Happiness is Something We Cultivate and Share

Who makes you happy? In reality, no one can make you happy. People in your life can enhance your happiness through sharing your interests. Or they can add to your frustrations by pushing your buttons. But no one can be responsible for your happiness or your misery—aside from you.

One of the biggest problems for codependents is that we too often enter relationships looking for everlasting happiness. We expect that the person we choose to attach our dreams to should be responsible for making us happy. In our minds, we fantasize that he/she will be focused solely on us, will spend every waking hour with us and will do everything in his/her power to insure that we are as happy as we can possibly be. In other words, we assume this person will meet all of our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual needs in the same way that we plan to meet all of his/her needs. In our little dream world we will smother each other with attention and we will both drip with the honey of happiness. Right? Maybe in a parallel universe on Planet Gaga-Googoo!

Companionship is an essential ingredient for a happy life. But another person can’t be the primary source of our happiness. When we expect another person to meet our every need for happiness, or to fill up our empty spaces, we place a tremendous burden on him/her that no person can successfully manage. Nobody can be at our beck and call 24 hours a day and they certainly can’t possibly do or say all of the right things at all times to keep us happy. We will never find someone who is going to want everything we want, believe everything we believe, or accept everything we may want to dump on him or her. The very pursuit of this fantasy is pure insanity.

Tragically, we may even know that it’s insanity, and yet that hasn’t kept some of us from continually pursuing our personal happiness and fulfillment through another person. We understand that no one can make us happy and yet we are still searching for that right person who will make us happy. Every new encounter breeds hope—hope that our insane thinking will somehow become rational—and that someone will indeed become fully responsible for making us happy.

An even greater flaw in this way of thinking is that fact that we give away all our power to be happy. When we attempt to make another person responsible for our happiness, we are at the mercy of that person. We will be happy if this person works hard to make us happy, but we will also be miserable if this person fails to make us happy. Once we give our power away to another person, we make ourselves into victims. And if this person chooses to abandon us, we are left wallowing in a mess of our own making.

If you are looking for someone to make you happy, you are looking for someone to rescue you. Rescue yourself. Choose to be happy in and of yourself. Look inside and decide you’re worth loving. Start befriending yourself. Find happiness in the little things you enjoy doing and in the simple joys that surround you every day. Seek out people who share your interests and share your passions with them. There’s a big difference between sharing with others and attaching to others. We share what we love with others and happiness becomes a byproduct of our sharing. That’s very different from attaching to others and expecting to suck happiness out of them. Sharing is life-giving. Attaching is life-draining. Choose to be life-giving in your relationships and you will discover that happiness is available to you at all times.