Melody Beattie
speaker
102 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Melody Beattie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Thank you for doing this wonderful show.
The comedian Louie Anderson. Mm-hmm. One said that I haven't really sold 7 million copies of that book. It's just been sold to one really, really codependent woman who went out and bought all those copies for someone else. So somewhere between the two, I think that's true.
Either they're really codependent or you are.
That's right. It is. But on the plus side. And I'm hoping this rings true. If we identify as codependent, we're in pretty good company. Yeah, we are.
very painfully in my life. I found myself, and I was in the program, the recovery program, AA. And I was going to meetings and there was a fire going on and a fire among young people that this program and the recovery in it extended to us as well. And my sponsor introduced me to a guy, look at me blaming, I'm not blaming. I married him.
And then I began to learn what it meant to be truly codependent. The research from this book was heartfelt. And yet it was also an exciting time because there was so much passion for recovery back then. In the 70s in Minnesota, we were on fire. We were steaming. And when I started bugging everyone in AA, like, because my marriage didn't feel right.
Nothing felt right about it, but nothing had really felt right my entire life. So I started bugging my sponsor and bugging people in the program and say, you know, this isn't, there's something going on here. It's like, shh, just go to your meetings and don't make a problem.
But I couldn't, I became obsessed with finding out what was going on with me, what I could be doing that didn't involve putting a substance in me. that could be causing and creating this kind of havoc inside of my entire being.
No, I had been clean and sober for two, three years by then. And, you know, working a program, but you wouldn't know it by the way I felt. And I thought, oh my God, here I am clean and sober and, you know, hard pressed to find a true reason to live other than caring for other people.
And so I kept up this obsessive search, which began, I would say, 1976 until 1985 when I wrote the book.
We go off. We go off. We're not tuned in. We become misaligned. When we're misaligned with ourselves, we really can't tune in to much else. And that's what happened. You know, there's so much talk now about people gaslighting other people. No one can gaslight me as well as I can gaslight myself. Tell myself my feelings don't matter. What I want doesn't matter. I'm overreacting.
All the things we do to invalidate our natural, normal human responses to life.
Well, that wasn't really the first definition. It was, has let ourselves become obsessed or controlled by another person's behavior.
That can be like from little things like not picking up your socks to, you know, drinking away the family's finances. Everything is on a scale, isn't it? Of what we're doing and why we're doing it. We all have different impulses that motivate us. But when it comes to codependency, luckily we're in this lovely boat together.
And learning to do something that is meant to, for the most part, feel good. Although all things we do that are good are somewhat hard, aren't they? Sometimes really hard. But we're learning what it means to really love ourselves. I mean, I mouthed those words for so many years. But if you look someone in the eye and say, what does that really mean? Hmm.
I'm not sure we can talk about love from the head. I think we need to talk about it from the heart. Love yourself, take care of yourself. But what does that really mean? So the next 20, 40 years became dedicated to learning what that really meant. To going back, to going forward, to staying stuck and to all the other journeys in between that we go through on the way.
They weren't substance abusing. No, they were just ticking off the addict or the alcoholic and reflecting their instability. And I'm going to, you know, be partial to genders, but I don't think that many women knew how not to be codependent back in the 50s, 60s and early 70s. We had been trained. We had been embedded in it, starting with the days that being married to a man was
inherent to our survival as a species on this planet. So we're talking about overcoming a lot of past karma.
Of course they are.
It's a little frightening if you think about it, but I really believe we've come a long way. We've come a long way to nurturing and growing that soul within each of us. I've heard this. I can't document it because my mother sometimes had a hard time with the truth. God bless her soul.
Showing 1–20 of 102 · page 1 of 6
Next →