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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected]. 

Emotional recovery is about going back to “ground zero,” your childhood.

A disease is a morbid process that is destructive to the being: body, mind, soul, and heart. It reduces our capacity to be productive and prosperous. Disease has a characteristic chain of symptoms with known or unknown origins. A disease is chronic, with acute episodes, progressive and often fatal.

We are as sick as the feelings we will not let ourselves have.

Symptom # 9 Hypervigilance

Hypervigilance is the fear of giving up anxiety that keeps me “on my toes” as a safety mechanism; bad things will happen if I’m not on my toes.

Hypervigilance is being controlled by anxiety. Anxiety is always seeking relief from the hypervigilance. Anxiety becomes the expectation of an external threat doing something to put me in a position of helplessness.

Anxiety is in us to tell us to be ready to take a defensive action, a reaction:

fight…get ready

flee…get ready

freeze…get ready

appease…get ready

Anxiety in its negative form is saying “watch outside right now because something is coming that is going to harm you.”  Anxiety is an external locus of anticipation and control.

The anxiety in hypervigilance is about avoiding the confession of being afraid and in need. The anxiety goes in search of the external threat; it looks for danger. This anxiety will not be quelled until it finds the thing that it needs to control in order to find relief.

We are made to live fully in relationship and connection. When we become disconnected from how we are made, because we are made for connection and to live fully in relationship, that has always been there. If I can’t find a way to be connected the way I am created to connect, I will have to find another way to be connected, one way or another. 

Toxic shame tells you that if you’re not doing what others expect you to do (and your discomfort will confirm this), then you will be humiliated and rejected. Toxic Shame says:

• You better get your role together.

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected]. 

The Boy & The Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency by Chip Dodd

In codependency, people hide their competence and giftings in order to belong and matter.

People are generally unable to celebrate well with others.

6. Name the symptom 

Enmeshed relationships with controlling people

Identify the fear that it’s grounded in 

Fear of being alone

Identify the toxic shame that it is birthed in 

Unless I please, I will be rejected.

Discuss its impaired expression in our lives (External locus of control) 

I wait to see what they want before I can act, and even then, I am uncertain about my feelings and thoughts.

Discuss what it was meant to be (Internal locus of control) 

Being in relationship with people who see you as having the same worth, and desire to hear your feelings and thoughts.

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”  Psalm 139:14

7. Name the symptom 

Constricted emotions

Identify the fear that it’s grounded in 

Fear of being known or the fear of being seen as weak/inadequate

Identify the toxic shame that it is birthed in 

If I let myself be known, bad consequences will happen. The past will repeat itself. I will be seen as weak/ inadequate again.

Discuss its impaired expression in our lives (External locus of control) 

The need to hide or deny feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope.

Discuss what it was meant to be (Internal locus of control) 

Freedom to express yourself wisely with others who can do the same

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”  Philippians 4:8

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected]. 

Structure of Symptoms of Codependency

• Name the symptom

Codependency recovery and codependency illness is not an either/or; it’s both/and. 

Just like addiction, codependency is an attempt to have a full life, without having to be truly human and having to deal with needs, embarrassment and vulnerability. It is both/and as an impaired way of living and an attempt to find full life.

Recovery is developing a tolerance for vulnerability. 

Vulnerability is the key to identifying myself as human, having feelings and being in need; and identifying others who are capable of feeling and being in need.

Codependency is the loss of self, and all that comes with self, given over to significant others because they are uncomfortable with someone being human in their presence. So, with our need to belong and matter, we will sacrifice how God made us to belong and matter to those who are actually running from themselves.

Sadly, children don’t know that these caregivers are running from themselves because children look at their caregivers knowing that they are big and the child is little. They think, “You must be right because you’re big; therefore, I must be wrong.”

The caregiver’s toxic shame and defenses, and their protection from their own internal world become a rejection to belonging and mattering for the child.

The origin of how we’re created is found in this equation:

intuition + suspicion + questions = the growing ability to discern 

• where I am

This means I am listening to my internal world.

Intuition + suspicion + questions = discernment.

Intuition + suspicion + defensiveness = judgmentalism. Judging my environment around me all the time based upon making sure that I do not end up looking little, stupid, or weak. This is the fear and toxic shame of vulnerability.

So, your whole life revolves around trying to fit in based upon your performance again, rather than being how you are made. This requires that you ask a lot of questions.

Asking questions is a solution that helps separate us from judgment and return us to discernment.

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). To consult or setup a session with Bryan, you can e-mail [email protected].

Episode Highlights:

The Boy & The Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency by Chip Dodd 

A story/workbook for helping codependents find freedom from codependency.

You are gifted, and there is a world in need of your gifts.

