Are Codependency and Fear Running Your Life? How to Recognize the Loop, Release It, and Rewrite What's True

Download the free Recover Your Soul 9-Step Mini Workbook and begin your healing today.

Something unexpected happened when I sat down to go through old photos in preparation for my upcoming book Recover Your Soul: A Spiritual Journey, Healing from Addiction, Codependency, and People Pleasing (releasing April 13th, 2026) — I saw the Recover Your Soul process is healing the old wounds and allowing me to rewrite my story.

In this episode I take you deep into what it means to finally recognize the fear loop that runs quietly underneath even your best moments, and that old operating system built from codependency, people pleasing, and limiting beliefs you absorbed long before you had the tools to question them no longer aligns with who you are becoming. You can update your belief systems and rewrite your story that embodies your wholenes.

Whether you are healing from codependency, recovering from addiction, breaking free from people pleasing, navigating Al-Anon, or simply tired of living from old belief systems that were never even true, this episode is your invitation to rewrite your story from your soul's hero's journey. 

The Recover Your Soul Spiritual Memoir will be available on Amazon April 13th!!!! Join me in person for the book launch on Friday the 17th and the weekend transformational retreat the 18th and 19th in Colorado. Lean more about everything on the website. 

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.

Transcript

The Hidden Loop Under Life

Rev Rachel Harrison 1:07

I was recently going through family photographs, and what I recognized is that the pictures actually tell a beautiful story about our lives. But I had a different story underneath. It was that constant loop that had gone through my experiences that were around being unhappy, around my constant vigilance of everybody else needing to be okay for me to be okay. And so it's interesting to look at our lives and recognize that we all have a loop underneath that tells the story. What if those beliefs and stories and patterns that we lived from in the past no longer serve you? What if they do not align with who you are becoming? And as we heal, as we recognize the value of every single situation that we have been through in our lives and we see them as challenges and as learning experiences, then we can go back and allow ourselves to heal and look at those past experiences in a completely different light. We're rewriting our story. It's step six in the recover your soul process, updating your beliefs, patterns, and rewriting your story. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcasting 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 inner change and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recovery Soul Podcast. It's Rev Rachel. Thank you so much for being here with me today. We are on this journey of soul exploration. We're on this journey of healing and awakening, and we're on this journey of learning how to let go of control, letting go of the world on the outside that we've been trying to fix and manage and control, to have some sort of inner peace, thinking that if we can have it be better on the outside, then clearly it'll be okay on the inside. And the more that I step into this incredible opportunity for our souls, for our bodies, for our own personal experience to be more aligned, to be more clear, to be more whole, to remember our wholeness. I feel like the layers are uncovering. And at the same time, sometimes it feels like there's so much to talk about, and there's so much that I want to share with you. And today's episode is around rewriting your story, which is part of step six in the recovery soul process, which reads: embrace new beliefs and rewrite your story. Update your mindset, step into new beliefs and patterns that align with your higher self and expanded perception. Acknowledge your unique gifts, assets, and strengths as you rewrite your personal story from a foundation of truth and love. And the reason why I want to talk about this is in preparation for the launch of the Recover Your Soul book, A Spiritual Journey Healing from Addiction, Codependency, and People Pleasing, which will be released April 13th, 2026. Yesterday I spent half of the day going through old photos because on the resource page for the book, in addition to having different episodes that will line up with the chapters, so you can have a little more detail of episodes that might have gone into stories or that help support the step that particular chapter is sharing my journey of healing and awakening through the work on that step. I wanted to also have a collage or a gallery of photos from our own life so that you could look and see where things were in my life during all of this wild ride, which again, my story is not my story, it's really our story. We all have been through this journey of recognizing our own incredible transformational experience of being alive. And when you go back and look at pictures, one of the things that I have said before that I was really impressed upon looking at this time is pictures tell one story. They tell a oftentimes a curated story because we've all learned how to smile in pictures. But sometimes there'll be candid pictures that people take that might have more truth to what's happening. And then in my journals, there's a whole other story. And if you look purely at one or purely at the other, you're not getting a whole picture of more balanced and truth of sort of what was. What we're recognizing in the psychology and the spiritual journey is how much our mind makes decisions and projects onto the experiences based on what's in our mind. And to recover your soul, we're learning how to have more clarity and awareness around the belief systems, the operating systems that are often in our subconscious that are projecting our beliefs and our thoughts and our feelings onto our life. And if those are from woundedness or from trauma or from pain or from fear, they're going to be repeating and accentuating those feelings. And it only makes sense that that's the case. And what I hope that you get out of what I've learned for myself and what