Al-Anon and Recover Your Soul: Healing Codependency Through the Power of Surrender

While I am away this month, I’m sharing another listener-favorite replay from the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast. This episode comes from our reflections on Al-Anon through the lens of the Recover Your Soul Process, exploring one of the most life-changing shifts on this journey: the surrender that frees us from codependency.

So many of us have lived in the exhausting cycle of trying to fix, control, or anticipate someone else’s behavior. We analyze every interaction. We hold silent resentments. We tense our bodies hoping we can make everything okay. But eventually the strain becomes too much. We feel tired. We feel defeated. And we know something has to change.

In today’s episode, we reflect on a powerful reading from In All Our Affairs that asks the simple, courageous question:
Am I willing to give up the struggle?

This invitation isn’t resignation. It’s remembering your own wholeness and handing back what was never yours to carry. It’s letting go of the quiet contempt, the overthinking, the need to understand every detail, and the belief that your safety depends on managing someone else’s life.

When we choose surrender, we choose peace.
When we stop trying to control the uncontrollable, something softens.

If this episode speaks to you, you may love listening each week to the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast. Apple Podcast subscribers and Patreon members receive an extra episode every Friday, a

Start your journey with the FREE Recover Your Soul™ 9-Step Mini-Workbook- A gentle spiritual path to healing, letting go, and awakening.

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 or guests. 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 Welcome to Recover Your Soul
• 2:37 Al‑Anon Reading On Surrender
• 5:39 From Control To Connection With Higher Power
• 10:28 Silent Contempt And The Cost Of Control
• 15:18 Safety As An Inner State
• 20:28 Detaching With Love In Long Relationships
• 25:58 Redefining Needs, Boundaries, And Codependency

