Releasing Codependency: Soul Recovery Tools to Let Go, Dream and Thrive

As people pleasers and codependents, it can feel impossible to ask for what we truly need and want without guilt or fear of rejection. In this episode, I dive into the heart of this struggle and share how Soul Recovery principles can help us release the people pleaser within and reconnect with our authentic selves.

We explore the delicate balance between letting go and dreaming—a concept that can feel contradictory but is deeply interconnected. Through detachment, acceptance, and self-awareness, we can begin to break free from old patterns of putting others first at the expense of our well-being.

This episode offers practical tools to let go of control, heal core wounds, and trust in a life that aligns with our highest good. Together, we'll discover how to ask for what we need, envision the life we want, and create a reality that thrives—not in opposition to others but in harmony with our true selves.

Join me on this journey of transformation as we explore how to release the people pleaser, let go of the fear of rejection, and step into a life of freedom, joy, and abundance.

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This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Chapters

• 0:00 Letting Go and Dreaming Balancing Act
• 6:16 Healing Through Soul Recovery
• 16:02 Embracing Healing and Letting Go
• 22:39 Finding Fulfillment Through Soul Recovery

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:44

As codependents and people pleasers, it can be hard to ask for what we need and what we want. A few weeks ago, we did an episode about the law of attraction and manifestation. What, if it feels like you're asking for what you need is in opposition to the people in your life, to being your full self, means that you're not doing something for someone else. This is our dilemma. This is the part of us that we're always working on. Today's episode is about how to let go, how to use the principles and tools of soul recovery around detachment and letting go, and how that responds to how we can ask for more and begin to dream and create the life that we love. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover your Soul podcast a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 1:39

My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and soul recovery to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our inner change and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recover your Soul podcast and community. I'm Rev Rachel. We are embarking on a new year, 2025, a year where we are stepping even more fully into our authentic self, our soul recovered self, and what I love about this journey is that every day is an opportunity to start anew. It isn't about some huge shift that happens all at once. It's about slow and steady and consistent changes within ourself and how we are choosing to see it. That can make huge changes down the road that we sometimes don't give ourselves credit for. If you've been coming to the podcast for a while and you've been in the community and you've been doing your soul recovery work, this is a time for reflection. This is a time to look and really give yourself the credit for the changes that are happening within you and how you feel in your own skin and your own life and your own body, and how you're letting go of control and learning to take your power back, to have compassion for yourself and everyone in the situation, and we're moving into a place where we can be more at ease and feel our feelings in a way that allows us to attend to ourselves, to turn that attention back to ourself and our healing journey, our awakening our consciousness, and to be in the presence of some complex situations, complex life, in a way that really allows us to be okay even when things around us don't feel okay.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 3:46

In today's episode I wanted to come back to this idea of visioning that we started at the beginning of the year, a couple episodes ago, and I wanted to answer a question that was on the Spotify comments. I really love getting feedback and responses from you about how this is working for you and the text me that's in the show notes. I don't know who you are, I can't contact you, I can't respond back, but you can use that as a way to share with me some questions that you might have how it is in your life. And in Spotify they have the same thing that you can make a comment and it does show me your username, so I can have more of an idea if I recognize your username, who you are. But it helps us connect and communicate as a community. And then I really love it when you go to the private Facebook community page in the Soul Recovery community page and share with each other how it's going on with you. What are you working on your Soul Recovery. What are some successes? What are some questions that you have? Do you need support? I encourage you to really embrace all that's happening within the community and to ask those questions. I love that she is able to attend meetings and be present with us in the soul recovery community from all the way on the other side of the planet, and she said Happy New Year and thank you for this.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 5:14

I love the idea of envisioning and dreaming with faith, rachel, but I'm finding it a difficult concept to reconcile with letting go and acceptance, which are also pillars of soul recovery. How can we apply both concepts of letting go and dreaming and I thought this was a really great comment, because this is the foundation of our codependent people pleasing dilemma that we are in on a regular basis how do we choose ourself and allow ourself to dream and let go and be accepting and work the soul recovery tools that allow us to be present with what is in other relationships? So I'm going to go ahead and talk about that today, because I think that this is really invaluable in our soul recovery journey. In the episode where I talked about dreaming and allowing yourself to vision, one of the things that I think is so fascinating about that is for most of us.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 6:17

