Al-Anon and Recover Your Soul: Stop Losing Yourself & The Path from People-Pleasing to Authenticity

This week, while I am away, I’m sharing a replay from the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast. Together, we explore one of the tender teachings from Al-Anon through the lens of Recover Your Soul, the quiet courage it takes to stop pretending you’re fine and to gently return to yourself.

Many of us learned to people-please as a way to stay safe. We tried to hold the family together, soften the edges for everyone else, and become whatever version of ourselves we thought was needed in the moment. And over time, that way of living can pull us farther and farther away from our own truth, our own voice, and even our own feelings.

In this episode, we reflect on a beautiful reading from In All Our Affairs about “the obligation to be myself.” We look at what it means to slowly release the façade, to feel what you feel without managing the emotions of everyone around you, and to begin discovering who you truly are and not who you learned to be.

Through my perspective in Recover Your Soul, we look at
 • why authenticity is part of spiritual awakening
 • how people-pleasing keeps us disconnected from our true selves
 • why detachment creates space for everyone’s growth
 • the difference between being “nice” and being whole
 • how to honor your feelings without laying them on others
 • and what it means to walk through your life as the real you

If this conversation resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or become a member on Patreon, where you receive a new Recover Your Soul Bonus episode every week. It’s a beautiful way to deepen your practice and stay connected to this supportive community.

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
• 1:50 Why Detachment Matters In Healing
• 2:44 Book Study: My Obligation To Be Myself
• 5:29 From Thinking To Feeling
• 8:43 Dropping The Facade At Home
• 11:41 Boundaries Without Overexposure
• 14:41 Growth Through Discomfort And Change
• 17:53 Naming Chaos And Choosing Clarity
• 21:24 Safety, Vulnerability, And New Circles

