Today I Stopped Holding Others Responsible For My Happiness

I have spent so much time holding others accountable for my happiness. I have become angry with them for not keeping their promises, for not loving me as I loved them, for not doing what I expected.

My expectations of the people who played a role in my life were too high; I made them responsible for my happiness. But there came a day when I started to feel bad. I wondered if I was manipulating people, and in a way I did. I used them to make me happy.

If someone could not do something fun with me because he had other things to do, I got angry and did not do the fun thing I wanted to do. Wow! My life was completely dependent on the people around me.

Holding others accountable for my happiness was a mistake. It only leads to suffering, disappointment, pain, sadness and in the worst case even depression. We do not realize that this dynamic creates a lot of emotional instability. How should we deal with our emotions with this approach? That would be impossible because we have already relinquished control of them.

But the most important question is: “why do something so ‘stupid’ as to leave such an important and fragile privilege in the hands of others?  The answer lies in our fears, insecurities, assumptions about relationships and often in the belief that love requires pain.

All of this creates a perspective with its own laws and logic, and it disrupts our relationships. We give everything, we strive to keep our relationships and friendships on track. But in the end, all our hard work does not seem to do anything, and it gives a taste of disappointment.

We prevent others from showing that they also care. We do it in the belief that there is only one way for someone to love us; that the only way is to satisfy our desires, and that is how we evaluate – but in fact diminish – the value of their way of loving.

In addition, we rarely (if ever) express our feelings about how we want to be loved, in the hope that through some miracle they will read our thoughts or interpret too subtle signs we send.

If, on the other hand, we are the friend who arranges things and leads the group, why not stop? What if we stopped leading and let others do something instead? Perhaps we are afraid that it would not happen, that our habits have instilled in us and those in our roles, who decide what we can and cannot expect from others.

Making others responsible for my happiness while I have my eyes closed so as not to see what is happening is a bad choice.

We look outside ourselves for what we are missing. If we feel lonely and do not want to be, we try to get rid of it with other people; if we notice that we lack love, we are looking for a partner to satisfy the need with. But holding others accountable for meeting our needs exposes us to harm.

We have a lot and we have the opportunity to get more. We have happiness, we have love, we have joy… it is true that we go through things that can make us believe that they have been taken from us.

But these things live within us, deep down – we just have to take responsibility for it. Let’s stop being passive players, because we’re the protagonist of our story.

So today I stopped blaming others for my happiness, to meet my needs, to satisfy myself. I have abandoned the role of victim, even though I was comfortable asking for things while giving what I did not have.

Today I do not depend on anyone to be happy, because I have the power to choose how I want to feel. And I have freed others from the “duty” I once placed in their hands, unaware of the danger I was exposed to.