Make Someone Happy....

by Mary and Allegra

[A forum post that we made on 4/16/15 in response to someone who was placing a parent's happiness ahead of self-care and one's own well-being.  The origin of the title of this blog post is explained here.]

Our words by themselves are inadequate, because we can't convey tone of voice, body language, and so forth, to let you know that we care.

People are responsible for their own feelings, and their own happiness. Nobody can make a person feel a certain way, even though their actions do indeed affect us. Yes, we may feel hurt, but we have a choice in how we react to that hurt and process it. It's easier said than done when it comes to loved ones, but it's true.

Charity and some of our others never felt good enough to please our mother, who passed away 15 years ago. Even if our mother were still alive, Charity would never be able to make our mother show Charity love the way Charity wants it. Our mother was who she was, and only she could control how she treated us.

It's still hard for Charity to accept this. She feels that she will never be happy, because she never had the kind of nurturing that she wanted from our mother. Charity wishes that she could turn back the clock and re-live childhood without the pain that she suffered. But this can't and won't happen, so she/we need to take care of ourselves as we are, and to put our well-being first, ahead of the desire to change things that we can't control.