You Can Be Happy Even When Others Aren’t: Acceptance as a Path to Healing from Codependency

You Can Be Happy Even When Others Aren’t: Acceptance as a Path to Healing from Codependency

One of the most painful beliefs many of us carry is that we can only be okay when the people around us are okay.

This belief sits at the core of codependency, people-pleasing, control, and self-abandonment. It keeps us exhausted, anxious, and disconnected from our own lives as we try to manage, fix, or emotionally carry the experiences of others.

In this episode, I introduce the theme for 2026 on the Recover Your Soul Podcast: Acceptance as a Path to Peace. We explore what acceptance really means from a spiritual perspective and what it does not mean. Acceptance is not giving up, denying reality, or tolerating what harms us. It is learning to see what is clearly, without resistance, so we can stop abandoning ourselves and begin healing.

This episode invites you to consider a new possibility:
That your happiness does not require anyone else to change or heal.

In this epis

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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 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 Theme: Acceptance As Peace
• 3:32 Personal Recovery And Mission
• 7:36 Parenting, Pain, And Control
• 12:08 Loving Detachment Defined
• 16:20 Using AI As A Creative Tool
• 22:40 Songs As Emotional Time Capsules
• 28:22 From Fixing Others To Inner Power
• 34:29 Redefining Acceptance And Agency