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. We are continuing our Al-Anon-inspired Soul Recovery book study. We're using In All of Our Affairs, Making Crisis Work for You, and we are in the chapter on detachment. And today's episode is around the obligation to be myself. This reading is a beautiful reflection of learning how to feel our feelings, first of all, and then to move into a place where we stop putting on the facade and we begin to learn who we are and how we can show up fully, authentically as ourselves in our life. 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 Bonus Podcast. It's Revre Toll. We are on a journey of exploring Al-Anon through the eyes of soul recovery. As you know, I'm not speaking for Al-Anon. I do not want to replace Al-Anon, but the Al-Anon literature was such a profound start of my soul recovery process and was where a lot of my beginning thoughts of detachment started to come from that opened me up to begin to look even deeper onto a spiritual journey and to pull from different places. But many of you are coming here because you found Al-Anon and you looked it up and you found me. And so I think that this beauty of us being able to really reflect the two together is really powerful. And you've asked for more Al-Anon. And so that's what we're doing here in the bonus episodes. As a spiritual book study, we're reading out of in all of our affairs, making crisis work for you. And we're in the section on the detachment, because detachment is such an important part of the soul recovery process to realize that we are powerless over every single thing outside of ourself, to let go of control, to hand it over to spirit, to really turn the attention to ourselves and to recognize that this part of us, this codependent, people-pleasing part of us that thinks that we are responsible for everybody else's stuff, their happiness, their well-being, has caused us a lot of pain and suffering in our own life. And then we're ready to take our power back and to come back into our healing, to choose a spiritual path for a happy and healthy life and to unconditionally love the people around us just as they are. And that is a tall order sometimes. But what I love about what we've been reading in these little sections of this book, which are individual independent stories that people are writing, is that we can relate to others in their experience through what they're going through. And it helps us in ours. And this particular section that I'm going to be reading in today, I love because it's around feelings and about being yourself. And I think this is an essential piece of our spiritual journey of beginning to be curious about who we are now that we're not doing all this other stuff for everybody else, right? So this is a really great section. It's called My Obligation to Be Myself. So I'm going to read and then reflect in the soul recovery perspective from my own experience. This writer says, during the drinking years, I played, quote unquote, let's pretend, so diligently and convincingly that I myself believed that we were a normal family and something as so unnice as alcoholism just couldn't happen to us. I went into Al Anon reluctantly. I talked about the program, but not about me. I told people what I thought, not how I felt. I didn't know how I felt. I love this line because when I started doing my recovery work, both in my alcoholism recovery and in my codependence recovery, I don't actually think I knew how I felt. I think that I had spent so much time and energy on how everybody else felt. And if you asked how I was doing, I would tell you what was going on in my family, not what's going on with me. I didn't actually know how I felt. So this clarity around telling people what we thought, but not how we felt is so great because maybe you don't know how you feel, but guess what? You're just starting out, or maybe you're just being curious about it, or even the concept that you don't know how you felt is a really great place to start. So they say, at meeting after meeting, Al-Anon members suggested that I would not recover unless I dropped the phonies and learned to relate genuinely with my whole self. I believed this and told other people the same thing. Be yourself, the reactions of other people is their choice, quote unquote. But in actual fact, I was not always willing to pay the emotional price of being myself, particularly with my husband. He couldn't handle my depression, my anger, my bitchiness. He depended on my total quote-unquote okayness. And why not? For many years I had carefully seen to it that all he had to relate to was a facade. Al Anon taught me that enabling can take many forms. When I protect my husband from having to cope with the real me, I keep him from having the chance to grow and change, just as I protected him from the consequences of his drinking. I am not truly loving him if I deny him this opportunity for growth. These are such great things. We're going to come back to them. Nor am I being loving to me. If I'm not true to myself around others, then I don't grow. I'll have no identity. And I don't know who I am because I haven't taken the time to know myself. I cannot encapsulate one area of my life. I cannot say, I will be myself here and not be someone else there without losing touch of who I am. I'll always feel safer with some people than with others. I will feel vulnerable and somewhat scared when I express my true self for the first time or even for the first 100 times. I cannot let down my guard all the time with everybody. Sometimes the emotional price truly is more than I can pay. In Alan, I was told not to go to the hardware store for milk. I don't share my innermost dreams with someone who will scoff at them, and I have the right to privacy and the right to protect myself. Relating on a feeling level doesn't mean that I become an emotional exhibitionist with no regard for what is appropriate in a given circumstance. It does mean that although I cannot relate to everyone on a deep, meaningful level, I can let you know my true feelings, even if we just discuss the weather. What I love about this, there's a whole bunch of really important parts of this. But what I really love about this is it really talks about that part of us that put on the facade to try to keep it all together. And that's the piece that we're learning how to let go of control. Because if we have an underlying belief that we are indeed responsible for everyone else and that if we let it all fall apart, it will be our fault. Well, why are we holding ourselves back from potential growth and their potential growth? Why do we think we have to adjust ourselves for their comfort? We're willing to be uncomfortable so that they're not uncomfortable. And I think about this a lot in terms of how she said that sometimes the price is too much to pay, that we have spouses or children or family members that have this expectation of us to be okay, to be the one that's holding on the facade, the one that's holding it all together. And we're denying ourselves the ability to be in our bodies and in our lives, in the wholeness of who we are. And the wholeness of who we are does not mean that it's fine all the time. The wholeness of who we are means that we actually touch in with our feelings, that we have access to our full selves. And this uncovering that she's discussing about how it took time to be able to slowly, slowly, slowly unveil that true self really is because we don't know who it is in the first place. We're just discovering who that is because we're always in evolution. We're always changing, we're always growing. But this part of us that is trying to protect and save the others from the consequences of drinking or from our own discomfort so that we don't want them to be uncomfortable. Maybe you're in a depression, maybe you're having a hard time. You have the right to be in a place in your life where it's hard right now. And you have the right to the feelings that those are. It doesn't mean that we lay them all over everybody else, expecting people to jump through a million hoops to fix us, but it means that we can actually be in touch with who we are and how we feel. And