If you want your work to be valued, value others' work

Mary Anna's lips tightened and she started fanning her face with her fingers. You're going to make me cry, Emily! Your goal as a mother, she explained, is to prepare your children to face the world on their own. Her greatest achievement in life has been accomplishing that goal: with her husband, she has raised three strong and independent girls who no longer need her. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, the ego-mind may seem to offer evidence for you to believe the thought it offers. It may resist or avoid the very thing for which it encourages fear. For example, let's say the ego-mind offers evidence that you are unintentionally capable of hurting someone else emotionally. If you believe that you have this capability, you may spend a lot of energy being very, very careful with what you say and do. This encourages a manifestation of being afraid to hurt someone else. Sure, you have a loving intention not to hurt others. However, in this case, that intention to love others is bound by an element of fear. So, now that love is less free and less full. There is ego in it. If we take a step back and no longer believe that it is actually possible to hurt someone emotionally, yet still speak and act from a place of love (which is in our nature), there is no fear. Once we deeply understand how our codependent identity was created, immediately, a second later, it will be very clear to us not only how we get into the codependent identity even without calling ourselves codependent but we could take off forever the feeling of being born wrong. Eventually, if it was something wrong there was not so much in us, all in all, there was not necessarily something wrong even with our parents. And the same concept of right or wrong, of error in ourselves changes profoundly once we integrate the polarities of our identity into our awareness. So, if we want to talk about an error, this error was generated not so much within us and in the characters of our childhood, but in the relationship that was created between us and them. Relationships that we systematically tend to reproduce over a lifetime because if on one hand, they were certainly dysfunctional for us and our well-being, on the other hand, they were fundamental to protect this blessed identity that we created. Stopping in the common explanation of the so-called childhood trauma, even if we had to recognize more defects that our parents value, there would still be the doubt that something wrong I must have had to have become codependent myself and, for example, while my sister did not.

Then, the fact remains that none of us like to recognize the defects of our parents. Partly, because it hurts us to sink the knife in the wounds of their weaknesses, partly because every time we point the finger at the defects that they may have, implicitly we are admitting the possibility that some of these may have been, generally speaking, installed within us and put our integrity, our health at risk. Finally, concentrating so much on what may have done wrong necessarily pushes us to continue to distress us about what was wrong with our past and is still reflected in our present. This activates considerations and sometimes, real fantasies useful for sinking into our problems but useless if we want to get rid of them. We can't exactly explain why this happens, but it's clear that we cannot do the transplant. Amanda was twelve years old and wanted to be as normal as possible, to connect with her friends however she could, and just be a kid. We brought her home and chose not to tell her that she had two weeks left, that she would not live to celebrate her thirteenth birthday. She knew she didn't have the transplant but never questioned any of the medical stuff, so we just focused on the upcoming holidays. Amanda had always wanted to see the Vatican in Rome and go on a gondola ride. It was her bucket-list thing. I'm believing in a miracle for you, I told her, feeling an even bigger pull into my own faith under these circumstances. We're not going to do the transplant right now. Instead, we're going to take you to Rome to go on that gondola ride, and whatever else you want to do. We're going to have some fun. That's also the hardest thing about being a mother, Mary Anna said as she started to cry. She could barely get out the next words through her tears: They don't need you. What's going to give my life meaning and purpose, she asked, now that I've done my most important and challenging job in life? The interview ended. Mary Anna and I stepped outside of the booth and continued our conversation. I asked her what the experience was like of telling her story in the booth.

