Stop Giving Your Happiness Away Through Negative Assumptions

I was watching “The Five Senses” last night which intertwines the lives of five different people, living in Toronto, through the five different senses. After watching the film, I thought about the  book “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz.

My primary focus throughout the film was on the characters played by Marco Leonardi (Roberto) and  Mary Louise Parker (Rona). Apparently, Roberto is someone Rona met in Italy, and he’s flying into Toronto. Rona is in love with him, but she doesn’t fully trust him. She has this fear that he’s only interested in her to marry her and thus gain citizenship. At first, we don’t know whether her assumption is valid or not.

My spin on the relationship is that Roberto genuinely loves her. We aren’t given any reason as to why he would want to flee Italy and stay in Toronto. And he goes so far as to engage an Italian female friend to help him decorate Rona’s apartment in the most romantic of ways, complete with dozens of candles, to express his love for her.

The problem for Rona is that she keeps falling prone to her assumptions. She happens to see Roberto’s female friend leaving her place after she has helped him decorate it for Rona. And Rona makes the assumption that Roberto is cheating on her, that he was playing her for a fool, as she had always feared. So she runs away down the street and the film ends with Roberto sitting with his head in his hands, waiting for a Rona who’s not going to show up. How codependent and tragic is that? VERY!

The third of the Four Agreements is “never make assumptions.” Assumptions are not facts. They are a misuse of our imagination, especially when we have poor self-worth. Rona’s lack of self-love and poor sense of self-worth make her suspicious from the get-go. She always assumes the worst, and she throws her own personal happiness away.

Actually, she breaks all of the Four Agreements, like many codependents do. She isn’t always impeccable or truthful with her words. How often do we lie to ourselves and others in order to please them— to tell them what we think they want to hear? Recovery requires that we own our truth concerning who we are and that we live our truth; no one else’s. She takes things personally as do most codependents. We think the universe rotates around us and that EVERYTHING is about us, especially everything that is negative. We rarely allow the person who is being negative to own their negativity. We make it about us.

Codependents, like Rona, are very bad about making self-destructive assumptions and thus destroying their own happiness, as I’ve  already mentioned. And “doing our best,” the Fourth Agreement, is never good enough. We judge ourselves so harshly.

If we want to be happy, we have to stop our lying, our need for approval, our tendency to make bad assumptions and our constant self-judgment. All of these stoke the fires of our codependency. Let’s stop throwing away our own happiness when we have the power to own our happiness and thrive as humans.