False Gods
Hello! My name is Catherine and I am a recovering codependent.
Codependency is an acquired mental health disorder, based on social conditioning and upbringing.
At its core, codependency means that I don’t didn’t love myself. I was taught not to. Instead I was taught that to give of myself to others made me a good person, and keeping myself to myself made me a bad person.
I was taught that self-love is shameful; by people who themselves had been shamed not to love themselves.
I’ve had enough. By not loving myself I have treated myself and others badly. No more.
I now practice self-love.
False Gods
My favourite toy at the gym is the rowing machine. A few sessions back I was piloting the rower closest to the stairwell and one of the gym owners, a man with a contagious enthusiasm for life, topped the stairs and bounded into the room singing in his powerful British accent; "ROW ROW ROW your boat!” I grinned in response, said hi and carried on rowing with a big smile on my face.
He had no idea that he was singing my personal, made-up religion’s first hymn.
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
Rhymes of Emergence
One of my earliest experiences of emergence was while singing Row Your Boat as a three-year old in a daycare in Pretoria, South Africa. We were about 20 kids, sitting cross-legged in a circle, singing along with the teacher and copying her motions of rowing, swaying our hands above our heads and then hugging ourselves. A warm, shimmering clarity emerged in the air at the centre of the circle as we repeated the song and the motions over and over, like a heat mirage. Our voices became impressively synchronised and harmonised for a large group of young children and there was a hum, a tone - a sweet frequency - that entered my body and I wondered if anyone else could feel it. My body was covered in goosebumps and I felt like I was floating, no longer sitting on the floor but in the air just a breath above it. I looked around and everyone was grinning at each other with sparkly eyes. I saw goosebumps on the arms and legs of the children to either side of me. One of the kids jumped up and started bouncing around in the middle of the circle and in a flash we were all up and dancing and shouting and laughing.
I believe we created a system that allowed for the generation of pure, unadulterated joy; a combination of love and gratitude. The JOY that emerged from our system was a conscious entity whose “body” was that cluster of individual human beings, whose lifetime began and ended with our song. This entity was a little piece of God, born through our collective consciousness.
I believe we created novel
Divine Consciousness.
Little kids are still close to the source; they unconsciously generate fresh Divine Consciousness. I call this Divine Consciousness my higher power, All, God or Universe. I believe that it’s only as I grew up that my body, ego and spirit become scarred and bruised and I became clogged up as a conduit for fresh Divine Consciousness to emerge into the world through. Trauma, and my attachment to my personal trauma, has the same effect on my connection with my higher power as sediment building up in a water pipe: it inhibits flow. Healing from trauma on all levels is similar to clearing out the build-up of calcium and grime in a pipe.
It’s messy work, but it’s admirable and honourable work too, and the result is magnificent.
The result is worth my effort. I’m worth my effort.
I believe my best course of action with regards to traumatic situations that I may encounter in the future is to accept that shit happens, learn ways to effectively manage myself when the inevitable shit-happens shit happens and then learn from it gratefully, let it go lovingly and keep moving forward cheerfully.
I believe All has given us a perception of time as linear because of the importance of forward momentum in the process of the Divine Will self-actualising, I call this self-actualisation process the Divine Plan.
Stagnation in any form, in any system, is a sign of built-up trauma and can become traumatising in its own right if it goes unaddressed.
I believe a lot of my codependent traits are a result of stagnation in areas of my self that needed work - work I wasn’t able to perform because of stagnation in other areas of my self.
My codependency began to qualify my codependency and I got caught in a vicious cycle.
All Matter Matters
I believe all physical things are generative systems for fresh divinity, not just the obviously alive ones like mobile creatures, but also the slow moving entities like mountains, lakes and trees. Because I believe that all matter is made up of the forces of Divine Will, I believe that all matter - no matter how small and inconsequential it may appear to the human ego - is conscious. Even a grain of sand or a speck of dust carries a spark of consciousness within it. When clustering behaviours occur and systems are created, the potential for emergence is created. All of our LIVING; our physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, ideas, beliefs and actions are freshly generated consciousness that contributes to the self-generation of All that is; the Divine Will. This process is a part of the Universe’s self-actualisation. In simply existing, we each play an important role in the Divine Will’s Divine Plan.
All is God. God is All.
There are no unimportant, inconsequential roles in the Divine Plan.