I hope that you're getting for yourself is we're not judging it as bad. This isn't saying that you're doing something wrong. As a matter of fact, we're taking there's something wrong with me out, and we're saying there's nothing wrong with me. As a matter of fact, I'm whole and beautiful and amazing in my just being. I am one with all that is in the universe. And my being here is special and unique and important. And in that, I came in with a brain and with potentially previous karma or things to learn that set up a way that I created operating system, a way that I see the world. And through that, we're always checking, we're always checking and we're using the past as reference of where we are today in hopes that we can make the future safer, better, something, right? And so going back and looking at these pictures to try to find the pictures out of thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures is really interesting because, first of all, digitally, there's only pictures starting at a certain time, whatever it was in the early 2000s. Everything before that are in photo albums in the house. I'm not trying to give you a photo album of my life in terms of like, hey, look at me, look at my family, look at my life. What I'm wanting to do is to depict specific pictures, specific elements that do give you reference if you're interested in looking at pictures of my life, of the stories that are in the book. But more than that, it's an example of us, right? We were all young. We all had ideals. We all had some level of trauma and experience and growing up that set up systems of how we thought we fit into the family or how we fit into the world. We all had those weird years in elementary school and middle school and high school that had both really wonderful, powerful connective stories with friends and also places where we became very, very clear about how we needed to survive without understanding the layer of belief system that it was creating. And a lot of things that weren't true. A lot of things that people said, maybe in passing, or that our parents said to us in just the repetitive, this is how you do the things. These are the rules. They're giving you the rules that created scars, these essences on our soul that kind of scar our well-being. So we all had those. And then most of us had a part of youth where you were wild and had the freedom to be and do whichever you thought. And then you thought that you were supposed to do a certain thing. And then a lot of us found partners at that time and then had children, and then you're raising the kids, and you think you're so grown up, you think you're so responsible, you think you're so mature. And the truth is you're just starting to figure out who you are and how to raise a family. And then it gets tough. Almost everybody I know raising a family is this idealized experience, and there's a lot that goes into it. You're caring for someone else's well-being, you're trying to do the best that you can with what you know, which oftentimes is limited. You have a lot of different circumstances, such as financial resources, such as family resources, jobs. And in the midst of it, you're trying to do the best for your kids. And at the same time, you don't know who you are. You're still just trying to figure that out. And they're figuring themselves out. They're in the space of themselves growing and learning and gathering up their belief systems. It's so fascinating how all of it works. And then they become their own people, and then you have the part of having to let go of them and those situations. And then we often have the complexities of job and relationship, and we're in this challenge of life, this wild ride of our existence. And so when I look at the pictures, there's so much that's amazing. I mean, going back and looking at those pictures from this more healed state that I have, one of the things that I think is really interesting is if I wasn't referencing the book, which is the healing process that I went through of being massively depressed, massively codependent, um, level nine anxiety, drinking myself to death and alcoholism, having kids who are really struggling, a marriage that was really struggling. Those things were happening. Those were things that were absolutely happening. There's no doubt that those things were happening. But there was also life that was happening that was really beautiful and wonderful. And one of the things that really hit me yesterday as I was in this process of looking at all these pictures was how it's happening at the same time. It's happening right next to each other because the feelings that we're having inside are uniquely ours. And when I'm talking about this with Rich, what's really fascinating, interesting, he's in the middle of reading the book for the first time. And I'm asking him, does this book relate the story? You know, I don't want to be relating a story that is not the story that feels true to you. And he says, No, absolutely. It is you're telling the story. There's nothing in it that I'm thinking that didn't happen, or I didn't think it was like that. And he said, But I can see how clearly I didn't see how really um unmet your needs were. And he said, I just I couldn't see it at the time, whether it was addiction, whether it was in his drinking, or whether it's just in the way that his systems are. And so we've been talking about that in a very healthy and interesting way around how we each have our different views. For him, his baseline of what family looked like, or what maybe uncomfortable or discomfort in kids and interactions was a very different baseline than my baseline. And because those were so different, then that was a lot of the upset, which was around him not really seeing the problem in some of the chaos. And because I had been raised with no chaos, any chaos was too much chaos. So there wasn't enough of a balance. But what I was really coming from was this place within myself that has to give myself forgiveness for the fact that inside of me there was pain. Inside of me, I didn't know how to handle it. Inside of me, I was running from systems that didn't work, but I didn't have another system yet. And I was still trying to escape discomfort on such a