Co-dependents Anonymous Boskruin Randburg

22/05/2025

CoDA literature available for purchase in South Africa:
Blue Book
Workbook
A5 Guide

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27/03/2024

CoDA 🇿🇦 South Africa 🇿🇦 - Literature Prices. Click on pic to see full pic.
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08/06/2023

Why do I not feel good enough?
Because I have been taught that what other people think about me is far more important than what I think about me, I am stuck perpetuating a lie.
I feel not enough and my life then becomes endless attempts to have someone out there tell me I am enough while I pretend I think I am.
(Adapted to first person from Lisa A Romano's text)

08/03/2023

Online meetings are affected by loadshedding. If you would like to confirm whether or not the CoDA meeting is taking place on a specific Wednesday, please send an email to codagauteng[at]gmail.com before 16:00.

13/09/2022

STOP TRYING TO FIX ME
Love me instead
Please, don't try to fix me. I am not broken. I have not asked for your solutions.
When you try to fix me, you unintentionally activate deep feelings of unworthiness, shame and failure within me. I can't help it. I feel like I have to change to please you, transform myself just to take away your anxiety, mend myself to end your resistance to the way I am. And I know I can't do that, not on your urgent timeline anyway. You put me in an impossible bind. I feel so powerless.
I know your intentions are loving! I know you really want to help. You want to serve. You want to take away people's pain when you see it. You want to uplift, awaken, caretake, educate, inspire. You truly believe that you are a positive, compassionate, unselfish, nice, good, kind, pure, spiritual person.
But I want you to know, honestly, friend, I feel like a steaming pile of s**t when you try to 'love' me in this old way. It doesn't feel loving to me at all. Quite the opposite. It feels like you're trying to relieve your own tension by controlling me. Under the guise of you being 'kind' and 'helpful' and 'spiritual', I feel suffocated, smothered, rejected, shamed, and completely unloved. I feel abandoned in your love! Do you get that? I feel like you don't actually care about ME, even though on the surface it sure looks like you care! But deep down it feels like you are holding an image of how I should be. Your image. Not mine!
It looks like your love, but it feels like your violence. Do you understand?
Yet as soon as you stop trying to 'help' me, you are of the greatest help to me !
I stop trying to change to please you !
I feel safe, respected, seen, honored for what I am.
I can fall back into my own power.
I can trust myself again, the way you are trusting me.
I can relax deeply.
Without your pressure, your demand for me to abandon myself and be different, healed, transformed, enlightened, awakened, mended, 'better', I can better see myself.
I can discover my own inner resources.
I can touch my own powerful presence.
I feel safe enough to allow and express my true feelings, thoughts, desires, hold my own perceptions. I no longer feel smothered, a victim, a little child to your expert adult.
The courageous adult in me rises.
I breathe more deeply.
I feel my feet on the ground.
Loving attention drenches my experience, even the uncomfortable parts.
My senses feel less dull. Healing energies emerge from deep within.
I feel light, free, liberated from your fear.
I feel respected, not shamed.
Seen, not compared to an image.
You help me so much when you stop trying to help me, friend !
I need my own answers, my own truth, not yours. I want a friend, present and real, not an expert or a savior.
And do you see, when you are trying to save me, you are actually abandoning yourself ?
You are running from your own discomfort, your own unlived potential, and focusing on mine ?
I become your ultimate distraction.
I don't want to be that for you anymore.
Let's break this cycle together !
Let's stop trying to fix or save each other.
Let's love each other instead.
Bow to each other.
Bless each other.
Hold each other.
As we are.
As we actually, actually, actually are.
~ Jeff Foster ~

07/09/2022

"We don't change until the pain of remaining the same exceeds the pain of change."
This was one of my sponsor's favorite quotes and now it's one of mine, too.

I know that it has held true in my life. And I find the quote comforting on many levels. For one thing, it changed my perspective on pain. That rather than something to be feared and avoided at any cost, pain is natural, and especially for those of us stuck in self-defeating patterns, it is necessary. Sometimes it is the only thing capable of motivating me to do what is necessary to get to something good. To fight for my freedom from my self-destructive habits. In this way pain is often my friend, and a gift.

