Melody Beattie Knows My Favorite Line!
Sep 25, 09- (by Mama MPJ)
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When talking about my own codependency, one of my favorite tongue-in-cheek lines (which came out of a recovery group I’m in) is: “I’ll work harder! I’ll do better! Please love me!” Whether I forgot a birthday, miss a deadline, stick my foot squarely into my mouth (or sometimes my keyboard, as the case may be) or am otherwise imperfect, I’ll quip (often internally), “Oh no! I’ll work harder! I’ll do better! Please love me!”
So imagine my surprise when I flipped a my copy of recovery writing queen Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go open to a random page today and saw (in italics, under the heading “Letting Go of Old Beliefs”): “Try harder. Do better. Be perfect.” Hmm. Sound familiar?
I think there can be only one explanation, considering that the book was published in 1990: Melody Beattie is a time traveler. She time traveled forward to the 21st century, eavesdropped on my group, thought “now there’s a great idea for my book!” and then time traveled back to write it. Either that or we codies all have something in common when it comes to being crazy-ass perfectionists. But nah. That couldn’t be, could it?
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The Language of Letting Go–a classic, and I love it. Even while “letting go” makes such good sense, it is I who am still senseless. But getting better at it. Better. I keep remembering a wisdom said to me not long ago, “Steve, turn your head in the other direction…now GO in that direction!” And it worked, it works!
Thanks for your interesting blogs.
PEACE!
Better reading than…hmm…what DOC? What defense mechanism will we have to give up next? Puppies? (They do take a lot of time and attention.)
I don’t know. Nancy Drew saved my life. Thank God nobody was asking me to stop and pay attention to what was going on around me.
[...] a different structure, if I were stricter, if I trained him better, everything would be different? (I’ll work harder, I’ll do better, please love me!) Does she think I’m a bad mom? But the beloved sitter she was replacing used to tell me what [...]