Loneliness is the biggest pain that people are facing now. What people need is to be known from the inside-out, rather than distracting ourselves from our loneliness (need for genuine relationship) through social media.

Diagnosing and Treating Co-Dependence by Timmen Cermak

5 Things God designed us to find fulfillment in:

1. We are created to use the development of our inborn self-awareness through feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope to find and live in authentic relationship.

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1. With that in-born self-awareness, we are able to be “response-able” to our inner make-up.  (We’re created to develop the ability to respond to our outside life by using our inborn makeup: feelings, needs, desire, longings, and our hope. We need our “makeup” affirmed and confirmed so we can keep being able to use it, so we can grow “response-ably” which ultimately becomes responsibility.)

↓      

1. We are created to find genuine relational connection through being “response-able” and through using our inner self-awareness.

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1. We are created to initiate our lives from our hearts, with others who have the same capacity. (We are looking to connect with others who are also living a life of relational fulfillment. They are aware that we are all 99.9% the same.)   "It's a Small World"

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1. We are created to be in relationship with others, God, God’s creation, and the others in it.

When we live our lives fully out of the 5 fulfilments, we are able to be healthy grownups who do what Jesus said in Matthew 7:7.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”  Matthew 7:7

Matthew 7:7 is for grownups; grownups are just children who have gotten older and who have remained fully present in their lives. Grownups are able to live out of their fully present lives.

Jesus encourages grownups to:

• Ask so they can receive.

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). To consult or setup a session with Bryan, you can e-mail [email protected].

Episode highlights:

The Boy & The Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency by Chip Dodd

God is a great garbage man; He wastes nothing in our lives. 

• God values His own creation;

Bring your child-heart to God and give Him your pain, suffering, and your struggle, and even your questions. God can deliver you. He delivers people through circumstances, prayer, His word, other people, and illumination of your heart.

“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength,” Ephesians 1:18-19

Paul was a man who knew that to love, is to suffer. Therefore, he needed a place to take his suffering. Paul refers to God in this passage:

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.”  2 Corinthians 1:3-5

So, we can either choose to believe that while God is good, we still suffer; yet we have a place to take our suffering. We can take it to God, who cares for us.

OR

We will stifle suffering unnecessarily, and just live miserably.

The Boy & The Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency by Chip Dodd

“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he. ‘Eat and drink!’ he says to you, but his heart is not with you.”

Proverbs 23:7

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). To consult or setup a session with Bryan, you can e-mail [email protected].

Episode Highlights:

Codependency is the loss or the sacrifice of: 

• God-created true self. 

Codependency is not being able to: 

• say what you feel. 

We are made for love; we are made to be connected.  

In order to be accepted and loved by our significant caregivers, we often end up hiding our own needs. Examples: If I don’t like sports, my dad will not love me. If I don’t make good grades my mother will be so  disappointed. If I have opinions that are different from my teachers, they will reject me. If I’m not artistic like my older brother, I won’t be as loved.

We end up acting a certain way or pretend to be someone we are not in order to be loved. We  eventually begin to “believe” in the pretending rather than being our true selves. We slip into denial. 

We perform for love instead of being ourselves. 

God designed for us to: 

• be who we are made to be; 

In a codependency environment we end up:  

• doing what we’ve got to do;  

Codependency becomes the belief that I can perform enough and do enough so that I can finally rest, trust, be believed, have my worth, and be valued. 

Codependency is a disorder of distrust. You trust the anxiety. You don’t trust listening to your own fear and exposing it.  

Sadly, if a codependent person stays stuck in their past and sOll believes feelings are the enemy, they will,  no matter how much they are loved, never trust the love.  

Codependency is bringing your “bucket of desire” into life, and your caregivers poking holes in the  bottom of it so that in your future, no matter how much love gets poured into it, it goes right through it. 

There’s not enough love; there’s not enough approval, there’s not enough trustworthiness because it all  slips right through the holes in the bucket. 

Codependency recovery is about repairing, or healing, the holes in your bucket (revision). 

Codependents are always trying to find their fulfillment externally by withholding what’s happening in  them internally. 

The Voice of the Heart by Chip Dodd 

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). To consult or setup a session with Bryan, you can e-mail [email protected].

Episode Highlights:

Click here if you would like more information about Champion's Path

Chip Dodd- The Boy & the Ogre: Finding Freedom from Codependency

Melody Beatty – Codependent No More

•  The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations for Codependents

Sarah Young - Jesus Calling

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Episode 31: The Rediscovered Treasure (Part 4)

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). To consult or setup a session with Bryan, you can e-mail [email protected].

Episode Highlights

Needs are: 

• how we’re created. 

Our need to belong and our need to matter are more important than food, shelter, and clothing. We will give up food, shelter and clothing in order to belong and matter. The unseen needs are more  powerful than the seen needs. 