The quote also comforts me whenever I find myself worried about or obsessing over the well-being of another and feel the urge to control outcomes. When I remember the essential role that pain—the pain of remaining the same—played in my recovery, I find it easier to "Let go and let God" and give that person or situation over to the hands of their own loving higher power, which is not me.

Instead, I can choose to self-soothe. From this calm place, I can recognize that I don't know what is the true higher good in this situation. I can simply breathe as things unfold as they are meant to. I can trust that I and we will get what we need, even if it's not what we want, or exactly when.
Finally, over the years in CoDA I have achieved a measure of self-love and appropriate self-esteem. I am able to have some appreciation of who I am today: my perspective, my experience. And I see the connection between this person for whom I have some healthy respect and the painful experiences that were part of what shaped her. So how can I say, "Those things shouldn't have happened" or "I wish things had been different" without this also meaning I shouldn't be who I am? Through CoDA, I am letting go of my need to have had a different past. I am embracing and accepting myself, which means accepting the pain, and even being grateful for it all.

Anonymous 7/9/22

05/09/2022

I owe myself an apology
For all of the times
I tore myself apart.
When I neglected my own needs
Lowered my standards
Berated myself
And put myself down.
For the self-sabotage
I continually inflicted upon myself
And the times when I apologised
For being who I was
And expressing myself authentically.
And I owe myself
The permission to start anew.
To forgive myself
For the battles I fought
That weren’t mine to fight
For all of the love
That I failed to give myself
And for the times when I failed to realise
That rather than being broken
I was worthy of value, respect
And beautiful, brilliant things in life
And that how I treated myself
Dictated how others would view me
And in turn, behave towards me
So by showering myself
With love, kindness, forgiveness and respect
In turn, I could pave the way
For others to do the same.
~ Tahlia Hunter ~

12/08/2022

At meetings members are able to share their experiences, thoughts, feelings and recovery with the group. There is never any obligation to share if you do not wish to. Being able to speak and be heard without interruption or feedback is a powerful healing experience for many people as is listening to others in the same way.
To attend CoDA meetings, all you need is the willingness to work at having healthy relationships.

🇿🇦 CoDA meetings are listed at
http://www.codasouthafrica.co.za/directions.php

CoDA meeting in South Africa, Cape Town & Joburg

27/05/2022

"Shame dies when stories are told in safe places." Ann Voskamp

CoDA meetings provide a safe and anonymous space to work through any issues arising from co-dependence.
🇿🇦
http://www.codasouthafrica.co.za/directions.php

08/01/2022

"Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing"
~ Brianna Wiest ~

“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”
-Brianna Wiest
https://ko-fi.com/donate_nepenthe



[Illustration: Yaoyao Ma Van As Art ]

22/12/2021

Holiday triggers - Melody Beattie
If something, even something we don’t understand, triggers painful memories, we can pull ourselves back into the present by self-care: acknowledging our feelings, detaching, working the Steps, and affirming ourselves. We can take action to feel good. We can help ourselves feel better each Christmas. No matter what the past held, we can put it in perspective, and create a more pleasant holiday today.

Today, I will gently work through my memories of this holiday season. I will accept my feelings, even if I consider them different than what others are feeling this holiday. God, help me let go, heal from, and release the painful memories surrounding the holidays. Help me finish my business from the past, so I can create the holiday of my choice.

From the desk of Melody Beattie
Originally posted December 23, 2014

https://melodybeattie.com/holiday-triggers/

One year, when I was a child, my father got drunk and violent at Christmas. I had just unwrapped a present, a bottle of hand lotion, when he exploded in an alcoholic rage. Our Christmas was disrupted. It was terrible. It was frightening for the whole family. Now, thirty-five years later, whenever I....

07/08/2021

What is Co-dependence?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En8klpAsoBY