When Dreams Become Nightmares

“God grant me serenity to ACCEPT the things I cannot change…”

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer

Acceptance can be hard for many codependents to swallow. Some of us are so tuned-in to the idea that we can make another person love us; that we can somehow earn love and acceptance. And we are especially adept at falling in love with people who are totally unavailable to us.

At first our efforts at earning love seem to reap rewards. We people-please the other person or we caretake his/her every need; and they respond positively to us. As a result, we begin to dream of spending the rest of our lives with this person and we quickly build a Disney-style fantasy in our heads and hearts.

We invest a great deal of time and effort into getting the love we want from this person of our choosing, but we rarely experience the reciprocal love from them that we so desperately want.

Over time the beautiful dream begins to become a nightmare. We feel our grip on the other person slipping away. Reality begins to set in and we resist it with denial. It’s too painful to acknowledge that we have invested so much time and energy into someone who is never going to really love us. We don’t want to acknowledge that they have actually loved what we have done for them, and not us. But it’s important that we do and the sooner the better.

Reality tells us that it’s time to ACCEPT the things we cannot change. In this case it’s the fact that there’s nothing we can do to make someone love us. We can’t EARN love. It’s impossible.

The first step toward accepting reality is asking our Higher Power to help us to do so. If the dream is falling apart it’s because it was never meant to be. The more we try to force it, the greater of a nightmare we will create for ourselves. We have to be willing to surrender our controlling behavior to God and ask God to help us to accept the reality that this person is never going to be right for us.

Once we accept this fact, we can grieve our losses and allow God to take us to a place of total acceptance; a place of clarity. We can then let go of our desire to force things into being what we had wanted them to be and we can move forward in life.

Hopefully as we move forward, we will learn that a key to happiness comes when we allow people to love us for who we are and not for what we can do for them. There are people out there who are waiting to love us for simply being us. We just need to wake up and allow them to do so.