In my last blog, I encouraged readers to take steps toward ridding their lives of dysfunctional behaviors and relationships. But the deep level of anger I felt while writing that article surprised me. I had to step back and take a good look at myself to figure out why I had such a heated reaction to my own writing. Sure, it was hard to understand the hesitation that hinders so many of my friends from making healthy decisions for a healthier life. But it was more than that. It felt personal and the mother bear in me came out with claws flailing.

This week I had an epiphany that revealed why I had reacted so strongly. I was talking to my friend Emma, getting more and more upset over the fact that all she wanted to do was complain about her husband. She was either unwilling or unable to take responsibility for her own misery and do something about it. That’s when it hit me. Emma thinks it’s her responsibility to fix her husband!

“If I stay with him,” she told me, “maybe he’ll become a Christian. If I leave, then he won’t.”

“How many years have you stayed with him hoping someday he’ll become a Christian?” I asked.

“Twenty-five,” she answered.

“So, what’s going to change this year?”

She shrugged her response. I so wanted to quote Alcoholics Annoymous’s definition of insanity but held my tongue.

“Whose responsibility is it for his salvation?” I continued. “Yours or his?”

Again, she had no answer.

And that’s when I realized Emma was co-dependent. She needed her husband to need her. She needed to fix him. And for reasons she couldn’t even begin to grasp, this dysfunctional relationship had her in a vice grip she was unable to break. Misplaced loyalty and guilt had a grimy stranglehold around her neck and she was trapped.

I was Emma a decade ago. That’s why her dilemma felt so personal. Because it was.

My son was out with his wife one evening, and on the way home he became sick. As he struggled to get his car window open, he vomited. Window, door, cup holder, seat, floor, you name it. It was also below freezing so with the window now open, the vomit froze where it landed.

When they got home, he announced with disgust, “I’m not cleaning that up.” He has a weak stomach to begin with. He even detests holding babies because they might drool on him. There was no way he was touching frozen vomit, not even his own.

His wife was just as adamant. “I’m not cleaning it up, either. We’ll just get rid of the car.”

But me, being the loving (Note: CO-DEPENDENT) mother I was, went out into the sub-freezing night air, armed with a flashlight and buckets of hot soapy water, numerous cleaning paraphernalia in tow. An hour and a half later I came into the house and announced with more than a little pride that the car was as good as new. I expected a standing ovation. I had scrapped, soaked, brushed, and detailed with a sharp knife every inch the vomit had touched.

You’re probably reading this and saying, “Oh, what a wonderful mother! So loving. So giving. So unselfish.” Well, that’s exactly what I wanted everyone to think because my motivation was not to clean frozen vomit, it was to earn my son’s approval. Actually, the whole family’s approval. It was to make him dependent on me because I was the only one (Note: THE ONLY ONE!) who would sacrifice so much for him. I needed him to need me, therefore I tackled the unthinkable. I was Emma.

You notice my daughter-in-law was not co-dependent. She didn’t need to earn her husband’s love or approval. She didn’t need to sacrifice her own discomfort. But, as a deeply co-dependent mother, I did.

In the end, they got rid of the car anyway, even after all my hard work. My sacrifice was wasted because my motivation was wrong. If my motivation had been to simply clean a filthy car, then I would have succeeded. But my motivation had been to earn their love and make myself indispensable. My self-gratifying efforts were not rewarded.

That is what we co-dependents do. We waste countless amounts of energy, countless resources, countless hours, and sometimes countless years (Note: YEARS!) on people who do not appreciate us or what we do. The validation we so desperately seek is never realized.

So, do we learn? No. We try harder. We do more. And as our enhanced efforts are not appreciated, we grow resentful, blaming them for our unhappiness.

In actuality, we have no one to blame but ourselves because, as I explained in my previous post, we teach people how to treat us (I first heard this from Joyce Meyer). If we neglect ourselves, we invite others to neglect us. If we criticize ourselves, we clear the way for others to criticize us. If we abuse ourselves, we open ourselves up to abuse from others.

Demanding respect falls on deaf ears. It takes action on our part to motivate change. We have to pave the way. We need to break new ground. We need to start over.

We do this by respecting ourselves.