God gives us the desire of our hearts. 

We are born with longings. 

We long for justice. (We see a small child lying in a bed in a pediatric intensive care unit with bandages and  tubes, and we cry, “NO!” We don’t have to know the child to recognize the injustice of it.) 

We recognize that we are not made to die of disease. We’re not made to kill each other. We’re not made  for war. 

We are made for love and peace and eternity and raising each other up. 

We are made to experience the grace of a hand that can reach into the farthest depths. There is no mistake  that is so far away that God can’t reach us. 

We long for a place where we can put our heads against a safe shoulder, where there are arms to go  around us, and there is a voice that says, “It’s okay now, it’s okay. You can rest now.” We long for a place  called “home,” where God lives. 

Longings are deep cravings within our hearts that will never be fulfilled as long as we live on this earth. It’s living in the wishing every day. It’s living in the wanting forever. It’s meeting God every day, and God says,  “One day it will all be complete.” 

Surrender your heart every day, and it will change. Walk in the surrender every day. Live in the world of  miracles. Tell the truth and live in the truth. Open your eyes to see the joy of what happens when we walk  in the truth. 

If we do not deal with our hearts, we end up living counterfeit lives.  

• We grow into shriveled, little trees, not oaks of righteousness. 

We pursue all forms of counterfeit fulfilments instead of believing that God can fill us. 

Sadly, we end up practicing hopelessness. We practice hopelessness as a way of not taking a risk to believe  that our heart’s yearnings are real. We refuse to believe that our feelings really matter. We refuse to be  vulnerable. We refuse to surrender our lives to the God Who made us. 

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). To consult or setup a session with Bryan, you can e-mail [email protected].

Episode Highlights

We are born as emotional and spiritual creatures. We are born with feelings.  Before we ever think or speak our first word, we are expressing ourselves as feeling creatures. 

We experience life in the very beginning as God made us through our feelings and through the  longings to be in relationship with our mothers and fathers.  

We came out of the womb experiencing life through what we feel.  

We came out of the womb looking for who was looking for us. We were looking for emotional  and spiritual connection through relationship, before we were ever able to think or speak. 

This emotional and spiritual language is the language of the heart.  

We communicated from the very beginning of our lives with our feelings.  

Hurt 

• is a feeling you feel when you experience a wound. 

Hurt that is not acknowledged becomes resentment. It is the impaired expression of hurt. It is a justification of your right to act badly towards another person because you carry a pain  that they’ve given you. Resentment takes us out of relationship. 

People who won’t acknowledge their hurt, hurt others with their resentment.  (Hurt people, hurt people.) 

Loneliness 

• God gave us loneliness so we would seek out relationship. 

Loneliness that is not acknowledged becomes apathy.  

Apathy develops when you try to make your heart stop caring about relationship.

Sadness 

• is a feeling you get when you lose something that matters to you or is important to  you. 

Sadness that is not acknowledged becomes self-pity. Self-pity is a way of trying to escape your  pain. 

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). To consult or setup a session with Bryan, you can e-mail [email protected].

Episode Highlights

The focus of this episode is a recording of a men’s retreat that Chip did in Texas in 1993. The retreat  content was edited and put on CDs. The CDs were included with the first edition copies of The Voice of the Heart published in 2001.  

You’ve got to get defeated to become rich in this “God world”. 

God says that what He is after is our hearts. Our hearts that He made, that He created, that He  loves. 

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. 

They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” Jeremiah 17:7-8 (NIV) 

What is feeding the roots of the tree? Its roots are planted in what feeds it, and it receives emotional and spiritual food. 

God feeds our hearts with emotional and spiritual food.  

God stamps our hearts with feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope at birth. This is what God is after. This is what puts us into a relationship with the God of our forefathers.

Through our feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope we end up growing into a strong person who others can love and trust.  

Torment in our lives does not come from exposing the truth about our hearts; torment comes from the energy we take to keep our hearts hidden. 

We are as sick as the secrets we keep within us, from the smallest manipulation to the largest  secret. 

The difference between an unhealthy family and a healthy family is the willingness to seek forgiveness. Healthy families seek forgiveness. 

Truths: 

Pain of the heart is the teacher. 

Love is the lesson. 

Life is the result. 

Sharing that is the practice.

God loves us so much that He will go to any length to get us back. There is nothing we can do to earn it. God doesn’t need anything we have.  

God does not need us:  

He craves us. 

He wants us. 

He wishes to be with us. 

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” Luke 19:39-40 (NIV) 

God doesn’t need us; We need Him. The price we pay for needing Him is having to go through the  excruciating and glorious pain of being loved, without being able to do anything to get it. 

What we can do is live out our salvation. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He came to bring life  and life abundantly.  

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