Being Engaged and Detached
Posted by Shawn Threadgill on August 5, 2006
In order to achieve high levels of success in your professional endeavors, one must muster up enough passion, courage, and energy to follow through the difficulties that naturally occur during such a quest. Yet, without a healthy level of detachment, our passionate drive can over take us and cause us to suffer.
How To Develop Detachment
First: Establish emotional boundaries between you and the person, place, or thing with whom you have become overly enmeshed or dependent on.
Second: Take back power over your feelings from persons, places, or things which in the past you have given power to affect your emotional well-being.
Third: “Hand over” to your Higher Power the persons, places, and things which you would like to see changed but which you cannot change on your own.
Fourth: Make a commitment to your personal recovery and self-health by admitting to yourself and your Higher Power that there is only one person you can change and that is yourself and that for your serenity you need to let go of the “need” to fix, change, rescue, or heal other persons, places, and things.
Fifth: Recognize that it is “sick” and “unhealthy” to believe that you have the power or control enough to fix, correct, change, heal, or rescue another person, place, or thing if they do not want to get better nor see a need to change.
Sixth: Recognize that you need to be healthy yourself and be “squeaky clean” and a “role model” of health in order for another to recognize that there is something “wrong” with them that needs changing.
Seventh: Continue to own your feelings as your responsibility and not blame others for the way you feel.
Eighth: Accept personal responsibility for your own unhealthy actions, feelings, and thinking and cease looking for the persons, places, or things you can blame for your unhealthiness.
Ninth: Accept that addicted fixing, rescuing, enabling are “sick” behaviors and strive to extinguish these behaviors in your relationship to persons, places, and things.
Tenth: Accept that many people, places, and things in your past and current life are “irrational,” “unhealthy,” and “toxic” influences in your life, label them honestly for what they truly are, and stop minimizing their negative impact in your life.
Eleventh: Reduce the impact of guilt and other irrational beliefs which impede your ability to develop detachment in your life.
Twelfth: Practice “letting go” of the need to correct, fix, or make better the persons, places and things in life over which you have no control or power to change.
