:01:42 Speaker_01
Every woman needs a room in her own home of her damn own.

01:01:47 Speaker_08
Well, we were told we didn't have homes. Yeah. But we could clean up their homes. Yeah.

01:01:52 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:01:54 Speaker_08
Oh, nice and cozy. I know. I know. I know. But the good news is we're being evolved. We're being changed. We're growing. That's right.

01:02:05 Speaker_03
We love you, Melody. Give your daughter a big hug from us.

01:02:08 Speaker_07
Yes, please. All right, I will. She'll be thrilled.

01:02:12 Speaker_03
What's her name?

01:02:14 Speaker_07
Nicole.

01:02:14 Speaker_02
Hi, Nicole. Hi, Nicole. For the rest of you pod squatters, just find some time to get home this week. We love you so much. See you next week. I loved that so much. You're incredible.

01:02:30 Speaker_03
Oh my gosh. You know what? It's just like this thing where you know you have a really good friend when you don't clean up your house before they come in.

01:02:39 Speaker_03
But to be like the best friend to you, you don't need to clean up your own house before you go home.

01:02:54 Speaker_08
We mind fuck ourselves so much. We do. Just continually, constantly pick on ourselves. It was my pleasure. I hope we meet this way again.

01:03:10 Speaker_02
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things?

01:03:23 Speaker_02
Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts,

01:03:35 Speaker_02
Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod.

01:03:45 Speaker_02
While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much.

01:03:55 Speaker_02
We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

01:04:03 Speaker_02
Our executive producer is Jenna Wise Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren Legrasso, Alison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.