when we do that, this concept of growth, I love that she really hits on this concept of growth because we are in a place where we are opening ourselves up to our own personal growth. It is through complexity, it is through challenge, it is through sometimes hardship that we have the most potential to learn about ourselves and the strength and the wholeness that we are, our ability to let go of these old beliefs and patterns. And it is actually a place where others in our lives are also being given an opportunity to learn through those experiences and even the experience of how to handle or deal with us. It also brings to mind this concept of when we are on the spiritual journey that we are changing and shifting. And sometimes that means that what was once comfortable and seemed normal or we related to, we begin to feel differently about. And it's not a judgment of someone being right or wrong or good or bad. It's really around if you felt like the chaos in your life, she says in the beginning, she says, I it was so, it was so a certain way that she convinced herself that it was normal, that a nice family like ours couldn't have something so unnice as an alcoholic situation when that was really what was going on. Because so much of the time we're just in something so much that we don't even recognize what it feels like, or we don't name it for what it is. But once we start to open our eyes and have some level of awareness and higher consciousness, and we begin to look at the situations and circumstances and people in our lives from this compassionate, soul-recovered place where we're seeing it without all the judgment, with all the blame, we can begin to actually recognize that these don't match with who we feel comfortable with or what makes sense to us. And again, it's not about somebody being better or worse than somebody else. It's really about you being conscious and aware of what feels right to you. And many of us have denied our feelings because if we had really touched in and been honest with ourselves, we would know that that didn't feel good. And how strange it's been that we're willing to not feel good for somebody else to feel better, but we're not actually touching into us for how we actually feel. We're just telling you what we think. I also really love that she touched in on the part that said, I may be uncomfortable the first time or a hundred times. I think we have this belief somewhere that it's not supposed to be hard or it's not supposed to be awkward, or it should be easy instead of recognizing that sometimes we're going to be in situations that are challenging. And we don't have to make it comfortable or easy for everyone else. And we can stand in discomfort and unease in ourselves for a minute, for a while, without having to um use old systems or to abandon ourselves. She also talks about how you don't go around just sharing yourself with everybody. And those protections can come as healthy boundaries instead of as rigid controlling ways of being. It's absolutely important and necessary for you to take care of yourself. Absolutely necessary and important for you to recognize who you can have these conversations with, who is safe to really be vulnerable and open. But when you're able to share with anybody your true authentic self without the heavy protection layer up, but with a clear understanding of who they are, where they're at, you never have to hide. This is about the courage to be your true self. She says, My obligation to be myself. What if you don't know what that self is? What if you're in a situation where you're just beginning to open up and realize that you've been taking care of everybody else for so long, that it's been so complex for so long that you actually don't know what you think, what you want, what makes you tick, what makes you light up. Well, this is exciting. This is actually good news instead of bad news. This really means that you're on a precipice of self-discovery, that you have this opening, this clean slate, if you want to say, that you can begin to be curious and notice what feels good. You can begin to have a um almost like a childlike experience of noticing what makes you feel giddy inside or what doesn't. And you know, it changes over time. It's okay if something that you loved before, something that you thought was so much fun before stops being that same level of fun. This is about us beginning to be curious in each season of our life about what excites us, what makes us happy. I have this beautiful art studio in my backyard that is now my podcast and coaching studio. It's a little she shed. And it was originally because I was an artist and I was trying to do my art on the kitchen table, and we built this as originally as a storage unit, and then I stood in here one day and said, Oh my gosh, like I could put my stuff in here. And for a lot of years, I did a lot of art in this space, and I am so grateful for that. And then it was time to do soul recovery and the recovery soul podcast, and it became my workspace. Well, as time has gone on, I'm finding that I'm looking around the room and I'm saying, I miss my art. I miss being able to do this creative outlet. I actually really miss making music too and writing songs. And those pieces were on the back burner for a little bit because I was putting recover your soul and spirituality and studying and becoming a metaphysical minister and all of those pieces into it. And now I'm in a place where I can begin to re-incorporate things, but I bet it's gonna look different. I bet that it's gonna look different than what it did before. And it's the same in terms of even the friends that you have. Maybe you have a friend group that you used to totally resonate with. And now as you start this journey of more personal responsibility, stopping complaining so much about everything and really taking your life into your own hands and being curious about different things and different topics, you're finding that you don't just quite meet up with those people in the same way that you did before. This is totally normal. And there's no judgment about those people and what those relationships are. This is about you attending to yourself, to be more aware, to have an obligation to be yourself instead of to fit into some mold that maybe fit in the past but doesn't any longer. She also mentions about not sharing your dreams with people who can't hold that space for you. And more and more you start to recognize that you don't need outside resources to validate what's going on with you on the inside. And I think the same is true on your spiritual journey, that for many of us, we're thinking about things that maybe we had never thought of before in ways that we hadn't thought of before. And it may not exactly fit into the conversations or the people that you've spent a lot of time with that feel comfortable. Those are your own private ways of being. And when you begin to ask the universe to bring you like-minded people, they will show up. And that's why going to Al-Anon is such a fabulous or AA or other groups is such a fabulous way to connect with others because you're already connecting to people who are interested and curious about a new way of thinking, a new way of being. And that's how we create some of the greatest relationships and greatest friends. So this obligation to be yourself is important because if we get to the end of our days and we haven't fully stepped into who our soul was brought here to be, we will be remiss in missing those opportunities to truly thrive. But there isn't some big push that says you have to be something huge, or you have to be famous, or you have to have done some enormous thing or saved a million people. It's really about being in your own skin, fully, fully in your own skin and loving yourself through all of it, through the darkness and the light, through the shadow, through all the pieces of yourself. And whatever tickles you, whatever brings you joy to do more of that. And when you feel obligated or in a should, it's okay to say no. It's about being true to who you are and figuring out what lights you up, the obligation to be yourself. 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.