Gains: Your Source Of Power And Resiliency
By Marshall Burtcher.
I view healing codependency as a life-long process discovering who we are beyond it. This involves a journey through three specific phases: Survival, Healing, and Creation.
When we’re in Survival, our brains will be magnifying the pain, the loss, the negative in our world as an effort to try to generate safety through prevention or control of potential threats.
This traps us in a habit of giving too much importance, focus, energy, and significance to fear and negative potentials. Further, it leads to emotional burnout, insecurity, and withdrawal from life, creativity, and connection.
To heal, we need to acknowledge, amplify, and trust our power to create positive experiences for ourselves. This is what I call a “gain”.
The journey beyond codependency is riddled with a lot of endings and loss. We move on from hopes, dreams, and desires we carried about friendships, family connections, and romantic desires. We grieve what will never be and what was lost. We walk a path of mourning.
In this, I have found it crucial to also nurture awareness of the gains we are fostering for our tomorrows.
Such gains would look like:
- The relief one has now that they’re no longer dealing with the toxic relationship every day
- The rest one feels as they enjoy a more safe space
- The space created for more creativity and adventure
- The increase in vitality as we heal
- The experience of more stability and regularity that is mundane, stable, and secure
- The lack of chaos, shame, attacks, and instability that was rampant in the toxic relationship
- Increases in one’s sense of power, confidence, and vision for themselves
- Raises in one’s experience of love and kindness towards themselves
- Healthier relationships and friendships
Gains show us the return we’ve created for ourselves by the choices and actions we’ve taken. They are a source of building confidence in personal ability to foster meaningful, desirable transformation in our personal lives and how we really do have power to craft the experiences we have in our realities.
Further, gains assist us in staying the course by helping the body adapt to the new path through positive emotional association with the change. “It was worth it” is often a statement that affirms the power of this association.
It builds our sense of resiliency and confidence that we can successfully navigate and move through challenging times and circumstances and come out the other side with powerful increases in our world.
They also immunize us from going back to the toxic patterns and options in our lives. This happens because we start to value all it took to gain and keep the positive outcome and we find that more important and valuable to ourselves than the temporary high we would get from the toxic relationship.
It helps us become profoundly sober to the reality of people, places, and things in our lives, including our own power and capability.
What gains have you noticed in your life from your choices and actions? What does it feel like to give those gains some more importance in your life?
May this add to your healing journey.
Till next time, go gently.
Marshall Burtcher is a Codependency Transformation Expert. He specializes in helping codependents, people-pleasers, and perfectionists get aligned with their real worth, purpose, and satisfaction so they create a life they enjoy. Learn how to heal and thrive by attending one of his monthly workshops. Click here to learn more: https://workshop.freetheself.com
