Book events can be challenging for the self. Yes, it is flattering and exciting to be sitting at a table as The author of This book. Sometimes people even reinforce these feelings by coming up to the table to congratulate me on being published, to meet an author, or to ask what it’s like to write a book.

And then there is the self-exposed side of things, the vulnerability that travels with putting one’s self out there in such a bold and permanent way and waiting to see how people react to what I have offered. Sitting at the book signing table as people smile and walk on can really reinforce these feelings of insecurity and discouragement.

Yesterday I was at the Doylestown Bookshop in Doylestown, PA. Received with a hearty welcome by the store owner and staff, it was clear they were ready for our book event. Posters in windows and on doors and My Life as a Border Collie strategically placed around the store, I felt their enthusiasm and support.

The signing started well and even early as a woman was there 45 minutes before the official beginning with the specific intent of getting a signed copy for her daughter. About an hour into the signing, things slowed down. This means no one was coming to my table to talk and no one was buying my books. For this border collie author, this type of lull poses an emotional challenge. I can’t get up and herd people to the table or better yet to the cash register. So I have to settle and be.

As I settled my self, Grace came over to sit with me a bit. I shared with her some of my feelings, laughing at my self some for thinking things always need to be at full tilt and really starting to let go of my pressing expectations to have more activity at my table.

At some point in this visit with Grace, I took off my scarf and put it back on in a new way. I jokingly said to Grace, “I have now re-arranged my scarf. Maybe this will help to change up things here at the table.” I also re-arranged the books for sale on the table, continuing to joke with Grace about creating new energy and space here.

Within minutes, much activity started to happen! My dear college roommate, Debby, entered this grand finale part of my story first, bringing into the bookshop and to my book table her wonderful energy. And then a slew of people started to come to the table, so many that I can’t remember all of the individuals and their stories. Excellent conversations occurred about the book, dogs, and codependency. The length of my signing event was increased and many books were sold. This border collie left the store feeling very good about her day’s work.

So what’s with the scarf part of this story? Well for me as a recovering codependent, that’s one of the most important parts of this story. No, I don’t believe in a direct way that re-arranging my scarf will invoke what I want. What I do believe is that my re-arranging my scarf became an active metaphor for connecting with and changing my internal self. In this case, it meant letting go of disturbing feelings and thoughts about my self and my work and being with what is. I re-arranged my internal self as I re-arranged my scarf. As I loosened the scarf and let it hang in a different way, I was helping my self to loosen and hang. I was freeing my self from the mental and emotional traps I was creating for my self.

Already Grace and I have had much fun reminding ourselves to “re-arrange our scarf” when we are feeling stuck and want to be free.

Oriole Field at Camden Yards,  Baltimore, MD, USA

Here’s another quick blog from the road. This time literally from the road, as Grace, my daughter and traveling companion, is driving and I am writing on a legal pad here in the passenger seat.

I was part of a charming book reading Friday night at Breathe Books in Baltimore, MD. Hosted by Susan Weis-Bohlen, owner, we had an intimate gathering on the second floor of her bookstore located in an historic townhouse on “The Avenue” in the Hampden district. As the event started, a weather front swept through bringing winds and heavy rain outside our windows and increasing the coziness within of my reading and our discussions which followed.

Guests included people who know codependency and people who know and love dogs: talk of dog behaviors, talk of what we can learn from them, and talk about useful tools for our self-development as we keep learning how to not let our strengths become our weaknesses.

Toward the end of our discussion, Susan, the owner, explained in an understanding way that “we have to work with what we’ve got.” Each breed of dogs has its own traits and temperaments, and as dog owners we have to both accept and train the dog with its nature in mind.

Similarly with codependent behaviors “we have to work with what we’ve got.” If we are, by nature, devoted, hard-working, and sensitive there is nothing wrong with that. It’s just that we want to learn to pay attention to our own traits and temperaments and work with them so as to increase ease within our relationships and peace within our self.