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:49

There's a lot of talk in the spiritual world about the end of self-abandonment and this call for us to have a voice to speak what is really going on with us to have our truth in a way that I don't think we've ever been given permission to do before. This year's theme in the Recover Your Soul podcast is acceptance as a path to peace. And acceptance has many, many layers to it. And there's this moment that happens in awakening where we recognize we can no longer stay the same, that this acceptance that we've had of putting up with what doesn't feel good to us no longer works for us. And we're willing and wanting to see acceptance from the spiritual principles that it is actually teaching about learning to understand what is, to not try to change it, but to change and be the change that we want to see in our own lives. Healing ourselves is how we heal the world. 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 Recovery Soul Podcast. I'm Rev Rachel, and I'm so grateful to be spending time with you here today. We are just stepping into 2026. And I haven't done this before to have a theme for the year, but I got clear guidance, and it was just so beautiful to actually hear these words and get this guidance to share in terms of an overall arching theme for the year that we're gonna work on because it is such a profound part of our loving detachment, the letting go of everything that's happening around us that is indeed very complicated. And the words that I got for our theme for the year is acceptance as a path to peace. And acceptance is something that we've talked a lot about over our last six seasons in Recover Your Soul. It's something that's talked a lot about in 12 step. It's something that's talked a lot about in terms of how to be okay when other people aren't okay. But we're gonna do some deep dives into spiritual concepts, spiritual journey, metaphysical journey, the ability for us to be okay when the people around us and the world around us doesn't feel okay, and using the tools and principles of the nine-step recovery soul process to learn how to accept what is. Acceptance as a path to peace. That's really important that we are learning how to be okay when the people around us aren't okay. And if you've been with me before, you know my stories and sometimes they'll repeat. But one of the things that I think about that is just such a huge piece of my own healing was that one day when we are in the midst of all the really complicated things that were happening with our oldest son, who is now 29 years old, but at the time was an adolescent and a teenager, and he just was really struggling. He was struggling in addiction, he was struggling with his mental health, he was struggling with how we fit into the world, he was struggling in the dysfunction of our family. Rich and I were active alcoholics, and there was a lot of intense stuff going on. And he, as an ultra-sensitive person, was reflecting that in the way that he did, right? And somebody once said to me, you can only be as happy as your least happy child. And that was it for me. That was a marker. It's like I always just describe it as like a badge that I wore on my shirt that said, it's my job to take this least happy child and make him happy because I can't be happy unless he's happy. Because I felt that way already, that it didn't feel safe for me to be okay if the things around me weren't okay. And you've heard me talk about this before, but it's interesting because I didn't come from some childhood where we had massive problems or massive addictions or raging or, you know, so many of the really complicated situations that a lot of you come from. But it's important for us to not um take away from our own experiences because it's your unique experience. And sometimes we can do this thing where we're like, yeah, but I didn't have a father who did this, or I didn't have this particular situation. My mother was nice to me, or actually, a lot of people, it's so interesting. A lot of people that come for coaching with me will start the conversation a little bit like, um, yeah, I'm not entirely sure where all this comes from because actually I had a perfect childhood. My parents were perfect, everything was so perfect. And there's something to unpack in that. There's always something to unpack because we are in the process of understanding our soul's experience, how we felt, how it um, how it modeled for us the belief systems that we ended up creating for our own safety, for our own well-being, and how then we present out into the world, how then we um continue to do the thing where how am I loved, how am I accepted, how am I seen, how am I safe? How am I safe? So for me to only be as happy as my least happy child meant that for me to be safe, I needed to make sure that he was different. I needed to make sure that I quote unquote fixed whatever it was that we determined was wrong with him. I wasn't accepting his journey, I wasn't accepting the situation, I wasn't accepting the what is. And what I feel is so important in our recover your soul process is this deepening of our ability to witness and be present in our lives in a way that releases so much of our personal belief that we are personally responsible for every single person, every single situation, all of the people in our lives, whether they're family members, whether it's at work, whether it's the world, if you really think about the burden, the exhaustion that you feel around trying to make sure that everything and everyone is okay, and that you can only be as happy as your least happy child, or as happy as what's happening in the world, you know, like if there's all these things happening, how can I be happy? What does that look like? What is what is what is the the way that I can do that? That's not fair. I can't be happy unless everybody else is okay. And this isn't about not feeling feelings, it's not about discounting what's really happening. It's not pretending that there isn't anything complicated happening, it's not putting your head in the sand and feeling like, you know, um, let's just pretend loving detachment does not mean that you're in denial. Loving detachment means that you stop abandoning yourself and your journey, and you quit giving your power away by needing everybody else to be okay for you to be okay. You take your power back, you take your spiritual, your energetic power back. And the more that I do this work, the more I recognize that we're recovering parts of ourselves or we're recovering all those pieces that we've given away for so long to try to make sense of this very strange experience that we're having as souls in this reality. And we're bringing them back, we're recovering them back to our wholeness. So acceptance as a path to peace, acceptance as a path to freedom, acceptance as a path to awakening. Recently, I've been doing a lot of AI music. And if you listen to one of the bonus podcasts that I did in the last couple months, I talked about AI. And AI is here, right? AI is here, and there are ways to use it in beautiful ways, and it has some aspects of it that are complicated, and certainly we're gonna go down some roads where we look back and where you question why we developed something that will immediately be smarter than us. But for me, I have leaned into AI for a long time. I use AI as a tool in helping me gather all of the transcripts. I have over 550 episodes at this point, and I've used