It's really hard for us to say this is what I need, because it feels like it's an either or. It feels like if you choose what you need, it means that somebody else doesn't get what they need. That somebody's needs and wants come first, and what soul recovery is offering is for us to be able to look more clearly about what that feels like to us. What feels true to us about that us? What feels true to us about that? Why does it feel like somebody has to be the winner and somebody else has to be the quote, unquote loser? And I get this a hundred percent. I get this so much.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 7:00

And if you listened to last week's episode, I shared some of my feelings that I had around Christmas and still sometimes slipping back into people pleasing and codependency and making sure that everyone else is okay and recognizing that it's really hard to ask for what you need and what you want. And I think the thing that's so powerful about stepping into our soul recovery journey is that we're not asking the whole world to change. We're not actually doing this thing, where we're asking for magic, where we do this work within ourselves and all of a sudden, by some miraculous event, people stop being the way that they've been or the world stops being the way that it's being. It is going to be the way that it is. But we're beginning to take a look at what is the reality in which we are choosing to exist, because what we experience on the outside is a direct reflection of what we are experiencing on the inside, and this very wild metaphysical concepts around the world is, as you choose to see it, the law of attraction that we are indeed aligning and calling to ourself.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 8:19

What works for us feels really out there when we are in the midst of all of the beliefs and stories and patterns that we've been in our life for so long about caring for and taking care of everybody else and trying to make life be a certain way, which, to be honest, would probably make it easier for everybody would just listen to some of the great ideas that we have. Right, it's not about that somebody's right or wrong. We're starting to actually disassemble that piece of it, that there is no judgment, that there isn't anybody who's right or wrong in any of it. It's just a complex community and family systems of souls who are all in the process of trying to understand who they are and how they fit in and what are their stories and their patterns, and that they're showing up with their defendedness. They're showing up in their woundedness. They're using drugs or alcohol or unhealthy behaviors not because they're broken, but because that's the only tool that they have at the time to heal or mend or pretend that they don't have a broken heart. We can have broken hearts. It's not about pretending that. That isn't it.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 9:40

Being a human being means that there's a lot of complex emotions, but the idea of dreaming is actually around beginning to understand that we have much more dominion over our experience than we were ever given permission to believe and, at the same time, the letting go and accepting means that we are letting go of everybody else's participation in our experience. But it also means that we're having more and more clarity around what aligns with us and that bumping up that we get of what aligns with us. And if something doesn't feel good, we've spent so much time trying to figure out how to mask that that didn't feel good and coming up with unhealthy tools and systems to pretend like that didn't that. That is okay, that that doesn't feel good to us, but it's okay, we're going to handle it, we're going to do something about it, we're going to try to fix it. Once you start getting cleaner and healthier and more attuned and more awake and more aware and more conscious, you start to see that it's not a judgment of something being right or wrong, that you can begin to just say this doesn't work for me, and it isn't about trying to control it or fix it. This is where the acceptance, the letting go of control, the allowing it to be is and what's interesting was coming through is it doesn't necessarily mean that we're always ending those relationships.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 11:19

It isn't about walking away from everything. There is such a easy predisposition to just walk away from what's hard. Well, I like walking away from what's hard. That was my runaway, was one of my defense characteristics. It was like shut the door, close the heart, leave the situation and never come back again. There's friendships that I have that I've done that too. There was jobs that I did that I did that too, and you know, the one place I didn't do that was in my marriage and with my family. I stayed in it and I continue to stay in it. From this new place of can I put my wellbeing in the hands of myself and can I allow them to put their wellbeing in the hands of themselves, but to have more space for source and spirit to show up for everyone involved.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 12:18

And what's so interesting about the dreaming and allowing yourself to use a law of attraction to call to yourself the life that you want to live is that, in general, the people around you, they too, would like a life of ease and happiness and joy and comfort and connection. They just don't know how to get there. But when we are in soul recovery, what we're saying is that the flashlight is on us and our experience, that we're spending more and more time. Instead of doing it so that they change, we're doing it so that we feel better. We're doing it so that we're more clear to the universe about what we need and what we want and what we're calling to ourselves, to ourselves, and through that healing generally, we have more ability to let go of all of our past attachments to how it's supposed to be, who we're supposed to be, how we're supposed to make it happen. And as we relax and let go, we are being offered more information that gives us the action steps that are needed to move closer still to what actually is being called to us.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 13:33

