I am texting a friend.

“Now that I have my happy back,” I say.

Wow! Not that long ago, I couldn’t imagine that this day would come.

I think the overall moral of my story to getting my happy back is to recognize that two wrongs do not make a
right.

Sure, I wasn’t the one initially behaving badly in my marriage. I am the one who made excuses. However, for
every excuse I made, the worse my own behavior became.

Whatever you do, do not say things to yourself such as:

They are a good person in a bad place.
They don’t mean to behave this way they don’t know any better it was in their home growing up.
This is the way most women are anyway – This is the way most men are anyway.
They are under a great deal of stress.

NO – If a person is behaving badly it’s completely and 100% on them. The irony, is it will make you begin to behave
badly. I’ve spoken about this before. You will begin to yell, over talk because the person you’re living with isn’t
listening to you, say things you don’t mean because of the level of disrespectfulness, etc.

So what’s different in my message about enabling this time??

It’s the recognition that in addition to being an enabler, I became someone who also was no longer responsible for
my behavior – scratch that – someone who was no longer responsible for own my bad behavior.

I knew I was over talking, yelling, etc. I knew that was bad behavior. I have always been self-responsible. And yes, as I have written about before, that is what happens when you are an enabler. However, at some point (much sooner) I should have stopped accepting it as a part of trying to save my marriage and thereby somehow explainable and
realized that I had a responsibility to always be self-responsible.

It brings me to something my marriage counselor said to me when I first began going.

“Colleen, your husband is who he is, only you are the one who made the choices you made to stay and accept certain things.”

These words were oddly empowering to me. They allowed me to forgive my husband and once again accept responsibility for myself. That would be self-responsibility. The truth is I had never played the role of victim – until my marriage went South. I had always taken responsibility for the good and the bad in my life.

I didn’t need to over talk. I didn’t need to yell.

I needed to be self-responsible. This was not a good situation, marriage or no marriage. I needed to get out.

I needed to get my happy back.

And…

I have because the day you begin to give up on being overly responsible for another human being and self-responsible for yourself again, something crazy happens. All of the sudden, joy sneaks back into your life, hits you upside the head, resuscitates you, and says ‘fool, you tried as hard as you could’ – now worry about your own behavior.

Get your happy back!

(Photo courtesy of Pexels)

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