heavy level that I didn't understand that my need to have that change was creating control that was actually making it worse, and that it was creating these people-pleasing, codependent behaviors that were causing me suffering. But when I look at the pictures, what I see is I see a really magnificent life with two beautiful kids and a husband who cared and supported our family. And when you look at sort of the wildness of our experience with these pictures of kids jumping off the roof onto the trampoline and playing in the backyard and having friends and making up stories and all of the board adventure sports that we had from the snow to skateboarding to surfing and the trips that we went on when we had no money, you know, and you wonder how we got so much debt in our life was because we created a life that we wanted to share with the kids. And so that included gathering up a lot of debt and why we had to refinance the house and you know, things that were really painful. But at the same time, those challenges or those choices that we made that sometimes felt heavy and the arguments that Rich and I used to have over money. I used to argue that we might be going into debt, but we were we were creating a life that we wanted. And if I look back at those pictures, it feels worth it that we had to do that. And so when I was picking these specific pictures to put onto the website, what I thought was really interesting was I was living step six in recover your soul, which is that I could feel the rewriting of the story, which is there was much less of the looking at the pictures and saying, yeah, but underneath this is what was actually happening. Yeah, but this is how I felt. Yeah, but this was the pain that I was experiencing. And it was more of a celebration and a witnessing and a recognition of a pretty incredible life together and the preciousness of our time, which I think we take for granted when we're younger. And that there's a catch that it might be that you could go back and spend some time being sad about or having regret. And I think grief is really important to give yourself permission to grieve and to feel your feelings. You know, I'm always talking about allowing yourself to really feel the feelings. But what I witnessed and recognized was the gratitude that I had in the release that is slowly, slowly happening in this process of recover your soul or whatever spiritual process you're on, or whatever life review process you're on. I'm never saying recover your soul is the one and only, because it isn't. There are so many amazing, beautiful ways for you to really touch into yourself. But we have a choice at each moment. I recently gave a talk at Denver Unity Spiritual Center, and one of the stories that I told was that in 2001 uh was Alex's fifth birthday. And I woke up early and I was icing cupcakes in preparation to bring them to his kindergarten class, and I turned on the Today show, and I witnessed the second airplane hitting the Twin Towers because his birthday is 9-11. It was a really powerful day in terms of knowing that something really big was happening, something impactful was happening. But not only was it Alex's birthday, but Bodhi was only two. And so it was a choice that had to be made. And I think specifically because it was Alex's birthday over the fact of protecting my two-year-old about not having the television on. And so I didn't see in live time all of that live footage of everything that was happening that was incredibly traumatic and difficult on that day. And we had to have our birthday. We went and did his party at school. We did our party in the evening with family. And although all these things were happening, there was a conscious decision to have our lives still be around love and celebration. And that's an example of something that we do every single day in terms of holding space for this and that, for this and that, for the painful and the amazing. And that the more that I look back and do this life review for myself and release the energy that is around wanting to hold on to the pain, wanting somehow feeling like if I let it go, it'll mean it didn't happen. And as Rich is reading the book, he is reflecting from it from his angle. And I can want him to maybe have this book really share with him on a deeper level my side, right? Like some part of me might really want him to see me. And he might and he might not, but it doesn't matter because our journey of healing comes from us seeing us, but not from a victim. This terrible things happened to me. This was the awful things. You won't read that in the recover your soul book. I talk about our life, I talk about the difficulties we were having, I talk about what was happening in my marriage, I talk about the complexity of my relationship with my husband and with his oldest son, and how Bodhi got caught in the middle. And I talk about all of it, but not from a place where every single detail gets drawn out. And as I've talked about before, like drug through the mud, because that's not fair to anybody. And the most important person it's not fair to is me. Because when I look at my life, I get to choose. I get to choose how I'm gonna engage in it, and not in a spiritual bypassing mode, because that doesn't work either. It will come and hit you. Life will continue to bring you opportunities to heal and see the parts that are ready to be released and let go. That's the journey of the soul. The soul came here to have this experience in body to learn and grow and expand in its own unique and special journey. When we do this reflection and we rewrite the story and re-reopen to these new belief systems, the I am enough belief system, the I am worthy belief system, the I am valuable belief system, the I can do it, that I don't have to take care of everyone else. I'm not responsible for everyone else's feelings, that I can turn the attention to myself, not in selfishness, but in a really sovereign state. It allows us to look at the past in a way where you can, and this is the power of making amends, right? And this is actually in step five of Recover Your Soul, which is releasing the patterns that no longer serve you. And it says, cultivate awareness and insight. Use your growing awareness to gain insight