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:19

If you're listening to this episode when it airs in December 2025, I'm on vacation, but I'm going to bring you some of the episodes that are Al-Anon through the lens of Recover Your Soul that had aired on the Recover Your Soul bonus podcast on Apple Podcasts and on Patreon. I know that you're going to love this. Let's jump right in. Reading out of In All of Our Affairs, Making Crisis Work for You from Al-Anon, we continue our series of looking at Al-Anon through the lens of soul recovery. And we are in the section on surrender. And this particular reading is so fabulous because it says, Are we tired of fighting? Are we weary from analyzing our relationship in each interaction? Are we tired of being in silent contempt, disapproving comments, no matter how justified we think we are? Soul Recovery and Al Anon both support this ability to be in a completely new way of living that lets go of control, lets go of grievance, lets go of the attack, and comes back to our connection to ourselves and our higher power, able to find serenity no matter what. It is as we choose to see it. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast and Community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recovery soul process 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 interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast. It's Rev Rachel, and I am just so grateful to have you here with me today as an Apple Podcast subscriber, as a Patreon member, and as a member of the soul recovery community. Thank you so much for supporting this community, and thank you so much for trusting me on your soul recovery journey. Today we're going to pick back up on Al-Anon through the lens of soul recovery. And currently we're in all of our affairs, making crisis work for you, in the section on surrender, which I think is so beautiful because this aspect of us that's learning how to let go of control and how to turn it over to the higher power of our understanding is really where our healing lies. And today's little quick story, I love how this book has just little quick stories of different people's perspective. I really thought was really beautiful because it's actually aligned with something that I had been wanting to talk about. So as usual, Spirit is right there giving us exactly what we need and giving me the information to share with you. I'm going to jump right into it and read from page 108. It's part two of this particular book and it's acceptance and surrender. And the name of this paragraph is Ready to Give Up the Struggle. Are you ready to give up the struggle? I know you are. That's why you're here. So I'm going to read this for you. Am I willing to give up the pain of trying to control my partner? Am I willing to give up my silent contempt, scornful looks, and disapproving comments, no matter how justified I think I am? Am I willing to admit that I'm powerless over him as well as my own emotional reactions? Am I willing to admit that my life is unmanageable when I react in this way? Yes, I am tired of fighting. I'm weary of analyzing the relationship and every interaction. This scrutiny began long before my husband found sobriety, long before I found Al-Anon, and has continued well into recovery. Enough. I turn to my higher power for my serenity, courage, and acceptance. I need to let go of my control and let God take over, to live my own life and let my husband live his. My experience in Al-Anon reassures me that God will do for me what I cannot do alone. I don't have to understand it. Trying to understand only locks me up inside my head. I loved this because this is how I lived with Rich. I lived in this silent contempt for him and the disapproving comments and the scornful looks. And I look back and I can hardly recognize who that person is, to be honest. It's fascinating because it's really grounded in fear and pain and a desire to be safe. I continually didn't feel safe for some reason. And even though there were things happening in our life and in our family that would be reasoning for not feeling safe necessarily, emotionally safe, we always were physically safe, but emotionally safe. What I recognize is it's something much deeper than that. And what I'm going to start doing more in these bonus podcasts is talking more on that spiritual level around soul recovery, this concept of our souls and what we are here to experience. And this curriculum of life that is incredibly complicated. And when I think about this journey that I've been on about really lovingly detaching from all of the clinging and the trying to understand, I love that at the end of this it says, you don't have to try to understand. Trying to understand only locks me inside my head. And recently I was talking to a friend about something that's going on with her sister, and she continues to be wrapped up in the story. That's the part that is the judgment that we're learning in soul recovery, that we judge not because we're bad, not because there's something wrong with us, but because that's how our mind is trying to make sense of all the complex situations that are happening around us. And that is the part of our mind that is trying to control, with trying to force things to be a certain way, because underneath all that is this real need for us to be safe. And the truth is that we're safe always. We're safe always, regardless of what's happening on the outside. The safety is actually something that we feel inside within us when we are truly connected with our source energy, when we remember our wholeness, when we remember our soul and connect to that part of us that is here on earth school in our curriculum of life, having these experiences, and we recognize that we're safe here. Almost anything can happen, no matter how trying or difficult or painful it is. But if we can really connect to this, knowing that our soul is safe and well and held by spirit, by source, then we stop trying to grasp and force and make things be different. And what I recognize again in my relationship with Rich that has been so interesting. This morning I was just thinking about how far we've come that we're in North, I can't keep track. We've been together since 1992 and got married in 94. So we're we're coming up on a lot of years together, 33 years together. I'm sorry, I'm mumbling over all that. Never good with math. That's okay. And it doesn't even matter, right? So it's like even counting the days doesn't even matter anymore because it's it's less and less and less about forcing this relationship to be something that I think that I want it to be. And it's more and more about me turning to myself and recognizing that there's been ample opportunity over and over and over again for me to learn about me. And the more I'm trying to control and force, the more I'm trying to control him, which I'm powerless over him, 100% powerless over him, powerless over what he thinks, powerless over what his moods are, powerless over how he sees the world, powerless over everything. But because we've been in this space with each other, that we are each growing and doing our own soul recovery at our own pace and our own way. That part of me that had that contempt, that resentment that was trying to force him to do it in some way that felt right to me has completely lessened. And it's taking the emotional battlefield. You've heard me talk about the emotional battlefield. What is it that I'm analyzing and just from all of this? Because you are entitled to want and need things. You are