If Every Sweet Hello Leads to a Sad Goodbye, It's Time to Wake Up









According to Dr. Bruce Lipton, DNA specialist, 95% of what we say and do in our daily lives is controlled by our subconscious minds. Think how terrifying that percentage is. It means we only act from our conscious minds five percent of the time each day.

As codependents, those who were primarily raised in dysfunctional addictive households, it's especially distressing. But it also explains why we have made the same relationship mistakes over and over without learning our lesson. It explains why we have chosen one toxic person after the next to build relationships with, why we have fallen into the same hole time and again and never understood why.

How many of us can relate to the lyric quote (pictured above) from the Roxette song "The Sweet Hello, The Sad Goodbye"? Looking back over my past codependent relationships, these words say a great deal to me now. I remember when "I thought we were the chosen ones who were supposed to fly" into each others arms and rescue each other from our miserable lives.

And yes, we "were very much the same, you and I." We had engaged in many relationships with a "sweet hello" that led to a "sad goodbye" because throughout the entire span of the relationship we were "still waiting to get hurt, time after time." It was our history of relationships: Crazy, head over heals with a "sweet hello" but always being too afraid to be truly happy because we were waiting from the get-go to get hurt and to experience 'the sad goodbye" one more time. Love found, love lost, one more time.

Except it was never LOVE. It was addictive attraction. "When love lies in our hands we seem to run and hide, And I can't help but wonder why, the sweet hello, the sad goodbye." Yes, we did run and hide each time we thought we were holding love in our hands, and we did wonder "why?" "Why do I always sabotage or run away from love?" is a question we may have asked ourselves countless times. But again, it was never love we were actually running from. We were running from ourselves and our addictive attraction to one more toxic person who subconsciously reminded us of mom or dad. And, on a conscious level, we didn't understand that fact.

Even in recovery, we can still be experiencing the sweet hello and the sad goodbye if we don't yet understand that we spend most of our lives acting from our subconscious minds, instead of our conscious minds. If we keep making the same mistakes over and over, expecting each time that the result will finally be positive instead of negative, then we are trapped in our subconscious minds. And we are reliving our childhood experiences over and over again.

Recovery programs can rescue us from this behavior. They can repeatedly remind us that the subconscious mind is very powerful and they can help us question where our desires, thoughts and behaviors are coming from. Are they coming from our conscious in-the-NOW awareness? Or are they coming from our very comfortable zombie-like subconscious, where there is no awareness, just repetition of the same old behaviors?

Think about it the next time you feel yourself experiencing what seems to be a "sweet hello." Is it really sweet? Am I subconsciously thinking this person just walked into my life to rescue me and vice-versa? Or am I consciously getting to know this person and realizing that we have much in common (excluding addictive attractions and behaviors)? If I'm not asking these questions and understanding why I seem to be experiencing a "sweet hello," then I'm surely, once again, going to experience a "sad goodbye."

Ask your Higher Power to help to to stay in the conscious moment where the truth exists.

"The Sweet Hello, The Sad Goodbye" 
video by Roxette.




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