Sobriety as an Antidote to Codependence

To be in Empowered Maturity, we have to be sober {sobriety: "clarity of thought and feeling"} enough to trust our own experience/reality.

What’s also difficult is admitting powerlessness over someone else‘s experience/reality who matters to us. When someone matters to us it doesn’t mean that we must take on—or feel responsible for shaping--their reality.

Stay focused on maintaining your integrity and self care, and extend as much acceptance and compassion to others as you can—without abandonment of authentic self.

When we see and accept situations as they are, all we’re left with is the responsibility to choose a mature, empowered response to the puzzle pieces in front of us. Distorted puzzle pieces cannot be fitted together. Managing our own experience in skillful sobriety is work enough without trying to manage another person’s.

All human conflict is born out of the urge to lay claim to an objective truth and to thrust it upon others. “I’m right, you’re wrong”. But objective truth is an illusion. There are no observations that can exist independently of their observers.*

That’s why sobriety is so important. We are each responsible for the accuracy of our own subjective truth. Without sobriety we don’t have access to the only kind of truth with which we have the power to create our own destinies.

Be clear about what you owe to others, but don’t try to give them the things only they and their Higher Power can provide them with.

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*For those who are philosophically inclined, this is the realization that in order to truly know anything, one must engage with it. Observation is ultimately interactive, and the act of observation disrupts or alters what is being observed. Quantum physicists discovered that the very act of measurement at atomic scales was not possible without affecting what was being measured. At a more comprehensible, human scale, we wouldn't claim to know someone without, for example, engaging in some conversation with them. But the conclusions we form about what's "out there" (the other person) are highly informed by what we brought to the encounter, knowingly or unknowingly. It's not as objective as we would like to believe.