And again, sometimes that means that you have to make big shifts and changes in relationship or jobs or you know places in your life, but a good part of the time it means that you just quit putting so much time and energy on what other people think about you, you quit taking things personally, you quit making assumptions, you quit needing and wanting the world to be projected upon in your mind how you think it should be, and you stop taking responsibility, this belief that most of us have. If you're here, it's because you probably have a core belief, a core wound, that says it is my job to make sure everybody else is okay. It is my job, my personal responsibility is to carry the weight of the world of my family on my shoulders. And when you really look at that from the solar recovery perspective, we're in step two. We're saying we are powerless over everything outside of ourselves. Powerless over it beautiful, authentic way that we can and still they may choose to do things and feel things that are harmful to themselves and in the past had been harmful to you. Are you ready to step into your soul recovery? Visit the website recoveryoursoulnet to learn more about the nine step soul recovery process. I hope that you'll join us the first Monday of every month for the free soul recovery support group on zoom, where we learn more about soul recovery and connect with each other. If you'd like to work directly with me to move through the nine step soul recovery process, I'm here for you, but you can also choose to work the steps on your own, with individual modules intended to support you, to work at your own pace and on your own time. And if you want even more soul recovery, join us for the Recover your Soul bonus podcast for Patreon members and Apple podcast subscribers, where I interview amazing people sharing soul recovery tips for us and also do spiritual book studies. You can also find daily inspiration on Facebook and Instagram and join our spiritual book studies. You can also find Daily Inspiration on Facebook and Instagram and join our private Facebook community. Visit the website for more information, links and registration for everything.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 16:03

Back to the episode. But when we begin to actually take responsibility for ourselves and how we're showing up and how it is hitting us, we can let go of judgment and let go of fear and heal those old wounds and stories and patterns that we've been living from that make it feel like we can't ask for what we need or what we want. One of the things that I think is so powerful about this work is that it comes in stages and it's given to us in the stages in which we need to go through them. And, again, that's just about taking small incremental changes and awarenesses and giving yourself the time to let each one of these layers of healing happen for you. I'm coming up. In February 10th.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 17:03

It'll be seven years of sobriety from alcohol, which is unbelievable, right. I mean, I am so grateful to be released of the demon of alcoholism. That was a huge part of my life from the time that I was 21 years old. I didn't get sober till I was 48. And if I look back, if we give ourselves grace and we say so, I was on a spiritual journey for a long time. Here's something that I learned when I was younger. That was part of how I have learned more about myself. Now, and we can be all judgmental about ourselves and say, yeah, but it didn't stick or you didn't follow that, that line, that timeline, so you could have been sober earlier. All of that is just beating ourselves up. All of that is taking away from the power that we have to say.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 17:53

Being a human being is incredibly complex. It has so many layers and when we're letting go of fear and all of the past trauma and woundedness that society encourages us to hold on to, it feels strange, it feels out of control, it feels unmanageable. Interestingly enough to let go of the woundedness, of the harm, who are we if we aren't these people that went through these difficult times? You know who you are. You're a bunch of survivors, you're heroes. You are doing it. You are releasing and letting go of the beliefs and stories and patterns that do not serve you. You are letting go of an old way of being. You are moving into the law of attraction, which says I get to choose what I want to have in my life. I'm going to call it to me, and the truth is that I said this in that episode.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 18:54

I think it's so powerful that when you're really in that space of that inner knowing that you're held and loved and resourced by something greater still and you're truly in that place of faith, those guidances that come through, that feel so juicy and delicious and feel so good, they are being offered to you and we're afraid of them. We're afraid of them because of all these old beliefs and sticky patterns that say, if I take care of myself from a whole perspective, the other people in my life, their feelings, might be hurt. My immediate family doesn't know how to interact with me from this place. And all of that is potentially true, but it's our old beliefs and fears that make us believe that we'll be completely rejected, that we'll be unloved, that we're not worthy. It's actually pointing fingers at some of the core wounds and core beliefs that we're working to release and let go. And instead of judging yourself and saying, oh, I can't believe that, I think that it's a place to be even more tender and compassionate to yourself and say I'm afraid to reach my highest potential because I'm afraid it will hurt the people around me or that I'll be rejected, or that I'll have to change everything in my life. And just to hold space for that and just to see it, you don't have to do anything about it.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 20:27

I think so much of what we are in life is this wanting to figure it all out, to have all the answers, to have all everything lined up. Why do we do that? Because then we'll feel safer, because then we'll be in control, because then there'll be perfection. If I can hold it all together and know exactly what's happening, then I can be safe and everything will be fine. And then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I can be safe and everything will be fine. And then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's just your inner self that has woundedness, that has fear, that's trying to keep you safe and protected. And the more that we just recognize that that's true and that's a part of us and we give it grace and attention and say, yeah, I can see why you're trying to hold on to everything so tightly. And is it okay to dream? And the dreaming is generally about how you want to feel. That's what I encouraged you. I encourage you to use the writing prompts.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 21:26