entitled to a healthy, safe, loving relationship. But that healthy, safe, loving relationship may actually look different than what our our expectation, our fantasy expectation is of what we think those relationships are. And if we pull, oh, what is coming? If I if we pull in all of those old stories, all those old beliefs, all that messaging, all that conditioning that we had when we were younger, and we begin to release all the energy that comes from that. That's what soul recovery is all about. It's about looking at yourself and your experiences and your emotions and your beliefs from a new lens, from a lens of compassion and grace, especially for yourself. And then noticing how all of that has this deep attachment, this desire to try to make it be safe and make it be okay. Because if they're okay, we can be okay. But when we give up, I love how she just says this. Am I willing to give up the pain of trying to control my partner? She's the one experiencing the pain. It's painful when you're trying to control what is uncontrollable. That is the suffering, the grasping, the wanting, the clinging, the desperately, you know, wanting so hard for it to be something else. Am I willing to give up my silent contempt, scornful looks, and disapproving comments, no matter how justified I think I am? You can feel your feelings. This is never about being a doormat or allowing someone to have unacceptable behavior. It's the part of us that is brewing within ourselves with discontent, scornful looks, that part of us inside that is just so intensely full of resentment and grievance and rage. Because all of that is actually keeping you from looking at what's going on inside of you, which is it doesn't feel good for a reason. It doesn't feel good for a reason. And we've been taught as a for most of us of women, the women who are listening to this, and many men, but mostly as women, we were taught to swallow our feelings, to not think or feel, to not be too much. And there's so much energy around how to be present in our bodies with our own emotions without fear of something from the outside that's judging us or shutting us down, or that we're supposed to put other people's feelings first. That's what codependency ultimately is, is we've been conditioned to have somebody else's needs, feelings put before our needs and our feelings. When we're not getting what we need from somebody, you are not getting what you need from somebody. It's not about looking at all these things and saying, okay, I'm gonna be fine with not getting what I need. That's not it at all. It's about seeing it more clearly so that you can let go of all the filters of all of your emotional baggage that's underneath and the view that you're seeing that people are against you or that they're to blame, or if they would just do this, then everything would be okay. And, you know, on some level, some of that's true, that if you have somebody who's actively drinking or actively raging or actively in a place where they're really dissatisfied with their life, if they were in a different place, yeah, it would feel better. But you're taking away the part of yourself that has responsibility of how you show up, how you choose to see it, and ultimately where you choose to put your body and where you continue to stay. I know for me, I was really thinking again this morning about Rich and I for some reason. And I was thinking about how at this point, with this many years under our belt, and how hard we're actively working on our relationship. I've taken the foot out the door that I had for almost all of our relationship. Because I was trained by my parents that you have different relationships at different times of your life, and the divorce is inevitable because my parents divorced when I was eight, and that was so amical and lovely, and they're such good friends that it actually gave me permission to say, yeah, when that time comes when you're ready for the next phase, then you don't stay with somebody. Well, Rich's experience was totally different. His parents divorced in very much anger and turmoil and upset. For him, this separating that didn't work for him because he wanted so desperately for us to have a commitment together. But over the years, I've made it clear from my soul-recovered perspective that I want to be in this relationship, but it must be healthy, it must move forward, it must have spiritual growth, it must have sobriety. And not as an ultimatum, but as my boundary for me. Right? My boundary for me. Because I don't want to live in a place where I'm giving him scornful looks or I have bad attitude or I'm judging everything that he does. I don't want to live that way because you know who it was painful for? That was painful for me. I'm the one that was feeling all of that upset and anxiety so, so, so, so much, which is one of the reasons why I think that I drank so much alongside of him, because I was just trying to numb out my own feelings. And I think that when we give ourselves grace to say, yes, we have seasons of our lives that are incredibly complex, incredibly complex, but we stop seeing them from this vantage point that we're victims or that somebody did something to us, right? And you just start empowering yourself to see that your soul came here to have this incredibly complicated, wild ride of an experience for you. And that you get to choose every day how you're gonna show up. She says, I am tired of fighting. I'm weary of analyzing the relationship in each interaction. That analyzing and that that fighting is really trying to control. It's trying to understand the parts that are hard to understand. We can't possibly understand what somebody's thought processes are. And then we're also trying to be right. We're trying to prove that one person's way of seeing it is the right way. And it has become more and more clear to me over time. Everybody has every right in the world to have their experience, their vantage point, their feelings around it because it's all flushing through their system that has all the same complex stuff that you do. But we get caught in this battle, this waging this war, and it goes back and forth. So as soon as you have contempt, they have contempt. As soon as you're trying to be right, they're trying to be right. And why do we get married in the first place? Why are we in relationship in the first place? To have friendship and to have companionship and to be loved. I want to just, you know, my goodness, I'm just feeling this energy that's really around how so many of us came into the experiences or in our lives without a foundation of this being modeled for us. And so it only makes sense, of course, that we step into relationships that might mirror or model some of the experiences that we had when we were younger that don't allow us to trust that we can be loved or that loving is safe, or love looks a certain way, that it has a certain texture to it. But it only takes one person in a relationship to make a change in how you're showing up, to change the energy in the entire system. And that's why we're here doing our soul recovery. We're not here to save them. You may have come here thinking, yeah, just like Al-Anon, walking in the rooms of Al-Anon. We walk in the rooms of Al-Anon because we're like, okay, we got somebody who's got a problem in our life. I know that this is a support group to figure out how to fix them. I know that's what I thought when I walked into Al-Anon the first time, both for my husband and for my son Alex. And then I soon learned it wasn't about that. But we talked a