Put the FUN Back in Your Life!



“I spend too much time
thinking and doing,
I need fun, fun, fun
in my life
and I need life, life, life
in my fun.”
The Drums, I Need Fun in My Life

The average codependent is seriously lacking fun in his life, much less life in his fun. Even if we’ve been in recovery for a while we can find ourselves still spending way too much time thinking and doing serious stuff that has nothing to do with our lives.

After all, our lives revolved around everyone else’s life for so long. All of our focus was on the lives and problems of everyone we encountered. We searched-out drama everywhere, and when we couldn’t find any drama to fix in someone else’s life, we worked hard to create as much chaos as it took to keep us from facing ourselves and living our own lives.

Where’s the fun in focusing on drama or creating chaos? Where’s the fun in focusing on everyone else’s problems 24/7? Where’s the fun in our futile attempts to fix everyone by falsely owning all of their problems? There is NONE.

Recovery teaches us to take our focus off the lives of others and to place our eyes solely on ourselves. We learn to own our lives and to work at fixing our own problems. Part of the effort includes learning to take time for rest and FUN.

We all need to have fun in our lives. We need to take time for ourselves. We also need to learn to build relationships that revolve around mutual interests and not mutual misery. In recovery we learn to make friends with people who like the same things we do. Then we take time to have fun. We go out to Italian restaurants with friends who like Italian food—and we relax and enjoy every bite. We go to movies we like with friends who have the same taste in movies. We go to amusement parks with friends who like to ride rollercoasters the same way we do. Or we go to concerts or museums or hiking with friends who like to do those same things—and we have FUN.

Recovery is focused on rescuing ourselves from all of the drama and chaos we have created and learning to love OUR lives. So take the time to put the fun back into your life—and the life back into your fun!

(The Drums are an American pop-rock band.)

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