into your old patterns and beliefs and recognize what you learned from them. And then it says, practice compassion and forgiveness, release these patterns through awareness, compassion, and forgiveness, both towards yourself and others so that you can make space for healing, peace, and new ways of being. Looking at our life from a more awakened perception allows us to actually see more truthfully what was, not only for ourselves, but for every everybody in the circle. Everybody in the circle. And everybody in the circle has their own unique view, which they are entitled to each of their unique views, even if you don't like or get or appreciate their unique view. This is where acceptance as a path to peace, which is our theme for this year, comes in. If we accept it, we're going to be letting go of the resistance. If you can accept where somebody was, it doesn't mean that you're validating as what those interactions were as being quote unquote okay, but we take the sting out of the part of us that is holding on to it as if that validates our pain. You can validate your pain. So as I look at these pictures, and I was curious about how when I was putting them on the website, it has a place for a description. And originally I put in a description that was like Rich and Rachel in 1992 when we first met or something. And then I started adding to the descriptions, and as the story got to the place where it got really Painful, I caught myself wanting to say the pain story. This is right before this happened, right before we separated, or this is when Alex was having a really hard time. And I had to ask myself why I wanted to put that in the description. Because those were true in one of those realities. And in the other reality, what I'm showing you is a picture of people who were doing okay in that moment, who are smiling in that moment. In a moment that was actually joyful. And inside of me, there was some undercurrent stuff going on. We all have undercurrent stuff going on all the time. And when we start doing this work more deeply, this spiritual work, and what I think is so important is that if we can give ourselves awareness that this work that we're doing right now is so much bigger than what it seems, because we can think it's so selfish to spend all this time on me, right? Sometimes I think that I'm like, man, girl, you are spending a lot of time on your own psyche. And then I work with people who are working on their own psyche and the guidance that comes through and says, yes, because as you work on your psyche, you're actually working on the collective consciousness. That as you release and let go of patterns that are rigid and old and were handed down to you, it is actually part of the collective oneness of everyone that is holding on to fear at the base. And if I look at that undercurrent in my psyche that was underneath the smiles in the pictures and the genuinely great times that we were having, that was me running fear in my background. It's like there was a fear loop that was limiting beliefs and old stories and not enoughness, and it's your job to make sure everyone's okay, and a lack of safety and a fear of rejection, all these interesting loops. And when we start to awaken, we start to change our perception, the gratitude that you can have for being able to see, first of all, that you're in a loop. Awareness is the number one starting point. That's step one in recover your soul, ready for awakening. Having awareness about, oh, I'm in a loop, I'm in a thought pattern. My biggest regret in my life is that I wasn't present as much as I wished I was, because I was so caught up in this continued fear loop that was running the undercurrent underneath that there were genuinely beautiful, wonderful things happening. But because of the way that my brain works and the way that my safety systems work and the way my defense mechanisms worked, there was something underneath that was eroding my potential to be present in my life in a way that would have given me value and the ability to just love it for what it was in those moments and not be in control. If we can give ourselves forgiveness and use the of course tool, we can start to have compassion for ourselves and say, of course. Of course, that's how I felt at the time. That's what I knew that was the operating system in which I was living from. But now we're embracing a new belief system. And I've been more present in my, like, this is the moment I'm in in the last couple of years than I was ever in my whole life. I was thinking the other day about how I am very intentional in every moment that I'm in, whether I'm making myself a cup of tea, whether I'm getting ready for bed, whether I'm here in the in the studio podcasting or editing or emailing, I am I'm as intentional and in the moment as I can be, because that's my number one goal right now is to like be in my body, in my intentional state, being present here and feeling the feelings that I feel in this moment. So that if there's an undercurrent that is a fear undercurrent, I can see it and I can love it and I can witness it and I can say, ah, there's another layer that is ready to be healed, that's revealing to be healed, so that I can come back to embracing my new story, my enoughness. You've got this, you know, all is well. You don't have to pay attention to the whole world. You're not responsible to fix every single person in your life and your whole family or the world as it is at large. And you can radiate and be peaceful by seeing what is, by seeing what is, and starting to see it from a more clear perception. And then when you rewrite the story, it allows you to really honor the journey that you've been on. So I loved looking at all those pictures from this new lens that has so much more healing behind it and could have so much love and compassion for the woman, the young woman. I know some of you know what I'm talking about. Um 56, which is still not that old. And yet you go back and look at pictures of yourself in your 20s, and you think, oh my God, the videos that I watched, oh my goodness, I was laughing so hard at just how young and naive and had no idea who I was. Not a clue in the world to have strength in myself. I was looking to everybody else. I was trying to be so what everybody else wanted me to be, and just love her and just love the young mom that I was and just love the part of me that really had a lot of pain and struggle. And the other thing that happened was as I was looking at the pictures, I had a lot more ability to see rich through a neutral lens and to see the man that he is through a neutral lens instead of through my pain body that I was witnessing him so much in. Because I want to be free of that. And all the spiritual stuff that I listen to talks about the power of forgiveness, and I talk a lot about forgiveness, and I'm just gonna allow us to really hold space around this incredible gift of again, it's not diminishing the experiences that you had because you absolutely had them and they were complicated and often really, really wounding. But we're gonna stop hurting ourselves. We're gonna stop having that story be on repeat, and we're gonna start to rewrite the story from our soul's hero's journey, and we're gonna start to look at the incredible gift of the experience in which we've been through that is bringing us some level of awakening today, whether it's just the ability to not be as reactive, the ability to not control so much, that is success. Small incremental changes change profoundly over time. And what I hope that you get out of the Recovery Your Soul book is a reminder of how powerful our awakening journey can be when it's just normal stuff. My journey is just a woman healing from addiction and finding so much more of who I was, who I want to be, and being curious about my life and my soul and spirituality, and following my passions and trusting my insides and turning within. My journey is your journey, and that's why we're here together. And you know, the podcast has changed over time because I'm changing. If you go back and listen to those first episodes in 2020, I'm a very different essence and person than I am today because we're always changing, all of us are always recreating and changing, and we have so much more strength and so much more power than we give ourselves credit to be in co-creation, to be who we are here to be, and to let our light shine and to be an embodiment of peace because our healing heals the world. So this opportunity to turn within, to go back, do life review, look at those stories, look at those pictures, and celebrate and laugh and see and then be curious. One of the things that I had about myself in my looking at those pictures was I want to live because I lived then. As challenging, as complicated as some of those experiences were, I was in life. And spirituality is not about hiding. Spirituality is about being able to be more present in your body in a more healed and awakened way. And so it just spurred something in me where I thought, I want to live more, I want to make sure that I'm experiencing more. I want to go out and do more things. I want to spend more time with family, more time with friends. I really want to embody and be present in my life because, you know, 10 years from now, I'll look back and say, oh my God, you looked so young and you were doing all these things. I don't want to miss it. I don't want to miss it. And that means that there's going to be challenge. And it means that my heart's going to break. And it means that I'm going to do things and they're going to fail. But I would rather go out failing and going for it than staying small and living from those old belief systems that weren't true. I'm so excited to bring this book to you. And I'm just more grateful every day that you choose to be here with me. And that I hope that something that I say each time touches your heart and reminds you of your wholeness and gives you strength in your journey and reminds you of the tenacity and the courage that it takes to be here. And that you also want to choose to be alive and to live your life fully and holy and awake and from a place of empowerment and to release what does not serve you and to love every shadow that is the part that you have gone through because those challenges have brought you to who you are today. And you're amazing. You're amazing, and your life is worth living, and it's worth living fully and completely. We are recovering our souls. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you for trusting me to be part of your journey to recover your soul and being part of this incredible community. There's so much going on, and I hope that you'll get involved. First, I want to invite you to our free first Monday of every month support group from 6 to 7 p.m. Mount Time on Zoom. This is where we come together in community, meet in small groups, and connect on our Recover Your Soul journey. I'm so excited to announce that on April 13th, the long-awaited Recover Your Soul memoir around my walking the steps that created the Recover Your Soul process and how it profoundly changed my life from codependence, addiction, people-pleasing, an unhappy marriage, an unhappy life to what I am living today, peaceful, happy, and free. I also would love to invite you to join me for the Friday Recover Your Soul bonus podcast, where you get an additional episode taking a deeper dive into this amazing restorative process. You can become a Patreon member or an Apple Podcast subscriber to receive over 200 past episodes and get a new episode every Friday. Free members on Patreon have access to listen to new episodes for the first week. And of course, I'm on social media and I'd love to have you follow Recover Your Soul on Instagram and Facebook and even join the private RecoverYour Soul Facebook community. If you enjoy Rev Rachel's meditations, I encourage you to follow me on InsightTyber for an entire catalog of guided spiritual meditations. All of this, along with ways that you too can work the Recover Your Soul nine-step process to healing and awakening, can be found on the website recoveryoursoul.net. And lastly, thank you for sharing this podcast and community with any friends or family that you think it would support their spiritual journey to healing and awakening. And those five stars and great reviews help us spread the word and increase the algorithm so we can reach even more people. Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.