lot, a lot, a lot about them over and over and over. Who's the qualifier? What are they doing? Why don't we like it? That part started to not feel good to me because it's us making the disapproving comments, it's us making the judgments. It's even though we're learning the tools that are so imperative for us to learn how to have detachment and how to take care of ourselves, there's still a focus on what the other is doing. And in soul recovery, I'm hoping that you can more and more and more let go of them and their experience and their choices and what is happening in their recovery or non-recovery. And you're leaning more and more into your wholeness, your awakening, your soul's journey, your incredible empowerment over your ability to be present in how you choose to see it, how you choose to think about it, how you choose to interact with it. She says, I turn to my higher power for serenity, courage, and acceptance. I need to let go of my control and let God take over to live my own life and let my husband live his. I think sometimes we think that when we do that, we're gonna lose our connection to them. What we really want is we really want intimacy, emotional intimacy. And I know for me, one of the things that I recognized when Rich drank was sometimes I didn't like his behavior, sometimes I didn't like his intensity, and he could be quick to react and have um be angry. But it was mostly an emotional lack of connection. It's like he wasn't there. And just like when I drank, I definitely was doing it to not be there a hundred percent because it was just so difficult and painful. But when we let go of control, we're we're actually not letting it go as if it's gonna float out into the ocean to never be seen. Again, we're actually letting it go for the energy to be able to transition and open up into something that is even more than we could possibly understand because there's so much more potential and unlimited nature of what is available to us than we've given ourselves permission or credit or the ability to connect with because we're coming from all these old defense systems. But the letting go of control is us opening to a deeper understanding of ourselves. And in that space, what I'm always saying is that when you are in a more healed, clean space, you can look at the situation that you're in from a more true perception. Is this like it was in my relationship? Is there a lot more that's actually working and good and riches the human being that he is, is someone that I wasn't even recognizing existed because I was trying to make him be something that I don't even know what that was. Or are you looking at something that you are trying to force and make to be something that it'll never be? To try to be loved and witnessed and in relationship with somebody who literally just doesn't have the ability to give you what you need. Not a judgment as being bad, but as just an as is, seeing things more honestly for what they are. And when we come from the soul recovery viewpoint, there is no one who is right or wrong, or the victim or the perpetrator or the hero in any of these situations anymore. We're seeing it from clarity of each person's experience and mostly empowering ourselves to say, is this the environment? Is this the relationship? Is this healthy for me? I want to be in my relationship. And when I wasn't in, it was painful for me because I was, I was battling it. And the more I battled it, the more it battled me back. And I look back on our lives and I look back on with the kids. And I've said before, sometimes I have a lot of pain and regret and wish that we could have done things differently. But more and more I just have an awareness of how these are the stories of our lives. Not that we have to continue to live from the woundedness and the pain and really go into victimhood around what I did or how they felt or what Rich did or what they did, you know, that the kids showed up and did their stuff too that wasn't all that great. Or can we see this as part of our experience of our growing and our learning and our expanding? And that part of this, part of this is we are breaking ancestral patterns at this moment in time that will not only heal generations to come, but actually if you believe in the quantum fields and all the spiritual wild stuff, it's actually healing the past too. Because all of it is connected. So the more that we can live from this place where we don't have to try to understand, we don't have to try to fix it, we don't have to make anything happen. We connect to something greater still and we recognize we're not alone and we we stay conscious in every moment, in every choice that we make, we are conscious in it. Even when you're falling completely off and into a spiral and into a spin out and you're pissed and you're doing all the things, you have that moment where you come back to yourself. That is spiritual awakening. That's the only ask is that you come back to that center, to the truth of who you are. You remember your wholeness, you remember the wholeness of the people in your life, you remember that you are not alone, you pause, you step back, you choose a different response. And in that, the healing is profound. And that's all we're asking for. Are we ready to give up the struggle? I think you are already doing it because here you are. So we'll continue to work on this section, which I'm really enjoying. And soul recovery is this beautiful opportunity for you to come back to your wholeness, to remember you've never been lost, you aren't broken, there's nothing wrong with you. But we we need to find our way again, even when we're lost, those that they say, those that that wander aren't lost, right? Like just give yourself grace that sometimes we wander. And that wandering is actually giving you information. And the more that you give yourself compassion and love for your full experience, and you allow yourself grace, the energy dissipates, and you can let go of the struggle. You can let go of the suffering. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and being part of the Recover Your Soul community. If today's episode spoke to you and you'd like to connect with the community even more, I invite you to join us on the first Monday of every month for the free online support group on Zoom. It's from 6 to 7 p.m. Mountain Standard Time where I share a little bit more on the Recover Your Soul journey and then we break into small groups. You can register at recoveryoursoul.net, and if you've registered in the past, be on the lookout in your promotions folder for the reminder email and link. I'd also love to invite you to listen to the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast every Friday, either as an Apple Podcast subscriber or as a Patreon member. On Patreon, you can become a free member and have access to new episodes for the first week, or you can support this community with the tier that you choose. You can also follow me on social media, Instagram, Facebook, and join the private Facebook group for more connection with this amazing community. I hope you'll visit the website recoveryoursoul.net and you can sign up for emails so that you can be up to date with everything that's going on and maybe even join me for a retreat someday. Lastly, I thank you for sharing this podcasting community with anyone that you think might enjoy or learn from it. I also thank you for giving me five stars on any platform that you listen to and writing a review so that others can find the Recover Your Soul community too. Until next time, Namaste.