Let People Be People: How To Live Our Own Truth, and Allow Others To Do The Same

Other’s opinions of you don’t change who you are.

Other’s beliefs about you don’t change what you need, or what you’ve been through, unless you allow them to.

I want to tell you about a conversation that constantly comes to my mind. My husband and I were in the trenches with a loved one who was newly diagnosed with the disease of addiction. (Addiction is a chronic disease of the brain, and what seems like a situation that could be resolved with a simple choice to “just say no” involves much more complexity.)

Being the fixers we are, my husband and I wanted to alter the circumstances and take control of the situation and the outcome. We wanted to lessen the pain. We wanted to make things easier. We wanted to play God.

A service provider, who has since become a friend, was talking with my husband about the situation. This provider personally battled/es addiction, and so clearly understands the stigma it holds in the general population, and why my husband and I and countless other so-called fixers want to rescue their loved ones from its grip.

This service provider’s words really stuck with me:

“You’ve got your shit. I’ve got my shit. And they’ve (our loved one) got their shit.”

That shit is the water we all swim in. It’s made of our own views, beliefs, experiences, emotions, and thoughts around life and how things should be. It’s why we become fixers, why we carry such heavy emotional loads, why (on the positive side) we care so deeply about the emotional, physical, mental, and social welfare of others, and why (on the negative side) we care about other’s opinions of us.

That shit is formed out of our separate journeys, our experiences, the triggers that result from some of those experiences, and the self-awareness work we all must do for our own healing and peace of mind.

That shit is the mud on our own boots that we try to wash away, only to walk into that same pile of shit again, and again, and damn it, again. Until we stop and look at our boots, acknowledge what’s there, evaluate how it got there, and what we can truly do about it with our own internal peace and wellness in mind.

That shit by another word is codependency, and it shows up in ALL (in my humble opinion) of our various relationships, to some extent. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a disease like addiction, or about something else, like money, emotions, or even other’s opinions of us. WE ALL, in some area of our life, to a large or small degree, battle codependency. 

Codependency is a term that originated in the addiction community to describe the unhealthy relationship between someone caught up in addiction and the loved one who is enmeshed in the relationship and trying to rescue the addict in some way.

The simplest definition of codependency for me is framed in this belief: I’m okay if you’re okay.

We need to learn how to be okay because we are okay.

In recent years, the definition of codependency has broadened. Terri Cole, a psychotherapist and relationship expert who focuses on healthy boundaries and their impact on living an authentic and fulfilled life, coined the term “high-functioning codependency” after noticing a pattern of disordered boundaries in her clients. In an article where Terri discusses being a fixer, she says:

“As loving, caring people, we are all invested in what goes on in the lives of the people we care about. High-functioning codependents are overly invested … I made the distinction years ago and created a new term, “high-functioning codependency,” because my incredibly capable clients did not identify with the old school definition of codependency. Back in the ‘80s, with Melody Beattie’s seminal text, Codependent No More¹ codependency was characterized by enabling behavior and addiction. In my experience, that definition needed an expansion.

High-functioning codependency is behavior that includes disordered boundaries, where you are overly invested in the feeling states, the decisions, the outcomes, and the circumstances of the people in your life, to the detriment of your own internal peace and wellbeing. 

A high-functioning codependent is often smart, successful, reliable, and accomplished. They don’t identify with being dependent, because they are likely doing everything for everyone else. In a way, you make it look easy and like you have it all together. 

You might have an amazing career, run a household, care for children or aging parents, juggle all the extracurriculars and doctor’s appointments, while also life coaching your friends through all their problems. 

You can do it all and the people in your life look to you to do so. But what is the cost to YOU? Over-functioning can leave you burned out and exhausted from trying to maintain an impossible workload and still keep all the balls in the air.” 

That part in Terri’s article about being overly invested to the detriment of your internal peace and wellbeing stands out to me, and it’s what I want to focus on. We may not all be overly invested to the point of burnout and exhaustion, but I believe we are all invested in being loved and giving love, and that need for love shows up in how we interact in all of our various relationships.

Especially around what others think of us, or ask of us.

We don’t want to say no. We want to be nice and liked and be helpers, maybe even fixers. We’re afraid people will think we are selfish jerks, that we are flawed, or outcasts. So, even though we want to be authentic and known for standing in our own truth, we still say yes when we mean no. We set goals and push ourselves to accomplish them, even after, somewhere along the way, the goal has changed. We strive for awards and accolades, and we present ourselves and our families in public and on social media in the best light, all because we care what others might think.

And we attempt to play God or even become God when someone we love has to reckon with a disease that carries with it not only the possibility of death, but also shame, guilt, and disfavor in the general population. Of course we want to protect our loved ones from harm and stigma – but the difficult truth is that we also want to protect ourselves.

We all want to be liked. We all need to feel loved. We aren’t always conscious of how we go about obtaining this validation and love.

What’s important here is self-awareness – the why behind our actions and reactions. And self-awareness is hard work. It requires digging deep into our core values. It means reflecting on past experiences and how they are repeating themselves in our relationships and life today. We need to clearly see ourselves, our wants and needs and desires—and boundaries—so that we can live and move and breathe in a way that reflects what we want out of life, and so that we can have internal peace and well-being while living it.

What if someone’s, anyone’s, everyone’s opinion of you didn’t matter, or at least not more than your own? What if you showed up as the most authentic version of yourself, without explanation or justification or need of acceptance?

What if at the very least you look within and start to ask yourself—with grace and understanding and empathy—why does his, her, their opinion of me matter so damn much? Could I possibly live a more authentic and fulfilled life, a life of internal peace and wellbeing if I cared more about my own thoughts about myself than I do about theirs?  YES! 5000 yeses!

You can only wash the shit off your own boots. If you try to wash it off another person’s boots maybe you’ll succeed for a while, but the real work—the only shit you can truly remove or sidestep altogether, requires looking at, evaluating, contending with what is going on within your very own mind. Self-awareness work and the understanding that results from it is where you will find your internal peace and wellbeing, and from where your most authentic and fulfilled life will start to flow.

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