Whose Life Are You Living?

Living the lives of others is a very codependent trait. I was watching an old John Ford movie last night from 1933 called Pilgrimage. It was about a widow named Hannah living on a farm in Arkansas with her young adult son, Jimmy. World War I is raging across Europe and there’s a war raging inside of Hannah.

Hannah doesn’t know how to live her own life. She isn’t willing to be responsible for herself and her own happiness even though she is actually a very strong person. She’s made Jimmy into her crutch and she’s living vicariously through him. This seems to work fine until Jimmy meets Mary and falls in love with her.

Now Jimmy wants his life back and on his terms. He loves his mother and he has love enough in his heart for her and Mary. Jimmy wants to get married and Hannah is totally opposed. She isn’t willing to release her hostage. Hannah tries everything to keep herself enmeshed in Jimmy. She threatens him, spies on him, goes to Mary and threatens her—and all in the sacred name of doing what’s really best for Jimmy. Ha ha.

When it’s obvious that Jimmy isn’t going to do as she wants, Hannah decides that she’d rather see Jimmy dead than to lose him to Mary. So Hannah goes and enlists Jimmy in the army. Apparently, back at that time, a mother or father could enlist a son if he was under a certain age. So Jimmy goes off to France, leaving behind an unwed and pregnant Mary. And Jimmy never returns. Hannah gets her wish. Jimmy dies before he can officially leave mom for Mary.

Codependency, at its worst, not only destroys relationships, it destroys lives and it kills people. And codependency at its worst often runs in families between mother and son or father and daughter; mother and daughter or father and son.

There are those deeply codependent parents who feel fully justified living vicariously through their children. They long ago decided what’s right and what’s wrong for themselves and thus for their children as well. As young parents they became accustomed to imposing their wills on their children. And as their children grew into young adults, these codependent parents maintained an iron-grip on their children at all costs. Codependent parents are the Hannah’s of the parental world and they believe their children only exist to please them and to ensure their own happiness.

Codependent parents like Hannah have no concept of the fact that their children have a right to their own personal happiness by making their own choices and living their own lives. The Hannah’s of the world think that children who choose their own happiness over mom’s or dad’s are selfish children; and that they deserve every form of punishment for not being willing to please mom or dad.

The Hannah’s of the parental world inflict heavy doses of guilt and shame on their children as a means of enslaving them to mom or dad’s will. Some even go so far as to invoke the Bible and the Fourth Commandment about honoring one’s parents. Well, believe me, it was never God’s intention that parents should be honored in any way other than through unconditional love. And unconditional love has nothing to do with bending over backwards to please people or to do or be what they want.

Unconditional love is God’s love. It knows no boundaries and it clings to no wounds. It never focuses on behavior because it looks beyond behavior into the very soul of the person loved. When we love someone unconditionally we are honestly loving them for who they are—for their uniqueness and for the very beauty of their being. We may or may not love all of their behavior; but even the behavior we don’t love isn’t enough to get in the way of our accepting and loving that person limitlessly. Of course it also means we set proper boundaries with those same persons we love if their behavior is abusive towards us or themselves.

Unfortunately, there are Hannah’s in this world who never grow beyond conditional love. Their concept of love revolves around what you do to please them. If you reach a point where you are no longer willing to please them at all costs, then they no longer love you. I feel great sadness for people like Hannah. They destroy their own lives by not being willing to give themselves the love they need and thus by not being willing to be responsible for their own lives and happiness. And they destroy the lives of everyone they cling to so desperately. In many ways they are like mistletoe clinging to a tree. Sometimes the mistletoe saps all of the life out of the tree in a desperate attempt to keep itself alive. Of course, once the tree is dead, there is no hope for the mistletoe to survive either.

If you are a parent, or anyone for that matter, who is living vicariously and codependently through another person, you need to let go. Give yourself your life back before you emotionally strangle and lose the “Jimmys” in your world. Decide right here and now to be responsible for your own life and allow your “Jimmy” to be responsible for his. If that means calling a therapist, do it. Go online and find out where the nearest CODA or Al-Anon meeting is and get yourself there. Come to understand that no one on earth is responsible for your happiness—not your spouse, not your children, not anyone—but YOU.

Own the life that God has given you. Take your power back and learn to make yourself happy instead of relying—like mistletoe—on others to give you the one and only thing that you can honestly posses yourself: Your life. And in choosing to own that life, and in choosing to help yourself, you will find the inner-love and the real happiness that you were trying to squeeze out of others.