This is my current understanding of reality:
The concepts that we are separate from one other, that our bodies and souls are separate from each other, that we are separate from God, that all moments are separate from all other moments, that one place is separate from another place - that’s the dream that’s mentioned in the surrender hymn: Row Your Boat.
There is no separateness. Everything is unified. Everything - All - is Divine Consciousness.
Anything outside of the present moment is the dream. Only the present moment actually exists. Time is a concept, not a reality - there is no past and future.
All matter is conceptual. It’s generated by and held together by BELIEF. It only exists in the here and now because All wills it so. Space is a concept, not a reality - there is no such thing as distance or separate places.
All matter exists only in the present moment, not in the dreams of past and future.
Nothing exists or occurs unless the Divine Will wills it so.
Every moment is complete and perfect. Every moment is one moment, and all moments. Every moment is generating itself cyclically. Every moment is eternity and nothingness.
All is as it is meant to be. All is as All means it to be.
Acceptance, curiosity, faith, gratitude, love, play, sensuality, surrender, trust and willingness are the purest values that can be practiced. These values are healing values. They are our greatest gifts from All, and our greatest gift to All is to practice these ten values in every present moment.
All is in the here and now.
The past and future are myths.
Memories of the past
and hopes for the future
are all imaginary.
Imagination is where applying the ten highest values have the most impact on our lives...
We’re encouraged to enjoy the dream with them.
All matter matters, and all moments are momentous.
I believe there is no such thing as wasted time. As long as we are living, in some manner or another, we are generating fresh consciousness for All through our experiences. We don’t get to choose our path in life; that is assigned to us as God wills it, but our free will allows us to choose our experience of our path.
We are free, and welcome, to ask for blessings and miracles.
In life, we encounter stimulus. Some of this stimulus exists in reality, in the now, and some of this stimulus exists in our imaginations, in the dreams of past and future.
We experience emotions - which occur in the body, not the mind - in response to the stimulus. Our emotions are messages about what stimulus we do and don’t like.
Our minds interpret our emotions to produce feelings, which are our thoughts about our physical sensations and emotions. Our feelings influence our critical thinking. From there, we choose how we react and respond to the stimulus with our behaviour.
Our behaviours effect our connection with All, which effects the stimulus that occurs in our existence.
Our free will is how we choose to behave.
My body, mind and spirit are all benefitting from clearing trauma and fantasy out of the system by practicing the ten highest values in all areas of my existence, especially in my behaviour. It’s a lot of messy work at times, but like I have said, I’m worth the effort.
This is as All means it to be:
practicing those ten values is self-love at its most pure.
Self-love is the purest form of loving God.
As a codependent, I was very reactive in my behaviours. My knee-jerk reaction was strong. In recovery I am quickly learning the value of pausing, checking in with my body (emotions) and then my mind (feelings), before reacting or responding. I am learning to do this with both pleasant and unpleasant stimulus, because sometimes my perception of the stimulus as either pleasant or unpleasant is incorrect. Sometimes my feelings are based in dreams; trauma and fantasy. My emotions are never wrong.
My body doesn’t lie because she is my little piece of reality and reality is absolute, pure truth.
Reality is God.
God is reality.
Pissing in the Well
I had three false Gods living in my childhood household; my father, my mother and my sister. I had plenty of false higher powers out in the world too; friends and authority figures included. My parents’ false higher powers were money, food, alcohol, prestige, themselves and other people. There was little room for true higher powers in my childhood. I became obsessive, compulsive, others-centric, self-abandoning, servile and disordered. I tried worshipping false Gods as modelled to me by my parents but found I didn’t like the way those higher powers returned the love I gave them.
I clung to my secret relationship with my Being, believing that God had abandoned me.
In my fifteen year marriage my husband became my false higher power. I became a dehumanised nonentity. I had no self-concept, no identity outside of “dutiful wife”. His opinions of me became my opinions of me. His beliefs about my purpose in life became my beliefs about my purpose in life.
I saw God’s love in all things, but believed I alone was unworthy of love from All.
I truly believed I was unlovable.
Over time I stopped believing in myself.
I abandoned myself.
I became inconsequential in my own life.
I became codependent.
New Beginnings
Monday next is my 3-month anniversary in my codependency recovery fellowship. This blog post is part of my celebrations. All gave me a gift to share with the world; an understanding of my psychological make-up as it is when I worship false higher powers, and my psychological make-up as it is in recovery, in which I am learning to love, trust and surrender to my true higher power and love myself, which is what my God wishes me to do with my free will.
