“Blame makes you powerless.
“Responsibility gives you the power to make your life better….
“To grow and heal, you must remove the magnifying glass from others, and focus it exclusively on you….
“Power is the ability to act in your long-term best interest. It is behaving according to what you believe to be the most important things about you as a person.”
— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop
“I’ve started to realize that waiting is an art, that waiting achieves things. Waiting can be very, very powerful. Time is a valuable thing. If you can wait two years, you can sometimes achieve something that you could not achieve today, however hard you worked, however much money you threw up in the air, however many times you banged your head against the wal. . . .”
— Dennis Wholey, The Courage to Change, quoted in Codependent No More, by Melody Beattie
“As the primary indicator of our ‘true feelings,’ emotions have become our new inner self, taking the place once occupied by the soul, the spirit, or the conscience. Now to question our anger, infatuation, sadness, and many other emotions is to question what is most sacred about us. It not only seems dishonest to let go of misery; it seems like a betrayal of who we really are.
“This redefinition of our core has thrown us deeper into chaos, especially since we have also redefined integrity, which used to mean being faithful to our core….
“Look at the dilemma we have gotten ourselves into by deciding that our emotions are our truest self. How can we be ourself if our self is changing every few minutes, as emotions invariably do? Not only are feelings never constant, we have layers of feelings heading in different directions….
“Emotions are like layers of files seen on a computer screen. The one we notice is merely the one we have clicked on. Even that analogy is an oversimplification because the contents of the files have lives of their own and the mouse likes to do a little extra browsing on its own. The bottom line is that if you make your emotions your inner self, you have chaos at your core.
“There is a place within us where we can touch the changeless and beautiful, a place where our real self is experienced in peace. This self does not have to be periodically vented, defragmented, or even defined. In gentleness and ease it is clearly seen, and everything about it is familiar — because this self is consistently whole.”
— Hugh Prather, The Little Book of Letting Go, p. 90-91
“Ask God to help us think. Every morning, I ask Him to give me the right thought, word, or action. I ask Him to send His inspiration and guidance. I ask Him to help me solve my problems. I believe He does help. I know He does. But He expects me to do my part and think. Some days go better than others.”
— Melody Beattie, Codependent No More, p. 152
“Happiness is that simple. Once you discover what the Lord wants you to do, and you start doing it, you will achieve happiness….
“If God has told you to stand for marriage restoration, you will not be happy doing anything else.”
– Robert E. Steinkamp, The Prodigal’s Pen, p. 59
“It’s not possible to feel loving or worthy of love at the same time that you feel resentful or angry–they are incompatible emotional states; you can feel one and then the other, but not both at once.”
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 49
“I’m convinced that we use resentment and anger to punish loved ones, not so much for their behavior as for the pain we feel from our reflections in the mirror of love. In other words, it’s what we take their behavior to mean about us that causes us distress, resentment, and anger.”
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 48
“It is far easier, it seems to me, to become a cynic than it is to work beyond disappointments and rise above wounds. We must be willing to trust again and expect better than we’ve received. True cynics who believe they have become experts at seeing through people have actually succumbed to a different kind of blindness. If we want love, it is better to look for the good in people, even if it means being somewhat of a cock-eyed optimist.”
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 81
“We feel crazy because we are lying to ourselves. We feel crazy because we are believing other people’s lies. Nothing will help us feel crazy faster than being lied to. Believing lies disrupts the core of our being. The deep, instinctive part of us knows the truth, but we are pushing that part away and telling it, ‘You’re wrong. Shut up.'”
— Melody Beattie, Codependent No More, p. 123
“Codependents cannot change until we accept our codependent characteristics — our powerlessness over people, alcoholism, and other circumstances we have so desperately tried to control. Acceptance is the ultimate paradox: we cannot change who we are until we accept ourselves the way we are.”
— Melody Beattie, Codependent No More, p. 121