I'm so happy and grateful to be in relationships with my family and my spouse and my friends where we see each other and we can deal with complex feelings and emotions, but we hold each other with compassion and love. Those are feelings that are attainable and the more that we let go and we accept people for who they are, that might look a way that is different than we could have ever imagined. It might look a way where you may not have a deep loving, we can talk about everything and we hug and we spend all of our time together. Relationship with somebody that your ideal self wants but it's actually meeting their criteria of saying I want a relationship where we are connected and see each other and accept each other just for who we are, and it might mean that that relationship has some space where there's new boundaries, new ways of communicating that look very different from the relationship that you currently have or the ideal that you hold in your mind of what that part of you wants it to look like.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 22:40

So much of our woundedness and our suffering comes from searching for and trying to have unattainable things. I was talking to somebody recently and we were saying is there actually like the perfect relationship? Is there the perfect marriage where they never have difficulty, where you just think each other are the most beautiful people you've ever seen in your whole life and no one ever has crunchiness and the kids play and they laugh and they have fun and everyone's just joyous and free and all the time? I don't think so and, if I'm honest, I don't think that would be healthy either, because you have to have contrast. You have to have something to bump up against, to encourage you to work on yourself and to want to grow and be better. Law of Attraction actually says that contrast gives you more information about what you are being called to be, that it is through the bumping up against the difficulty that you say this is not it. Well, what do I want more?

Rev Rachel Harrison: 23:50

But some part of us has this fairy tale. But some part of us has this fairy tale, this fantasy of what we would like for it to be, and that fantasy hangs heavy on us and keeps us from actually being present with what is and accepting what is, and with gratitude, with awareness, and with gratitude with awareness. I can't even begin to say how strange it is now to look back on my life and say I am grateful to have been a drunk, I'm grateful for the complex relationship that I had with my husband. I'm grateful that my kids were addicts, that they struggled. I'm grateful that my kids were addicts, that they struggled. In those moments of my life, that is the last thing that I would have thought that I could look back on and say, wow, it turns out that that dark night of the soul, those relationships that we had, those really painful experiences that we had, have been part of how I got to this place today, where I see the world from a completely different set of eyes than I had before. But I wouldn't have had these eyes without that.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 25:06

So this acceptance, the letting go that is so important in soul recovery, is about seeing what is through a new set of eyes, so that it can show you and give you more information about the beliefs that are ready to be released, about the attachments that we continue to hold because they are sticky and hard and difficult to let go because they are so ingrained in there and of course they are. They are the tools that have been used over and over and over and they're the neurons that have been run on those paths and they are sheathed together. But we have neuroplasticity. We have the ability to change how our brain works. We have the ability to reach into our soul and connect with our higher power and ask to be relieved of our bondage of self, to be relieved of the part of us that feels this heavy, dense responsibility for everybody in our life and making everything work out perfectly, and begins to move even further into a faith, into trust, into knowing that things are working out for our highest good Things are working out for us.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 26:29

My minister at the Unity Church that I attended used to say that prayer, a lot that things are working out for the highest good. And then people would come back you know, rightfully so and say, yeah, but I got cancer, my father died, there's a war, there's these. You know people are coming into office. I don't like what's happening here. How is that working out for my highest good? How is that working out for my highest good? And it isn't that we are deserving of difficulty, that we're being punished and we're being given quote unquote lessons to show us our strength. I think it's more gentle than that. I think it's the free will that we have as human beings. That we have as human beings, and the free will is wrapped up in our psychology and how our brain works in fight or flight.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 27:21

In 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of years of human evolution, that really had a very important protection mechanism of making sure that we were safe. That hasn't adjusted as quickly as our lives have adjusted, and so there's more to it than we can understand. And on a spiritual level, it isn't about there being no war or no illness. It's about us recognizing that our souls have so much more capacity than we give it space to be, that this connection with spirit says yes, even if there are wars, can we trust that there is more going on and the people who are suffering can feel that, knowing that they are being held even in their darkest moments. That even when we lose somebody who is so important to us that we can remember who they were in our lives, that we know that death is always part of life and that this is painful to be in it, to allow yourself to be in it and from that to call to yourself the life that they're encouraging you to live, and not to live in grief or sadness forever, to not get held in that, to move into a knowing that there is always something to be learned, that as our hearts break wide open, we become more connected to source, more connected to our wholeness of self, and we see beyond our limited human form.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 28:59

