Do you want to know the deep satisfaction that comes from being in love? It's your choice.

My choice? You're thinking. But you don't know what I've been through. You don't know what I have to live with. You don't know my mate!

I agree this may be a hard truth to swallow, because it also means you no longer have any excuse to be miserable! I hated the idea at first. For more than half my life, I would find all kinds of reasons why I wasn't fulfilled and in love. I could place blame with the rest of them. Then, little by little after age thirty-five, I started seeing what so many had already said about our enjoyment of life and our love being in our own hands.

Someone who continually blames problems on others or on his or her circumstances becomes what author Stephen Covey calls "the reactive person." Reactive persons allow others to rob them of their quality of life.

Covey sees another group of people as proactive. They're ones who believe "as human beings we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions—our choices—not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen."

One of my favorite writers in this area is Dr. Harriet Goldhor Lerner. A chapter in her book The Dance of Anger could convince anyone that one's marital happiness is mostly in one's own hands. She also says that putting our energy into changing another person to enhance our own enjoyment of him or her is a solution that "never never works." If we focus our attention on adjusting someone else's life so we can find happiness, we fail to exercise the only power we have for enriching our own lives. In short, here is the formula: (1) We can't change other people. (2) We can choose to make changes in ourselves. (3) As changes occur in ourselves, people around us usually adjust their responses and choices according to our new behavior.

To flesh out this truth, let's look at someone who chose to take responsibility for his own emotional well-being. When Richard first came to see me, he was not a happy man. Picking up the phone to call a counselor was a first step in acknowledging that his dissatisfaction with life was a warning that something was wrong. He was frustrated, disappointed, and fearful things were never going to change. And yet a wee bit of hope for something better prompted some changes in his life.

Richard was in his fifties, a husband and dad, a classy dresser, and the president of his own large company. After more than thirty years of marriage to Gail, he'd grown tired of her nagging and hatefulness. But he had also grown tired of expecting Gail to change and meet his relational needs, as he had in the early years of their marriage. And even though he hated the thought, he was contemplating divorce. But before he took that drastic step, he sought out and acted on my advice.

After the usual counselor-client preliminaries, I asked what had brought him to me. He answered, "I'm aware of my part in messing up with my wife and kids. I've spent so much time building this company. Now I recognize that even though it's late, I want to have a better relationship with them. I'm very successful financially, but I'm not very happy, and neither are my family members. I don't know how to go about changing things, especially after being the way I've been for so many years."

Then he added something highly significant. "I didn't have much of a relationship with my own dad," he said. "In fact, he was always too busy for me, just the way I've been with my family."

Right there was a key factor in Richard's past failure as a husband and father. His own dad had never built a close relationship with him, and that pattern probably had gone back for several generations. As a result, Richard didn't now any other approach.

If Richard had been hooked on the blame game (when you "win" by finding someone else to blame for everything wrong in your life), he could have stopped his growth at this point. With a little bit of new insight, he could have said, "Okay, it's mostly my father's fault!" Or he could have said, as so many workaholic people do, "But I was providing for my family! I did it all for them so they could have a better standard of living. If they can't understand my good motives, it's their problem. Hang this 'relationship' bit."

If Richard had chosen to blame his father for his own problems, he might have had some justification. Research has shown that people raised under strong, controlling, and rejecting parents may, in turn, reject and control their own families. But Richard was no longer looking for a scapegoat. He took responsibility for his response to the way he had been parented. At this point Richard learned two powerful truths:

1. What I am today is because of the choices I've made in the past.



2. I am 100 percent responsible for the choices I've made.

© Copyright 2006 Smalley Relationship Center

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