Here we all are, drawing closer to leaving 2021 behind and beginning a new year. These past 12 months have been momentous in so many ways – and I know that you don’t need me to go into much detail about that. For some of us, this year that’s ending has included much loss and grieving – of people we loved, of businesses and jobs that evaporated because of Covid-19 and other factors. For other people, there were opportunities for growth and well-being – with all kinds of shades of grey in between for so many of us.

But what holds true for all of us is that our lives are made up of a combination of experiences, how we perceive them and how we choose to handle them. Some days, during this past year, we felt like we were trudging through darkness with the weight of the world upon us, with no light in sight. Some days we either stayed as busy as we could or dipped even further into already-present addictions, not wanting to think (or perhaps feel) too much about what was happening. And yet, here we all are again, being asked about our New Year’s resolutions – something we don’t seem to be able to get away from pondering at this time of year.

For the past few Decembers, I’ve written articles about the difference between ‘resolutions’ and ‘intentions’ – and although I still feel this is a very important distinction worth discussing, I now want to explore it from a different angle – specifically from the perspective of codependency and recovery.

While there is nothing wrong with reassessing yourself from time to time and exploring changes you would like to make, the problems come when you allow yourself to over-identify with the “hype” of the season. It’s one thing to make the overblown and often unrealistic New Year’s resolutions that you think you should make at this time of year, and quite a different process to take stock of where you are, in present time, to see what you might like to be doing instead so that you can live your best life.

In short, it’s important to increase our level of self-awareness so that we can successfully make distinctions such as these. [Read more…]