The White House, Washington, DC, USA

Here is a quick blog from the road.

As you can tell by the photos on the Facebook page for My Life as a Border Collie: Freedom from Codependency, I am on a book tour.

Yesterday I was at the Barnes & Noble at Union Station in Washington, DC. I was hosted so well by that store, and we all felt that the book event was very successful.

Many people came up to me to talk about the book, drawn in surely by the fantastic cover of this book. Some people were also drawn in by the topic of codependency which the subtitle clarifies – but not as many people were familiar with this topic as I might have imagined.

In this very general public area where people are coming and going from trains at this station just outside of our national capitol building, I found myself explaining codependency to a number of people. Now I was careful not to make it an academic exercise but more to speak in language we all can understand on a daily basis: losing our self in someone else, over-functioning in someone else’s life, taking more care of others than of self.

As I offered this information, wanting to make sure that the potential book buyers did not think this was a dog training book but rather a book for personal development, I noted how often people said to me, “Well, this seems like a book most people could use.”

Then this morning from my Google alerts for codependency comes this article by a life coach and pastoral counselor, Randy Moraitis writing on how widespread codependency really is.

Yes, My Life as a Border Collie really is a book that most people could benefit from. Whether you call yourself codependent or not, I believe it’s important to bring to your awareness how you really are doing, what you may really need, and find ways to find that balance in care of self and others.

I’ll keep passing on the word.

As you know from my previous blog, I am sharing with you some of the content from our last two Codependence Camps on understanding the deeper roots of our codependent behaviors. Attachment theory provides some useful information that can help us to understand our vulnerability to codependency.

 Attachment theory in psychology originates with the seminal work of John Bowlby(1958). In the 1930’s John Bowlby worked as a psychiatrist in a Child Guidance Clinic in London, where he treated many emotionally disturbed children. This experience led Bowlby to consider the importance of the child’s relationship with their mother in terms of their social, emotional and cognitive development. Specifically, it shaped his belief about the link between early infant separations with the mother and later maladjustment, and led Bowlby to formulate his attachment theory.

Attachment theory is interested in whether an individual has developed secure or insecure attachments to others as a result of the way they were treated by their primary caregiver. The caregiver’s responsiveness and consistency in their relationship with the child are of particular importance.

Secure attachment develops in a child when they are responded to in a consistent and responsive way by their primary caregiver.

Insecure attachments develop from non-responsiveness and inconsistencies in parenting and present themselves in several ways: Insecure – Anxious can come from inconsistent parenting where the child can not trust that their primary caregiver will be there to meet their needs on a predictable basis. Insecure – Avoidant can come from non-responsive parenting where for the most part the parent does not notice and respond effectively to the needs of the child. In such cases, the child may become dismissive or fearful in their relationships with others.

The field of attachment theory is rich in research and applications of the theory. This is a very simple introduction to you about this material with the suggestions that our attachment styles likely influence our codependent behaviors. If my style is insecure-anxious, I am likely to seek reassurances and do things to try to insure that the object of my affection is not going to leave me. If my style is to be insecure-avoidant, I may well try to be self-contained and operate in rigid, controlling ways which may keep others at an unnecessary distance – a distance I may not really want.

All of this is about our sense of self, in this case our secure vs. insecure self. Recovery from codependency is about understanding our insecure self and fostering its growth into security and strength. Ideas on ways to do this will appear in future blogs.

our “Deeper Roots.”

This coming week-end I will be facilitating our 15th Codependence Camp along with my colleague, Margaret Cress, LMFT. We offer this Camp twice each year. The curriculum for the Camp began with my Disentangle work and has evolved as the participants have evolved and also as our knowledge about codependency has evolved.

A year ago as Camp was ending, it was clear that we were ready to go yet deeper into understanding the origins of our codependent behaviors. So for Camp this past spring our focus was “Deeper Roots: Empowering Our Self Further through Understanding.” In my over eager, over functioning codependent way, I prepared way more for our 2 days than could possibly be covered, absorbed, and applied. Camp this coming week-end will be continuing our “Deeper Roots” work.