Between therapy, my twelve-step program and the epiphanies I’ve experienced since setting out on my recovery journey, I’ve come to realise that if I am to be happy in life, I may not make anything or anyone my higher power. Only my true higher power deserves that privilege.
I have experienced some remorse, regret and lamentations; believing that I’ve wasted so much time as a codependent. My Being has been nourishing me through the process of letting go of that belief, furnishing me with the information that every single present moment that I have experienced in my just-about-nearly 40 years of life has mattered because it has brought me to this work. I can’t emphasise enough how important this work is for me. I also can’t explain why it’s so important to me, I just know that this is what I am meant to work with and I may not give up on it and I must give it away.
Every laugh, every tear, every lonely moment, every hope and regret and fear and yearning has been vitally important, essential, because it has brought me to this work.
This work has value to me and I hope it will have value to others.
Only when I am in a state of surrender to my true higher power and I have actively released my attachments to false higher powers (things, situations, people, thoughts, ideas, beliefs etc), do I have the experience I wish to have; one of bliss, serenity, enjoyment, gratitude and love.
Recovery
is a process of detaching from all false Gods
and surrendering to and accepting a
true higher power.
Higher Power Wheels
I made two wheel graphs. The False Higher Power wheel shows behavioural patterns that I exhibit when I worship false Gods. The True Higher Power wheel shows behavioural patterns that I exhibit when I am practicing letting go of all false Gods and embracing only my true higher power, All.
I felt shy to share these wheels with others. I started beating myself up, like, Who am I to think my ideas have any merit? I recognised that that thought belonged under the segment of Ego Dysfunction and saw that I was making you, beloved reader, my higher power by worrying what you might think of me. So I accepted myself as a fallible, flawed human being. I accepted that some of the stuff I’ve written here might be from my ego and therefore valueless. I willingly checked in with my emotions and ran my Honour Code about experiencing lingering codependent compulsions, like self-hate, insecurity and egotism. I surrendered to All by detaching from my ego and communicating with my Being. She said this is good humility practice - bringing value with humility and love and letting it go without being attached to outcomes - true generosity. She also said Bravo for checking in before reacting to that disordered thought by scrapping this work entirely. After practicing these values, I found that I was now cheerfully ready to take action and behave autonomously.
You’re Dreaming
My relationship with my higher power is improving. I have been praying to All to give me all sorts of reasons to trust in All, in every way. I ask for blessings and miracles and: I receive them. I practice trusting that All is available to me and: All is available to me. I practice trusting All will provide and: All provides. My true higher power is proving to be the first higher power that I can trust.
My definition of trustworthiness is someone who is willing to earn my trust and maintain their trustworthiness by being willing to regain my trust if it has been challenged. From my end, I am proving my trustworthiness to All by acknowledging when I am projecting my trauma from my experiences with false Gods onto my true God. This is a practice that I am also using with my relationship with myself - earning my trust and recognising when I am triggered by the dreams of past or future; trauma and fantasy. I am bringing this new trustworthiness practice into my new relationships too by practicing detaching from others’ inner worlds - I take responsibility only for what’s going on inside of me so that I may live and let live.
False higher powers all demand my trust and then blame me for being mistrustful even while they are betraying my trust. False Gods are impossible to please, and they’re liars too. I can scoff an entire bag of Liquorice Allsorts (a vice I learned from my parents), feel sick and ashamed afterwards and yet still that crackly, colourful packaging leaps out at me from the store shelf the very next day, singing “Trust me, I’ve got happiness and love for you.” On days when I’m lonely and feeling unloved and unlovable, that siren song is so TEMPTING.
My relationship with my Being is improving too. In late 2022 her messages became so damned insistent that I finally started listening to her. She hasn’t told me a single lie. So I am learning to trust my own spirit too. I’m learning to trust her to step in when I am being tempted by a false God. She comes to me and whispers, “Sweetie, you’re dreaming,” and that’s when I discover that I am indeed projecting my trauma or my fantasies onto the present moment. That projection is what leads to my desire to control.
Each time I realise that I am caught in ego and/or spiritual dsyfunction, I use one of my tools of recovery, as I’ve shown on the True Higher Power Wheel, to bring myself back on to my path in reality, in the here and now.
My thoughts, feelings and ideas all become more realistic when I am practicing this mindfulness. I am less stressed in general because I spend less time worrying about all that needs doing in the future or all that was done in the past. I focus only on doing what All requires of me in the present moment:
