Stage 8    REMEMBERING YOURSELF  

Affirmation:  I will consider myself to be as important as everyone else.

In the previous stages, you have been working hard to understand your personal history.  In this stage, you add specificity to these insights by recalling particular relationships in your life that have become unbalanced.  Relationships become unbalanced when your needs and wants are disregarded by you and those you love.  Making others more important than ourselves is an epidemic in the female community.  Our culture expects us to be willing to to live a life of self-deferment.  Worst of all, we expect it of ourselves.  This prolonged self-deferment causes us to become lost.  It is hard for others to respect a lost-self and it is difficult for a lost-self to truly love.  So little is accomplished.  After you have worked through this stage, you will have drastically changed the way you perceive power.  You will use it more appropriately, for example, for self-determination rather than self-destruction.

Presentation based on Codependency and the Socialization of Women, by Ann Mody Lewis, Ph.D., Copyright 1996