INDEPENDENT HAPPINESS

     We can be happy and ok within ourselves even if the people around us are miserable, grouchy, sick, dysfunctional, or hostile. Our well-being does not depend on anyone else being any particular way, although we think it does. It feels wrong, or selfish, to be happy, when our child, or our spouse, or our parent is suffering. We impose suffering on ourselves so that we can suffer alongside. That feels much more humane to us- but it's a self-con job. It's co-dependency and dysfunction in us that thinks we can only be happy when everyone we care about is doing ok. That doesn't happen much. Someone is always having a bad day.
     And we can let them. Where we make ourselves crazy is insisting that they be other than they are so that we can feel better. But what will truly make us feel better is to let them be. They'll work it out, or they won't. We can be loving and kind, but we needn't turn ourselves into doormats. We get so twisted up forgetting that everybody has choices to make and that giving them the freedom to make them is the most loving thing we can do, even if their decisions do not please us. If they ask our opinion, we owe them our honesty, but we do not need to spew our unsolicited judgments all over their lives.

I stop trying to control the moods and choices of the people I love. I can be happy and whole, whether they are feeling that way or not.