It was cathartic: It made me feel heard, she said, like someone wanted to listen to me. She said things in the booth, she explained, that she would never have said in an ordinary conversation with friends and loved ones back home. There was something about the booth that made her open up, and that helped her build meaning. For Mary Anna, the forty minutes in the booth enabled her to gain insight into her past experiences and present relationships. We love more fully. We are open to give and receive that love, too. Fearless love is pure love. Fearless love is a very beautiful thing. Fears are not created to torment or torture you. In a sense, they come to help you, as soul, to awaken and to come back home to the state of pure love. Identifying with a limiting fear draws our attention away from the present, living, and eternal moment of Now. If our attention is focused on the future, as it is in the case of soul-liberating fear, our capacity for pure love can seem diminished. Some people might say that living in an imaginary future is an experience similar to a living hell or a half-life. Anyone who has experienced pain or suffering can relate to how living in the future can feel like living in hell. Let's not forget that none of us are perfect, even the best parents in the world, as well as the best children in the world, are imperfect creatures, limited and constantly exposed to weaknesses and errors. For this reason, I do not consider it's useful or recommendable to spend the time of our life to probe down to the smallest detail the errors that we have perceived in us, in our loved ones and in general, in our lives. This is why I believe it is much more ethical and useful to focus not so much on the mistakes of the past but on the polarities that have determined not only our past but today our present. A present that without the ability to understand the importance of polarities and therefore of identity, will despite ourselves be too similar to our future. How well the great philosopher Ortega and Gasset said: Human beings are not a past tense, they are a present progressive. We are beings in movement, capable of changing along the way, often forced to change to survive, other times driven to change to be happier.

Our growth, as well as our healing and our unique story, is a path, a path that changes from the moment it is generated. We are used to call it Life. Codependency and Addictions I t may be important to see the relationship between codependency and toxic substances or alcohol. Amanda knew that if she had the transplant, she'd be in the hospital for ten months. My sister, who worked for American Express, asked her coworkers to pay for Amanda to live out her wish--without a tax write off--and they gave generously, raising all the money within twenty-four hours so we could buy airline tickets to go to Italy. It was just Amanda and me, her best friend and her best friend's mom, and we flew over there as soon as we could. I grew up Catholic and my girls are strong in their faith, so this quickly became an important part of our collective experience. Each girl went through a different cycle on the journey that cancer brought us through. Sometimes they were strong; Amanda was amazing. She said she saw a lot of angels when she was fighting cancer. I didn't see them, but she did. Mommy, look at those angels in the room, she'd say. Part of the reason I feel lonely, she said, is because I don't tell people things. I hold my thoughts and feelings inside. This taught me that I should make more of a point of talking to others--and not just for me, but for them. When we tell our story, we do two things. We understand ourselves better and we offer support to people going through the same thing that we're going through. We also leave behind a legacy.

The reason Mary Anna came to StoryCorps was that she was attracted to the idea of leaving behind a record of her story for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to hear. We live in this world where we seem so little compared to everything that's going on. After a couple of generations, no one even remembers who you are, Mary Anna said. So this is a way to leave something permanent behind. This is because identification in the past or the future, or any kind of suffering, is not a place for living fully. Paradise and the experience of bliss are always here and now within you. FEAR IS NOT WHAT KEEPS US SAFE As an instinct or learned behavior, often in an effort to help you stay physically, emotionally, or otherwise safe, you have likely learned that you should avoid that which can potentially harm you. However, the experience of fear does not necessarily help keep you or others safe from harm. Your ability to keep yourself and your loved ones safe from harm is guided by something entirely different than fear. It comes from common sense, gut feeling, basic intelligence, and love. This basic understanding is one reason why any emergency drill or first response training teaches you to stay calm in an emergency. Fear is not needed to keep you safe from harm. Imagine that you have come upon a very dangerous area of land, for example, on the crumbling edge of a rocky cliff. For simplicity, we will only talk about alcoholism but what will be said can be directly transferred to any type of drug addiction. It may be important to point out that this is not a article that claims to talk about alcohol recovery or drug addiction. This does not mean that using polarities allows us to understand various dynamics of alcoholism and especially when alcoholism and relationships with a codependent cross. The main dynamic that leads alcohol addiction is competition within the strong-weak polarity, polarity in which the addicts (or those who are becoming addict) have decided to place themselves in the extreme of strength, without much success. They gradually lose their strong hand identity as they sink into alcoholism, finding themselves in the sudden role of weak with all the consequences of identity crisis that follow. It is easily visible in the relationship that is created when various drinkers consume alcoholic beverages together.