AI as a tool to help me decipher information, to create blogs, to um to do social media, to use my words, my concepts, and be able to be an assistant for me in my voice. And I have no problem saying or stating that that is what's done because I'm not using it for anything on the outside. I'm actually using it to help me to take all this content that comes in and through me and be able to give it to you in ways that um will inspire and help and support your recover your soul journey. I recently was introduced to AI music, and many of you know you can go on my website, and there's actually a music tab that has some of my original music. I was in a couple bands. Uh, one of them was called Spirit Rising that we did uh for almost 10 years we were in a band together, and it was so amazing because I wrote a lot, a lot of music, and then I had these amazing musicians that came and helped me make those songs even better. Rich was the drummer in the band, and there were many years where we were in the depths of our really dark, hard years, and those poor band members had to sit through some pretty sticky, not all that fun rehearsals with just the energy that used to flow between me and Rich, specifically me towards Rich, if I'm really honest. And then when the band broke up in 2020, I had been in an additional three-part women band, and we had done some really great covers, and so that's all of that's on the website. Anyway, I miss my music, and I've discovered AI music. And what you can do is you can take your song that you wrote and put it in, and it just takes what you did and creates, you know, the the AI vocals and a whole backtrack. And it's pretty phenomenal for somebody like me who loves the songs that I write, but I'm not a great musician, and I don't have anybody to play music with now because I'm so busy and full in what I'm doing. And this was really allowed me to um sort of get back into that creative flow. So, one of the things that's so interesting is I went back and I started looking through the audio recordings of rehearsals with Spirit Rising. And a lot of the songs were songs that maybe I wrote and we performed maybe once or twice over the years and did at church. We used to play at church a lot in little coffee shops, and they were sort of they're lost, they're sort of gone. But when I went back and started pulling in these songs and playing with AI to work on these songs and to hear them again, they're these markers in time of the experiences that I felt in those moments, the depths of despair that I felt, the heartache that I felt. And one of the songs in particular was around not being able to move forward, being stuck, staying the same. And one of the lines that I wrote was seasons change, seasons come forcing change, but not me. I stay the same. And I wrote that song with my guitar underneath the leaves in the pond, little area in the open space where I live, in the fall with the leaves falling. And and this just profound feeling at that time that I was so stuck in my misery. I was so stuck in feeling like the life that I had was based solely on whether the people around me were happy or not. And being in a family where there was addiction, where we were drinking, um, and then the situation that was going on with the kids, and specifically what was going on with Alex, and how hard it was. And that part of me that was giving myself away, saying, I need you to be okay for me to be okay. I can only be as happy as my least happy child, had me stuck in a situation where I couldn't move, I couldn't change, I was, I was locked in everybody else's experience and I wasn't in mine. And I think right now so much about how I was never like in the moment. I was always in the past and always in the future. I was, I was so future tripping all the time, and my mind was completely calling around, like swirling around what I was gonna do, what I was gonna do, how I was gonna fix, what was I gonna say, how was I gonna manage, what was I gonna, you know, make things change. Well, what I want you to know and recover your soul is it's understandable why you do that because you love the people in your life. I loved my son. I loved him so much that seeing him in these really hard situations where he was getting in trouble at school, he was starting to use drugs, he and his dad had a uh relationship that was incredibly difficult and painful to watch because as much as Rich loved Alex, which he absolutely did, he was using the tools that he had been raised with. And as we've talked to each other over these last years of healing, he can have more and more awareness around those tools sometimes were not all that great because he wasn't taught how to not be intense or how to, you know, do what I say because I told you to do it, even though the intention behind what he wanted him to do was always good. It didn't have um a softness to it that would have worked better for Alex. Acceptance does not mean that we um what's coming here? Acceptance does not mean that we're trying to make it be something else for the oh my gosh, this is in my what's in my mind, it's swirling around, so just stick with me. When I look back on those situations, part of the acceptance is something that I need to do right now because there's so many times that even even now I'll look back and I'll think, oh, why couldn't it have been different? You know, why what if what if this particular marker or this this major marker in our lives that it happened hadn't happened? You know, what would have been different? Acceptance means so many different things, but in this particular context, acceptance has two pieces. One is I wasn't able to accept what was going on in our lives right then with the level of compassion and awareness that would have allowed me to be present in those situations and done a better job in those moments because I was so consumed with trying to control. And then there's a level of acceptance right now, which says when I go back and I think about those experiences, if I'm totally going back and ruminating on it and having regret and pulling up all those pain experiences and rolling them around and bringing them forward into some sort of like, well, all of this happened because of this, and this is so-and-so's fault. I'm not accepting what was. And recently I read the Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And it's one of the reasons why this is our theme for this year. Because the reminder is that the foundational teachings of Buddhism, which is what I was raised, Tibetan Buddhist from the time that I was about six months old, and my mom found it, is this acceptance of what is. And what we're learning on this spiritual journey that we're on together is that this level of acceptance does not mean that we take what doesn't feel good. And this is the big shift that's been happening in the last years. I think there was a whole period of time where we were learning how to put up with, we're learning how to lovingly detach and put their stuff over, you know, this is their side of the street, this is their lane, we have all this terminology, live and let live. We have all this terminology around how to be present with what is without judgment. And we're gonna talk about that later in the year. We've got, I mean, this topic is just so big. But what we want to lean on is this place that is about not self-abandoning ourselves anymore. We cannot tolerate that anymore. It's becoming more and more clear. That part of me that wrote