Melody Beattie is an American author who has written self-help books for adults and older people. She is one of the most loved self-help authors in the world today. While it may seem that Melody was always a righteous person who would never do anything wrong, this sentence does not hold much truth. Actually, Melody was a heavy drinker, an alcoholic and a drug pusher as a minor. This is precisely because Melody survived sexual abuse, kidnapping and abandonment very early in her life. And such difficult traumas she curbed to understand what people might go through.
But Melody was determined to get out of the abuse she suffered from the help of her own mind. She took medical help for her addiction but got out of depression all by herself. Melody coined the word codependency, and she was passionate about this subject. She taught the world a lot about codependency, and even after her son's death, she gave more wisdom to the world by teaching the world about grief. Below are some of the famous Melody Beattie Quotes.
...the plan will happen in spite of us, not because of us.
Melody is a person who believes in fate and destiny. She thinks whatever is meant to happen will happen. We are a small part of the puzzle, and even if we fail to do our part, someone else will, and whatever is meant to happen will eventually happen with or without us.
You don't blast a heart open," she said. "You coax and nurture it open, like the sun does to a rose.
The human heart contains many feelings, which may be strong at times, but they are to be treated softly. You never force a heart to feel a certain way or change in a certain way but nurture it and make it understandable for necessary changes required.
The lesson I was learning involved the idea that I could feel compassion for people without acting on it.
Melody is a self-help coach, and because of her job, she had to learn human emotions quite keenly. She had to learn what is compassion in a way that she can help people with her knowledge, but she does not have to become fragile listening to people's suffering.
Beliefs create reality.
Each person is a whole universe in himself. Our beliefs shape and form our individual universe. And our reality is created thereafter. Each person has his/her own subjective reality corresponding to his/her own beliefs.
Taking care of myself is a big job. No wonder I avoided it for so long.
Self-care is important for every human being. Everyone must take care care of his/her mental well being. However, self-care is not that easy. A person may often fight a plethora of negative emotions, and taking care of oneself becomes a challenge, and that is why people keep avoiding self-care. But no matter how difficult, we must take care of ourselves.
Continue reading some more Melody Beattie Quotes...
I saw people who were hostile; they had felt so much hurt that hostility was their only defence against being crushed again.
In the formative years of their lives, people build their belief system and nature. Whatever a child observes, a child does. It is seen many times that a person who is bullied by his parents or other people turns out to be a bully. A child of an angry person turns out to be angry as well. The negative trait a person observes becomes his only defence against anything negative or anything threatening.
Worrying, obsessing, and controlling are illusions. They are tricks we play on ourselves.
While some human qualities take the best of us, some can be prevented by applying our minds. If we worry, obsess or behave controlling it is only us who are fooled by ourselves. These three emotions can be controlled if we begin to think rationally.
The formula is simple: In any given situation, detach and ask, "What do I need to do to take care of myself?
A third-person perspective often solves most of the human problems. We tend to give good advice, but we rarely apply this advice to ourselves. So the best solution to get out of anything is looking at the problem from third person perspective and asking ourselves, how do I take care of me from or during this situation?
Codependents: don't trust themselves. don't trust their feelings. don't trust their decisions. don't trust other people. try to trust untrustworthy people.
A person be it a spouse, parent or a child must be independent. People are supposed to be independent. Even if we keenly observe nature, we can see that higher or lower kingdom animals leave their child after a few years. Same is the case when it comes to humans. But humans have become co-dependent. And such individuals are weak who aren't sure of their feelings, decisions, worth.
Taking time to rest, renew, and refresh yourself isn't wasted time. Recharge. Choose what energizes you.
It is a conceived notion of the world that we must work day and night and take little to no rest. But in real life, this kind of work exhausts our body and mind. It is famously said that a woodcutter must take time to sharpen his axe. We can say sharpening our axe is resting. So we must rest when needed because sharpening our axe actually helps us do our work efficiently.
Few more Melody Beattie Quotes...
Do we really have the right to take care of ourselves? Do we really have the right to set boundaries? Do we really have the right to be direct and say what we need to say? You bet we do.
Rules and laws of the world often confuse us. Sometimes when we take a stand for ourselves, we begin to doubt ourselves if we did the right thing. But Melody assures us that taking care of ourselves, keeping our opinion and taking a stand for ourselves is our right. And we must always exercise this power.
For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
God has given us great qualities. And though the devil may sometimes confuse us with his lusty and bad qualities, we must remember that God has given us love, a stable mind and power.
As I've said before, no wonder we think God has abandoned us; we've abandoned ourselves.
Sometimes things don't quite go as we want them too. In moments such as these, we begin questioning the grace of God. We question the existence of the almighty. But Melody says that when things don't go right God hasn't really abandoned us, but we instead have abandoned him.
Self-care isn't selfish; it's self-esteem.
Melody has often stressed over self-care throughout her teachings. Our mental and physical well being is very important, and we must take care of ourselves. When we don't take care of ourselves, our self-esteem goes down. At the same time, the vice-versa is also true. So to build good self-esteem, we must take care of ourselves.
We work it out, or live it out.
Human lives are very difficult. Whether we win or lose, we face difficulties. If we procrastinate, our failure is difficult to face and when we work hard the process of working hard is quite difficult. But either way, life is difficult, we have to choose which kind of difficulty we want to face.
Some more Melody Beattie Quotes...
We do not lead others into the Light by stepping into the darkness with them.
Sometimes we want to help people, but we do not understand how to help them. We put ourselves in negative emotions to help the other person do both parties no good. But we must understand that a person can only be helped if he positively deals with his negative emotions.
Recovery is not about being right; it's about allowing ourselves to be who we are and accepting others as they are.
People are often drawn to become the perfect version of themselves. But the truth is that the perfect version of ourselves does not exist. When we are healing from a problem, we must understand that we cannot be the ultimate right at anything, but we must try to be the best version of ourselves.
The only person you can now or ever change is yourself. The only person that it is your business to control is yourself.
Many people speak a thousand words and advise everyone they meet, but we truly do not have power over anyone or anything but ourselves. We cannot change other people, but we can change ourselves the way we want. All in our control is our body and senses and no one else's.
Others do not have our magic. We have our magic. It is in us.
We expect too much from other people. We many times think that the key to our happiness is in someone else's hand, but the truth only we hold the key to our happiness and joy. Other people do not have any power over us, but we do.