When we're in the midst of it, it doesn't feel as easy as sometimes. It is to say in prayer and meditation and in metaphysical experience or in your spiritual experience, it's true. That's the reason why we come back into the practice is to give ourselves the strength to remember, to remember, to remember so that when we step out into the world and we're affronted with the complexity of others and life situations, that we take a pause, we move into our heart, we remember forgiveness and compassion and grace for ourselves, first and foremost, and others. We attend to our own healing, we recognize our old beliefs and patterns that feel like we're responsible for everyone and we let go of control. We surrender it to something even greater still and then we recognize that we are co-creating our life, co-creating our life. This is step four in soul recovery connecting to something even greater still, to the higher power of your understanding to co-create. And that co-creation holds space for all of it holds space for everyone. It holds space for the healing and it holds space for the hurt. It holds space for the healing and it holds space for the hurt.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 30:31

And to give yourself grace for wherever you're at and allow yourself to feel your feelings. And maybe you're feeling feelings, real feelings, for the first time. They're always showing us something. Our feelings, they're showing us places where we need attention in our heart. They're showing us places where we feel joy and love and to lean more into that, it doesn't always have to be heavy. The hope is that soul recovery is actually giving you freedom and lightness to be in your life in a way that is new and different, that you are seeing it from a new perception that is allowing you to let go of control, to let others be exactly where they're at and to ask for what you need and want in your life, not from others, but from source, to connect to yourself and have clarity about what you want and what you need.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 31:31

I was looking in some journals as I'm getting through my writing my my quote unquote memoir my story of how I found soul recovery in my own life and I finally found the piece of paper that I was telling you about in the Law of Attraction episode from February 2019, a year after my sobriety that when I look back now again, I want you to really feel this, knowing that when we do this work, it's not about anybody else, it's about ourselves having clarity about what we want in our lives, and none of this stuff that I had written that was as if it was happening now was happening then, and you can go back and listen to that episode. But I actually found the piece of paper from my journal that I had torn out and kept someplace safe. I finally found it and it says February 2019. I love watching the boys live prosperous and independent lives as they follow their passions and dreams. I love spending quality time with my friends. I'm so grateful to be working helping people and inspiring them to live their fullest lives and heal their hearts. My income continues to grow as I work less and less. I love watching our income and investments increase and prosper and seeing zero due on our credit accounts as they are paid in full. It's a blessing to be enjoying the beach life in the winter and summers in Colorado. I love spending my free time creating music, singing for people and making art.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 33:26

This or something better still, rachel Ann, it's incredibly powerful to read this almost six years later and that all of this has come true and it's not in rejection or in control of anyone else. This is purely the work that I have done in my own life. I may not be as fit and look like people look like on TV, but for me, my body is out of pain. It is not in the same level of pain that I've had my entire life from my lower back, and I do have a relationship with my husband now. That is a best friend relationship and we are traveling and we do enjoy our time together and our family just had a fabulous Christmas that had some real life stuff, but we enjoyed our time together like never before. My boys are doing well, they are living lives that are independent and I do have this incredible group of friends that all came in a community after my sobriety, when I had to leave my friendships from before that were really around my drinking and alcoholism. I do have better financial standing than I ever had before and my life is a blessing. We may not be spending every winter at the beach, but we are going every year to someplace warm in the winter.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 34:56

It's happening. It is happening and it's happening because I asked for it, because I was willing to ask for and dream for what I needed and to let go of trying to control the world around me to live some potential fantasy that isn't real. So letting go and dreaming are connected. They need each other. Without the dream, what are you letting go for? And without letting go, how are you going to get to the dream? If you need help with this, I'm always here to help you. You can either do coaching one-on-one with me or do the work the steps on your own on the soul recovery website. Together we can do the work that will recover your soul.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 35:41

Until next time, namaste, thank you for listening and I hope that that helps support your soul recovery process. Just a reminder that every Friday is the Recover your Soul bonus podcast. This podcast is for Patreon members and Apple podcast subscribers, and not only do you get an incredible interview or book study that comes with being part of that community, but your subscribing helps support this podcast and the Recover your Soul community. If you want to listen to those bonus episodes but can't subscribe right now, do know that you can be a free Patreon member and have access for limited time to new episodes. Visit the website RecoverYourSoulnet or check out the show links below for coupons and information for upcoming events. I thank you for sharing this podcast with your friends and family. I thank you for giving it five stars, and the reviews that are left bring tears to my eyes. I am honored to be part of your life. Together we can do the work that will recover your soul.