that song that said seasons come and force a change, but not me. I stay the same. I was so stuck, and that being stuck felt so yucky and so hard, but I didn't know what to do at the time to move forward. And the more that I can accept that that was the truth of who I was and where I was in that moment, the more gentleness I have to the experience that I had and the feelings that I felt that I couldn't process at the time. I just was in fear and anxiety, and it just felt so overwhelming. And I felt like it was my fault. And, you know, all the things that we feel, because those are normal feelings. They're actually appropriate feelings to feel, but because there hasn't been this modeling to allow yourself to be in whatever that experience is, we've just been learning to control. How to fix, how to change, how to be codependent, how to be a people pleaser, how to deny our own needs, how to abandon ourselves. And part of this acceptance is a path to peace this year is around learning how to have a compassionate, kind, and authentic voice to share you your needs, your your truth without trying to push anybody else to accept them for who they are, where they are. And we're starting to use some of the terminology from spirituality on a more um mainstream format, which is around what is the alignment? What resonates with you? Because I don't think it's except for the last I'm gonna say 10 years that we are giving ourselves permission to not have to quote unquote accept, right? So this is another way that we use the term stuff that doesn't feel good to us. And at the same time, we're learning the more deep meaning of this word, acceptance, to see things as they are, and to begin to see the neutrality in everything for what it is, and how we can show up from our most healed, authentic, highest selves to interact with it in a way where there's more and more clarity all the time. Does this work for me or doesn't it? What am I gonna do here? What is my work here? Am I learning something from this situation or am I stuck? Seasons change, but I won't change because we're stuck in this belief that we have to sit in it, we have to take it, we have to force it, we have to change it, we're responsible for it. These are the pieces of self-abandonment that are becoming more and more clear that they just no longer work. And that's what we're gonna work on this year. So it's pretty fun to go back and listen to these songs that AI makes marvelous, incredible songs. Some of them I hope that I'll um pull the stems into my recording programs and take the vocals and put my vocals instead of the AI vocals. But it doesn't even matter because it's been this record of my own journey, because each of our journeys are so important. And we've dismissed the value of our unique experiences because they're so intertwined and enmeshed in everybody else's. But in Recover Your Soul, we're learning more and more and more about to take our power back, to turn the attention to ourselves, to have more and more compassion to ourselves first and foremost, and then to the people around us for their sticky, complicated, sometimes painful, challenging life too. And then when we let go of feeling like we're responsible, we can only be as happy as our whatever it is, the person in our life, we take responsibility for our own well-being and we begin to recognize how important it is to love yourself, to love yourself. And as I hear those songs, some of them really entrenched in pain, I can have so much compassion for that woman that wrote those songs. And my heart just fills with love for her and gratitude that there was a place to share those ideas and those feelings, because sometimes we don't feel safe to do that out in the world in other ways. That's why music is so powerful. Music and poetry and writing, there are places where we can put our soul, and our soul wants to create and share from those experiences, and to be able to speak our truth in ways that really hold space for where we're at. And the journey is complicated, and sometimes there's highs, and sometimes there's lows, but I look at that person who felt like she couldn't change, and I'm not that person anymore. I'm not that person even at all. And it took being in that level of pain that I was in those years for me to be willing to do the work to recover my soul, right? That's step one in recover your soul is ready for awakening, where you recognize that the feelings that you feel, you you feel those feelings. Your perception, your beliefs, your stories, the way that you choose to see the world, the way that you're interacting with the world, that's where you have power. That you can be happy even when you have a child who is not happy. You can be fulfilled even when you have family members that are not happy. That our happiness is a reflection of our choices, and their unhappiness is a reflection of their choices, and not one is good or bad, or okay or not okay, or the right thing or the wrong thing. It's bigger than that, that our souls are here on purpose to have these experiences, these challenges, these opportunities, and you've decided it's time to recover your soul. You've decided it's time to awaken. You've decided that you are ready to heal. You've decided to walk a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life, and you're willing to do the work for you and let go of trying to fix and change everything around you. What a powerful and courageous moment, accepting what is as a path to peace. So, we're gonna talk more about this theme this year. It's gonna be a thread that weaves through everything that we're doing. And I'm super excited because I just met with Bodie, and we're gonna start to shoot all of the podcasts starting probably in February on video and move to video on YouTube. You'll still get the audio just like you do now on all of the other audio platforms, but start to really kind of shift how we're bringing this information to you and continuing to build this community to create this community. I'm so excited to be offering the group coaching so that those of you who are parents of adult children can meet, those of you who have spouses or family members can meet together. And those of you who've been to workshops or have worked the steps with me or done something in person with me can come and meet because there's this community that we are in. There's so much that happens when we connect together in groups and share our experience, our strength, our hope, our journey. And we share it from an awakened place, from the place that says, I'm healing, I'm learning, I'm growing. And I want to share with you how I am shedding the old skin and making change in my life and choosing happiness regardless of what's happening around me and be getting permission in a way from others to do that as we heal together. Thank you so much for being part of this community. Until next time, Namaste. If you want to hang on for a minute, I want to share with you the full AI version. This is not my voice, but it is the song that I wrote called Stay the Same as Created by AI.

SPEAKER_01: 29:53

Tears and dreams they fall from me. Tears and dreams a fall from me. Seasons come in force a change. Where I'm going, I don't know. I'm still dead. I let you go.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 32:56

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 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 podcast and 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.