When you are unwilling to forgive, you limit your growth. Forgiveness allows you to right a wrong in your spiritual self, to have understanding instead of resentment, to have compassion instead of hatred.
— Louise L. Hay, The Power Is Within You, p. 181
You don’t have to forgive because they deserve it. Frankly, they don’t. But just as Jesus chose to forgive us even before we’d repented, the choice to forgive opens the way for the most meaningful growth we can experience in life. If you think you can’t possibly forgive, do it instead to set yourself free from that pain. Do it in hopes that trust will one day return. But do it soon, and accept that it’s simply a part of living life.
— Cheryl & Jeff Scruggs, I Do Again, p. 177
We can look at the people hurting us as teachers or as enemies. The most painful circumstances can become important parts of our destiny, or we can call them mistakes.
— Melody Beattie, The New Codependency, p. 19
Accountability may not sound like a lot of fun, but trust us, its opposite is a lot less fun.
— Rick Foster & Greg Hicks, Choosing Brilliant Health, p. 51
Caring about people we love, feeling victimized when we’re betrayed, giving our all to people we love, or wanting to control people because we’re watching them destroy themselves and hurt us doesn’t mean we’re sick. These are natural reactions. Codependency is about normal behaviors taken too far. It’s about crossing lines.
— Melody Beattie, The New Codependency, p. 5
The need to blame (ourselves or others) runs so deeply at times that it can feel like a basic necessity. Part of the need arises as a defense against shame. As shame encroaches, fending it off requires that someone else be proved the villain. And it is not enough that we protest what they’re doing, that we have our say. We have to nail them to their crimes, make them confess, make them feel bad and promise to be better. Only then can we finally have the satisfaction of being free of the denunciation we direct at ourselves….
Knowing oneself is integral to growing up. But, to the extent that we live in a blaming system, we do not want to know the truth about who we are and, therefore, resist growing up. We don’t want to know our own murderousness, selfishness, greed, envy, because all of these very human feeling states have been made a source of so much guilt and shame that they lead at once to total condemnation and self-rejection. We can’t know them, and we can’t know how we came to them. As a result, we miss out on the experience of self-empathy and self-care, which might be the basis for doing something new, for beginning to emerge from these things we don’t like in ourselves but which hold us prisoner.
Some of what we do is bad and should be changed — the way we bully, deny, manipulate, shirk, indict…. But if we make every misdeed or character orientation into a capital crime, into evidence that our very being is worthless, we will not be able to let ourselves know the full complexity of who we are. If there can be no mercy, no leniency, no understanding, no forgiveness, no simple tolerance for the magnificent complexity of being human — if we face every flaw or disliked quality as evidence that our blackened souls require rejection and banishment — we will not be captured by our own awareness and motivated to change. The blaming system, therefore, puts a brake on a fundamental area of growth….
Blame is very absorbent. It soaks up sadness. It dries the tears. It provides an opportunity and a target for fury which is felt as preferable to experiencing pain or loss — whether the loss is a cat, a spouse, an aspect of physical health, a loved object, a piece of work, a good night’s sleep, an election, a colony, or a war. Blaming and vindictiveness are ways of not feeling one’s sorrow or shame and, by corollary, of not caring for oneself. Blame is the anti-mourn and, hence, the anti-self.
— Robert Karen, PhD, The Forgiving Self, p. 110-112
This is where most people get stuck. To get what they want, they try wanting harder. They yearn more deeply, try harder to become worthy. They build the case about why they should have what they want, but this very attitude requires holding the desire as other (out of reach). It’s a strange paradox that when you want a thing, you affirm that your life is wanting. You affirm the Trance of Scarcity and lack….
We need to recognize the formula that does work. That formula is not desire but confident expectation. It’s an example of energy matching energy, impersonal but reliable. When you pray for rain, bring an umbrella.
— Victoria Castle, The Trance of Scarcity, p. 111 & 117
Now there’s at least two ways I can look at all of this. I can say look at everything I’ve had to go through. Or I can stand back and say wow. Look at everything I got to experience, feel, and see. And as much as I’ve resisted and struggled each step of the way, maybe that’s why I am here: to go through all of this and see from my point of view exactly how all these things feel.
— Melody Beattie, Playing It By Heart, p. 247
People say everything happens for a reason and God has a Plan for it all. I believe things do happen for a reason. And God does have a Plan. But if we don’t learn the lesson from the circumstance and let ourselves completely heal from it — whether it is in the past or today — the things that happen for a reason will just keep happening over and over again. And we’ll end up on a talk show talking about what keeps happening to us and wondering why.
— Melody Beattie, Playing It By Heart, p. 244-245
Sometimes, I forget things that I know. Sometimes I forget that letting go has more power than holding on, and then I forget to let go. Sometimes I get so focused on the other person and what they need and want that I forget how I feel, what’s important to me, and what I need and want too. Sometimes I forget that no matter what situation I find myself in, I do have powers available to me, even when I feel overpowered. I have the power to think, to feel, to pray for guidance, the power to let go, and take care of myself no matter what’s coming down on my head. And sometimes I forget that the temporary hit of power from drama addiction wanes in comparison to the real power we can connect to when we’re at peace with the world, and with ourselves.
— Melody Beattie, Playing It by Heart, p. 242-243