Today I’m releasing Same Eyes, a song about our inner children and inner healing. Listen to Same Eyes on Spotify, Apple Music or Soundcloud
Thanks to Kati, in Bali circa Feb 2017, I discovered that I was what’s known as codependent.
This was a bombshell that rocked my world. As I read about codependency I suddenly understood how my childhood had shaped ALL my relationships in adulthood, and why my relationship with Kati often occurred to me as painful and hard.
Here’s how it went down: Kati, back in Boulder, had discovered the work of Pia Melody and read me a few excerpts from Facing Codependence and Facing Love Addiction over Skype. Immediately I knew I had to read them as soon as possible.
I ordered the two books on Amazon and after a hefty shipping charge and a few days spent waiting, amazingly a guy on a motor bike delivered them to my bungalow in Ubud. Yes Amazon works even in Bali.
At this point Kati and I had been apart for weeks and Kati had started to identify as a love addict. She had entered a 12 step recovery program and shortly thereafter she requested that we not speak for a month so she could go through withdrawal. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I wanted to support her, and honestly some time apart felt like it would be healing for me too. I agreed.
That month turned out to be deeply healing for both of us.
Without the support (crutch?) of my relationship I was forced to be my own man. I started to see myself in a new light.
I saw how low self esteem had been a part of my character since I was a child, and I saw all the ways I held myself back in life in order to gain other people’s approval.
During that month I meditated a lot. I played a lot of music. I started performing in Ubud. And I wrote Same Eyes as a lullaby to the healing process both Kati and I were going through.
Codependence is caused by neglectful experiences in childhood. The result of these experiences is that we fall into emotionally dependent ways of being later in life. In other words codependents need their partner to be a certain way in order to feel good about themselves. It’s a recipe for harmful, confusing and painful ways of relating.
Reading about love addiction and codependency was sweet and terrible at the same time. It opened a window into our childhood experiences, and showed me how the challenges Kati and I faced early on were still playing out in our “adult” relationship.
I saw that when Kati and I were fighting, it was almost entirely my scared and upset little boy fighting with her scared and upset little girl.
I saw that underneath our rational understandings of our conflicts, there were deep emotional wounds trying to be healed. It was sweet and sad at the same time.
Coming to this realization showed me that I had been so swimming in my own hurt that I had been blind to Kati’s hurt. There were these big childhood wounds in each of us that I had completely missed in 7 years of being together.
Yes we loved each other. We took care of each other. We supported each other. But we had never shared our deepest pain with each other. Probably because it was too painful to come into our conscious awareness. It was like suddenly realizing the air I was breathing was heavily polluted.
I had missed a giant piece of what it was like to be Kati, and she had missed a giant piece of what it was like to be me. We had never spoken about codependency or self esteem or love addiction or abandonment or enmeshment, all-together the pervasive and enduring aftertaste that childhood had imprinted on each of our realities.
So as I saw more of what was really going on for us, I wrote Same Eyes, as a lullaby to our healing process. We weren’t talking that month, but I hoped that at the end of our month of silence little Will would feel more valuable and whole, and little Kati would feel more valuable and safer, and that we could all reunite and thereafter relate in a healthier way.
Ultimately that’s exactly what happened. The first person to hear Same Eyes was Kati when we first talked after our month of silence. We both cried.
Unbeknownst to us, things were about to get rocky and I’ll tell that story next but for now I hope you enjoy Same Eyes!
P.S. There’s also an instrumental version here that I love to leave on repeat while meditating or working. The guitalele seems to express the sadness and hope of the healing process in a unique way. Much love.
P.P.S. I can’t recommend Pia Melody’s books and other material highly enough. She conducts the best dissection of dysfunctional relationships that I’ve found and shows us the path forward in an extremely compelling way. If you are in a relationship that doesn’t feel good a lot of the time, Facing Codependence will likely help you find the answer.
