Misery Loves Company?

“I’m sorry I met someone because I know how much you hate it when I’m happy… You’re happiest when I’m miserable ‘cause then you don’t have to look at how miserable you are.”

Grace Adler, Will & Grace (2002)

Will Truman (Eric McCormack) and Grace Adler (Debra Messing) bounced back and forth within a love/hate friendship for eight seasons on the TV series Will & Grace. Both characters were codependently needy, and they spent many an episode trying to control or fix each other.

As I was watching an episode from Season Five, the above quote really made my ears perk up. It made me think back over my life and of how I, too, was often happiest when someone I’d grown close to was miserable. It doesn’t make sense on the surface unless you understand codependent caretaking. Before recovery, I was a professional codependent caretaker. In other words, I came alive in a relationship when the other person was suffering through something they were powerless over. It gave me the opportunity to prove my worth by running to their rescue. I felt needed. I felt like I had value. I believed I could earn my keep and their love by saving them from their misery.

And I was wrong. I was wrong in many ways. First off, recovery has taught me that I can’t rescue anyone. I have also learned that it’s a bad idea to think that we can earn respect or value by rescuing people from their problems. Likewise I’ve learned that because my motivation was misplaced, I often wanted to solve the other person’s problem, but not immediately. The longer it took to fix, the more they needed to rely on me. So I sometimes manipulated the situation to get what I needed from the other person—my sense of value—which means I didn’t have their best interest at heart.

In addition I have realized that the compulsion to rescue others also kept my focus off of me and my own personal misery. And although I don’t try to rescue people anymore, I have recently realized that I still often place my focus on someone else in order to escape from myself and my misery.

But today, instead of trying to rescue people, I find myself judging their behavior. For example, I may find myself creating dramas in my head about how a certain person isn’t carrying his weight at work and my focus is on his every mistake. So I create a head-drama that I perpetually play over and over inside my mind throughout the day. Last week, I realized that making myself angry over another person’s faults and failings was actually keeping me from directly feeling miserable about my own personal shortcomings. I think I have been playing-out my own bad feelings about myself by projecting them onto someone else.

So I’ve decided that I am no longer going to play this head-game. My focus needs to be on me and on making my life better. That means I need to face my own misery, be responsible for it and ask my Higher Power to help me heal it. That’s certainly a much better idea than creating mindless dramas by projecting my misery onto others. From this day forward, I no longer want to avoid my own misery by focusing on someone else’s misery. I will choose to let go of any need I may have to caretake someone else’s problems/misery, and I will choose to let go of my need to escape from my own misery by projecting it onto someone else through angry thoughts.