What we studied in the spring were the influences of our childhood and family-of-origin experiences. Yes, we certainly had studied this before, but at that Camp we looked at several important areas of influence we had not so examined before. Here is the first of those three areas very briefly offered as ideas for you to examine as well.

The work of Alice Miller offers much to help us understand our focusing on others to the detriment of focusing on self. Working to connect with our true self vs. our false self, Alice Miller’s material informs us how in early childhood, some part(s) of us were split-off from our true self. Our feelings and needs were not attuned to and responded to by our primary caretaker. We were not mirrored or echoed. Instead, we learned to attune to the feelings and needs of our primary caretaker who was likely not doing this to us intentionally. Their needs for our mirroring of them were at an unconscious level.

As a result of these experiences, we developed a strong capacity to attune to the feelings and needs of others and to respond to those feelings and needs.

Sound familiar? What a great description of one of the core dynamics of codependency.

My plan for future blogs is to share three more areas of childhood and family-of-origin influences with you and then to offer a list of helpful ideas for recovery which come naturally from our understanding of our “Deeper Roots.”

September 21, 2012

Several years ago I was presenting my Disentangle material at a conference on addiction and recovery. My session was full with around 30 participants. As we started the session, I asked the participants to give me some comments about why they had chosen to attend my session. Several hands went up right away. The first man I called on said, “I am here, because the primary reason for relapse is codependence.” A number of people nodded and agreed.

This man worked in a treatment center for substance addictions. And though much of the treatment offered to patients in such a setting is directed at education about and treatment for specific substances, this counselor knew that the treatment of this process addiction of losing our self in someone else is essential to sobriety from those substances.

Then within the past month, I ran into an article also saying this same thing. In a blog appearing in Sober Living Outpatient David Kolker, therapist at Sober Living Outpatient, states, “The number one cause of relapse is codependency.”

These statements are emphasizing the importance of understanding and treating codependency for solid recovery. As you know, I speak of codependence as loss of self in someone else. If I am not able to listen to, to attend to, and to cultivate my self, I am very likely to fill those needs through things outside of my self. This external meeting of my needs can range from tangled relationships to return to substance addictions.

It is completely normal for me to have my needs for love, connection, attention, safety, security, and encouragement – to name just a few of these human needs. It is just important for me to be learning how to offer these things to my self as a cornerstone of my own health and recovery. My potential to be in a healthy relationship and substance free is greatly increased by this loving work on my own behalf first.

Here is my third blog in this series supporting the work laid out by Dan Griffin and Rick Dauer in their article Rethinking Men and Codependency in the Addiction Professional. In that article, they name nine relational skills they believe are essential to healthy codependency recovery for men including conflict resolution, emotional expression, healthy boundaries, and self-care. As in my past blogs, my comments which follow are offered for both men and women.

I agree with all of their nine identified relational skills. And I believe there are many skills within those skills that have to be learned. In my book, Disentangle: When You’ve Lost Your Self in Someone Else I present more than 50 of those skills divided into four areas of work for our Self: Facing Illusions, Detaching, Setting Healthy Boundaries, and Developing Spirituality.

For example, learning how to detach and gain some emotional distance involves learning that I am a separate individual from the other person and to differentiate what is theirs and what is mine, learning to observe my self and the other so as to act not react, and paying attention to my motivations as I interact.

Learning to set healthy boundaries involves learning how to quiet our self, how to listen to our self, how to know what is true for our self in a given situation, being able to assert our boundary, being able to stick with our boundary, and learning how to manage our self as we feel the various feelings that come from stating and standing firm with our boundary.

The skills are numerous and important. Why don’t we already know these things? Well, it is likely that the roles we have taken on over our lifetime and the related socialization influences discussed previously have limited the skills we needed. We have operated in our prescriptive ways over and over. The good news is that you are reading this and are interested in change. New relational skills will definitely help with those changes.