Doubt is like the rude uninvited guest that keeps showing up to your party. It’s the rain on your parade. It has the power to completely overhaul your plans, what actions you take and to keep you stuck replaying the same tapes over and over again.

If you don’t understand doubt – where it comes from and what its motives are, you will continue to believe that it’s real and in return, you will settle for less than you deserve, it will stop you from going after things you really want, it will make you responsible for everything and everyone and it will keep you stuck in the same place. Doubt creates fear,  confusion, anxiety, shame and sorrow. Doubt is something codependents wear like a warm blanket. It’s soft and comfortable and it feels like home.

Every time I get a new client, the first thing they say to me, after they’ve finished telling me their story is,”I’m not sure if he/she is a really great person and I’ve just made a huge mistake.” This after they’ve spent the last 25 minutes listing all the horrific relationship crimes they’ve been victim to. Their doubt is making them question their reality past and present.

Doubt is part of the disease of codependency. It comes from those childhood tapes that keep replaying the same message over and over again – that you’re not good enough, that your needs aren’t important. It’s the critical parent voice always trying to keep you where you are and beat you up emotionally. If you stray too far from believing that you’re unworthy and start to believe that you just might deserve something better, it will always show up to remind you of your core belief.

The one thing I know for sure about doubt is that if you don’t become aware of it – if you’re not mindful of what it is and what it can do to you, it will control your life – in every single possible way. It is the low emotional energy that permeates around our being and draws ‘like’ things to us

Doubt and the Law of Attraction

A friend of mine recently went to one of those I Can Do It seminars . I think that’s what it was called. It had a host of new age celebrities – some from the documentary The Secret, Gabrielle Bernstein was there among others and my friend had a really great experience. She posted a picture she took, on Facebook, of an overhead, which I’ve posted at the top of this post.

Under the heading -Top 10 Things that Hold You Back From Living Your Purpose, it liststs:

  1. Putting yourself last
  2. Trying to control other people
  3. Perfectionism
  4. Playing small
  5. Always assuming the worst
  6. Doubting your higher wisdom
  7. Addiction
  8. Procrastination
  9. Staying in toxic relationships
  10. Needing the approval of others

Now call me crazy, but this list sounds like a lot of the symptoms of codependency. Very likely they compiled a list of behaviors that keep your emotional energy low and didn’t know what they had once they were done compiling it.

I know that the Law of Attraction is real. I’ve seen it work in my own life – for good and bad.

As many, who have read my blog for a while know, I was in a car accident several years ago. I had never been in an accident before. Not even so much as a fender bender. I always felt confident behind the wheel, but after that accident I suffered Post Traumatic Stress. I kept reliving the accident day in day out. I’d see myself crashing when I closed my eyes at night. I was always anxious behind the wheel and within 2 ½ months I’d had another accident. There was so much emotion behind it. I was fearful and anxious. I visualized crashing constantly and I let my mind just ran amok with it and it produced the fruits of that labour. I’ve had it work for positive things in my life too, but make no mistake it is real and it’s the same law that brings the codependent and the narcissist together.

It’s that pesky emotional energy that we learn from our parents and they learned from their parents. I remember reading about experiments in psychology text books back when I was in university. Low socio-economic status was always something they would consider as a factor in this and that experiment.

In real life, low socio-economic status refers to those individuals who live in poverty. It’s the single parents living in government assisted housing and living off of government assistance. That’s the image I always got when I glossed over those terms and I came to realize that this “status” was the blanket I referred to earlier. It’s the emotional vibration that a parent passes down to her off spring. It’s why these off spring go off into gangs and commit crimes and have babies with several different people and these babies grow up and have the same life.

“Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to us more than we think we are worth.” – Iyanla Vansant

Codependency doesn’t always or only exist around poverty. That’s just one area where it can manifest and thrive. The focus of one’s codependency seems to be whatever is of import to one’s care givers. My parents never had a lot of money and my mother was obsessed with physical beauty – so my shame was always geared to not having these things. This was the song of the critical parent voice in my head, always making me settle for less financially than I deserved and why I never felt comfortable in my own skin.

Codependency is a disease. It’s destructive and it keeps you from living a full authentic life. To beat it, it’s important to know what it is, where it comes from, how it manifests in your life and what its agenda is. Once you can point out these things – once you can label it (in the present moment as it’s happening in your life) – it loses its power.

“I had no idea there was such a thing as Resistance. I believed the voices in my head. I acted out. I blew up my marriage and blew up my life, rather than plunge a sword into the heart of that book.

It took me seven more years before I found the courage to face that dragon again – and another ten years after that before I had finally learned how to lay him out. Here’s one thing I can tell you and you can take this to the bank: Slay that dragon once and he will never have power over you again.” – Steven Pressfield

The above quote is by novelist Steven Pressfield. He’s probably best known for his fiction writing, having penned best sellers like The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Gates of Fire, but he has also written a few non-fiction books for writers and artists. Some of the titles include, Do the Work, Turning Pro and my favorite (an intentional play on words) The War of Art. In these short works he talks about overcoming the enemy. He calls it resistance, and one could easily sub in the words doubt or codependency. In all these works he talks about how our doubt/resistance/codependency tries to keep us from our goal. It stops us from accomplishing all that can and from being who we were menant to be. Resistance is the distractions we create for ourselves, it’s the critical parent voice that tells us we can’t do it and that we don’t deserve it. If these voices and beliefs go unabated we will never overcome them .

“Remember the enemy is not lack of preparation; it’s not the difficulty of the project or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account. The enemy is resistance.

“The enemy is our chattering brain, which if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.” – Steven Pressfield

One could argue that all people suffer from doubt and that is very likely true, but I would temper that statement with – the lower the sense of self-worth the higher the doubt. I see it like a teeter totter. The higher your sense of self -worth the lower your level of doubt.

Codependency is the low emotional vibration that we create within – it’s a negative feedback loop that keeps bringing to us more low emotional energy people and experiences. We learn it as children and we live it as adults, never knowing or understanding why we can’t get ahead.

You slay this dragon through awareness. Once you can identify it, you can stop being burned by it’s fire. Once you stop listening to it, you become it’s master rather than it’s slave.

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