Five Bad Minutes or 24 Bad Hours-- The Choice is Ours




Gee, you know, we codependents tend to have many bad days. Or do we? Is it karma? Do we have an invisible bullseye on our backs? Does everything really go wrong all day long? I'd say the answer to these questions is probably "NO."

What we codependents often do have in common, though, is a victim mentality. All it takes is one wrong glance from a person in the office, one irritable spouse, or one assumption we just made about what a friend said a few seconds ago-- and suddenly our entire day is ruined.

Codependents have an unwritten rule: "Where there is no chaos I will create it." We thrive on drama, where we're the unfortunate and undeserving victim, of course. Many of us could win Academy Awards for Best Perpetual Victim in a Supporting Role.

Why? Because one little bad thing happens in the morning and we stew on it for the rest of the day, or week, or month or year. We tend to take everything PERSONALLY. If the coworker just took it on the chin from an abusive client, and we were the first person they saw, the scowl on their face had nothing to do with us-- but we assume it did because our self-worth is poor. If our spouse was grouchy it may be because he/she slept poorly the night before, but didn't bother to tell us. If a friend said they really wish they had someone in their life that they could turn to when times were just too difficult-- someone who was a really good listener-- and we thought we WERE that person, then we're immediately heartbroken. 

And that last example is less about taking things personally than it is about our often deeply ingrained codependent need to be everyone's caretaker. I mean, everyone in the world knows that codependents are responsible for rescuing everyone from all of their problems, right?

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! 




Everyone's behavior is about THEM. It's never about US. As codependents, hopefully recovering ones, we need to stop creating chaos and drama each day. We do that when we stop taking things personally, stop being responsible for other people's behavior and stop caretaking the people around us. Once we realize that the problem is not with us, there's no reason to take five bad minutes and make an entire bad day out of them.

Even if the boss legitimately chews us out for five minutes because of a mistake that we need to own, it's better to own the mistake, learn from it, realize that we deserved to be "called out" and to move forward knowing we can do better next time. That's much better than blaming someone else for the mistake and then playing the victim for the rest of the day. Suddenly, we've placed ourselves in a no-win situation. We don't learn lessons and improve ourselves when we refuse to take responsibility for our mistake and thus refuse to admit the boss was right. And we turn five bad minutes into an entire bad day by playing the victim.

Unfortunately, the need to be the victim and to create an entire day's worth of drama out of five minutes of chaos is deeply ingrained inside of many of us. If we stopped being the victim, we wouldn't know who we were. But that doesn't mean we can't change.

The choice is ours: Do we want to have JUST five bad minutes, or do we want to have 24 bad hours? If we're serious about recovery and about finally being reasonably happy in this life, we'll learn to change and accept the five bad minutes, while we learn to enjoy the 23 hours and 55 good minutes of the rest of our day-- everyday!

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