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 perso...