Own Your Life and Allow Others to Own Their Lives

It’s pretty foreign for an active (non-recovering) codependent to focus on their own personal problems. Active codependents have been trained to focus outside of themselves. So an active codependent often lives to solve the problems of other people. In this way active codependents live vicariously through the lives of others. It’s how they (the codependent) avoid taking responsibility for living their own lives.

Typically, if someone, say a friend, comes to an active codependent with problems, the codependent will immediately feel the need to “own” their friend’s issues. And they (the codependent) will do just that. He or she will take on their friend's problems as if they were his or hers to solve.

For example, a friend comes to you with money problems. He’s completely overextended himself financially and he’s in a panic. He can’t pay his mortgage this month, he’s in arrears on his credit card payments, his utilities have been cut-off and he’s now being hounded by collection agencies. Physically, this friend is 46 years old, but emotionally, he’s 12. And so he expects that you should rescue him.

As an active codependent, you are already miles ahead of your friend. Two solutions have immediately occurred to you: 1) you can loan him money (actually give him money, because you will never see it again); or 2) you can go to his creditors and attempt to fix his problems for him. If you are truly a codependent maniac, you will offer to do one or the other or both. You will “own” his financial problems and work your hardest to rescue your friend, who is actually just like you in that he doesn’t want to be responsible for his own life either. He wants you to be his “mommy” or “daddy” and you are all too happy to oblige.

A recovering codependent, on the other hand, will handle this situation much differently. First, the recovering person will have learned to take responsibility for his/her own life. He/she will focus on his/her own problems. This means he/she will “own” his/her problems and no one else’s anymore. The recovering codependent knows that they can fix their issues, with the help of their Higher Power, but that they can’t fix anyone else’s issues.

When the friend with financial problems approaches the recovering codependent, the recovering person will listen and empathize with their friend. He/she will validate his/her friend’s situation, but he/she will not feel compelled to “own” it or try and solve it. The recovering person will not volunteer to rescue their friend. And he/she will not allow their friend to coerce him/her through shame or guilt. The recovering codependent will stand their ground, understanding that their friend is coming from an infantile mentality. In their childlike mind, this friend expects that someone should still play “mommy” or “daddy” and save them from having to take responsibility for their behavior.

The recovering codependent knows that to rescue a friend in this way is to enable that friend to stay stuck in his emotional disease. Saving the friend allows the friend to emotionally remain a 12 year old. In our society, 12 year old persons are rarely considered culpable for their behavior. If people continue to rescue this person, he will never grow up and he will never learn to be responsible for his own mistakes.

In either situation, whether you are an active codependent or a recovering one, you will most likely lose this friendship, or the friendship will be changed. Sooner or later, an active codependent realizes that they can’t solve their friend’s problem. By the time they realize this, however, they are often angry because they have lent money to this friend and the friend has no intentions of paying it back, or because they have wasted so much time owning their friend’s problems that their (the codependent’s) life has become completely unmanageable. We can only avoid our own issues for so long before they catch up with us. Either way, the codependent will end up angry and resentful.

If we set boundaries with our friend, and he isn’t willing to accept them, then he will become angry with us. He will feel abandoned by us, even though he is the one who has actually abandoned himself by refusing to own his life and issues. He will become resentful and will likely cut us off, labeling us as a bad person and friend. We might be hurt by this initially, but the loss of this “friendship” is really to our benefit. Any person who isn’t capable of accepting responsibility for his/her own behavior, isn’t capable of being a true friend either. We have to be willing to detach with love from those people who aren’t willing to help themselves if we are to succeed in becoming fully healthy people ourselves.

Accept responsibility for your life and problems and allow others to do the same. You will then attract healthy people into your life—people who own their own problems and allow you to do the same—and your soul will truly shine!