How can you tell when a recovering codependent has recovered enough to be safe to date?

FUTURE

Some people say astrology is crap, and maybe it is.

Then again…every single thing my horoscopes have predicted for the past four years or so has happened. I even pinpointed the date of my husband’s death within a week by looking at his horoscope transits. They read exactly the way my grandmother’s did the week she died.

When something that eerie happens, and then it’s telling you you are almost certainly bound to your married ex-boyfriend in some significant way for the long term, it does indeed give you pause.

Even if it’s not true: We do tend to attract the same kind of person over and over again, and play out the same kind of relationship time and time again. I really do hope that if someone else came along, I would know better this time than to feel a soul-mate attraction to someone so hopelessly codependent that he can’t stop wrecking his relationships and his life. I really, really do hope that I would have learned better, and maybe if I ever met someone I could fall in love with again, he’d be more like my late husband, who knew who he was and what he wanted and wouldn’t compromise that for anything.

But. What are the odds I’m actually done in this area? Am I going to pick Chi or someone just like him, again??

If a person’s self-esteem is so critically low that they morph themselves into whatever they think you want, struggling to please you because they’re afraid of losing love…and then ten years later they discover they’ve betrayed themselves so painfully there’s nothing to do but have an affair or get a divorce: Even if they’re in treatment, how do you know when they’ve recovered enough that you can trust that what they’re telling you is true?

Can you EVER trust that what they’re telling you is true?

Do they even know that it’s not?

By Chi’s own admission, he knew he was unhappy with the dynamic he agreed to in his marriage and his life for something like TWENTY YEARS. And NEVER SAID ANYTHING. Except to come to club meetings and talk about how he was studying Zen to tolerate the unhappiness in his work, in his marriage, in his life. Of course, he was never specific enough about what was going on until those six months we spent together.

He could tell me then because I wasn’t truly a close part of his life. One phone call, and <snip!> I was gone. He didn’t live with me; all he had to do was not be online, and he didn’t have to deal with me at all. What a person to tell all your secrets to! If no one knows about the relationship, one phone call and it didn’t even happen.

Whereas, for the people in his life whom he called “nearest and dearest”…well, I knew sixteen years before any of them did how unhappy he was in his marriage. SIXTEEN YEARS.

When a person has lived this inside-out and backwards life their whole entire life, can they ever change? And how would you know whether they had?

Because a person who can chronically and habitually lie to you about how they feel and what they want, while suffering unimaginably for TWENTY YEARS, going, “Everyone’s happy but me, so what’s wrong with me? I can’t talk up and hurt these people,” is NOT safe to live with. Ten, fifteen, twenty years later—BLOOIE!!!! Everything you thought was real…IS NOT.

I can’t think of anything that would hurt me more. If I love someone enough to be in an exclusive relationship with him, to let him into my house, into my bed, into my life, to plan a future with him and only him—I’d rather watch that person have sex with someone else than know that person didn’t trust me enough to tell me, “I don’t want to do this or that. This is making me feel unhappy, can we change this?”

To THINK that the second love of my life didn’t trust me enough to believe that I loved him enough to care about his needs…well, I’d rather jump from a bridge. And that is no joke.

Are codependents hopeless? If you’ve been so seriously codependent, with such terrible, horrible, low self-esteem for almost sixty years, is there any hope? How would you know the person was functioning well in the relationship, rather than just shining it on so seamlessly that you won’t know until your whole world falls apart?

I’ve been asking myself this question a lot. Since if this one doesn’t come back, I’m likely to just pick out another one just like him.

I guess if there’s a lot of disagreement and differences, you can be sure the person is probably telling you the truth. If they are dissenting with something you want to do and saying so, why would they say it if it wasn’t who they really were and what they really wanted?

But if it’s smooth sailing, and everything is, “Yes, dear” how do you know that the person really is okay?

I guess you don’t.

And that is truly scary.

I’d be afraid to let this person move in with me. I’d be afraid that if I did that, he’d start overcompromising and overdoing, overplacating and overyessing, overpleasing and undertalking, unhappy the whole time and not saying anything for fear I’ll snap at him or leave him. Even if I’m asking and asking and checking and checking with him: “Is this okay with you? Are you sure this is okay with you? You’re not just saying this to please me? You really, really are comfortable?” I don’t know that I could trust the answer. Chi came to our club meetings for years, talking about the hobbies he was doing with Rory as if they were the most interesting things in the world. Only when he finally let me into the deepest recesses of his heart did I hear the truth.

If the price of being close to such a person is being kicked OUT of the deepest recesses of the person’s heart, it isn’t worth it to try to be close. That Chi trusted me that much meant more to me than a million bars of gold. If we established a relationship, and he didn’t trust me anymore…

I really would want to die. I really, really would.

And I realize this has nothing to do with me. This is this person’s illness, which predated my birth by ten years, which I did not cause, and which I can do nothing to cure.

How about it, out there? Is anyone reading this involved in a relationship with an adult child of an alcoholic? Does that person lie to you? Did the relationship stay intact? How did you get past it? How do you know you can trust what that person tells you about their feelings and your life together?

If you find out you’ve picked out an ACoA to have a relationship with, should you just abandon ship?

Thought: How do you know if an ACoA is better or not?

Answer: Look at the person’s self-esteem.

Anybody got any more??