9. Fear of Negative Outcomes for Relationship Partners
Maybe you get hooked by the fear of the possible negative future outcome if you are not deeply involved in taking care of and fixing your relationship partners. You may be aware of the hooks which keep you boundary-less with your partners. Yet you are afraid to LET GO of the control you have with your relationship partners for fear something very negative might happen to them. Maybe you fear that your relationship partners would become: homeless, hungry, jobless, poor, lonely, scared, go to jail or worse yet die if you do not continue to fix and take care of their needs. This fear of the possible negative future outcomes is so debilitating, that it feels better being sucked dry intellectually, emotionally and physically than to LET GO and watch your relationship partners suffer these feared awful negative outcomes. You find yourself powerless to keep from doing the healthy thing because of the intensity of this fear. You have become a prisoner in the prison of these relationships. You have become a hostage of very powerful, needy, helpless, manipulative "hostage takers." You are a possession of your relationship partners. You find yourself doing all you are asked to insure that these possible negative dreaded outcomes do not happen. You are being emotionally blackmailed and may even have heard threats of suicide if you say you want to change or get out of the relationships the way they are. The rational message needed to establish healthy boundaries from this hook is: "I am only responsible for my life. No one can make me responsible for my relationship partners' lives. I can choose to feel responsible for my relationship partners' lives, but I cannot control or determine the outcome of their lives no matter how hard I try. I am powerless to control other people, places, things and conditions. The only thing I can control is my own thinking, feeling and actions. I need to hand my relationship partners' problems and needs and the outcomes of their lives over to God. I cannot carry my relationship partners' possible negative future outcomes on my body or I will experience failed emotional and physical health. It is OK for me to expect my relationship partners to accept personal responsibility for their own lives. It is OK to require my relationship partners to accept the consequences for their own actions, choices and decisions."
10. Idealism or Fantasy Thinking
Maybe you are hooked by the fantasy or ideal about how it is supposed to be. You have an ideal, dream or image in your mind of how relationships are supposed to be or how they should be and you have a difficult time accepting them the way they really are. You work hard at making your relationships approximate your idealized fantasy. You put a great deal of time, energy and resources into making them become a reality. Unfortunately the more you give and give, the fantasy never becomes the reality you are wishing for. The pull to make the fantasy become real is very powerful. You seem brainwashed into believing that it is possible even though all of your efforts have not made it happen, after years and years of effort on your part. You get hooked by the delusion of the fulfillment of the fantasy and live as if the fantasy has become reality. You are sometimes so out of touch with reality that you appear to be psychotic to others when you discuss your relationships. They know they are not real and in some cases do not even closely approximate what you are saying. You keep pouring your resources, energy and time into empty pits which seem to never get filled. You become obsessed into acting and looking like the fantasy is real. You get hooked into waiting for the "big pay off" down the road if you just stick with your relationships. You remain loyal to the belief that it will happen one day. "Wake up and get off the fantasy train before it runs off the track!" you hear people saying but ignore their warnings and keep blindly on, in search of your quest. The rational message needed to establish healthy boundaries from this hook is: "I must accept reality the way it is rather than how I want it to be. I will give my support system, in my recovery or spiritual renewal program, permission to call me on it if I am hooked into fantasy relationships and lose myself in them. I will work hard to stay reality based and keep myself from losing my objectivity and contact with the way things really are. I will make every effort to accept my relationships the way they are rather than how I want them to be. I am a human and subject to making mistakes and failing and I will forgive myself if I make a mistake in my efforts to establish healthy intimate relationships with my relationship partners. Once I give up the delusion that things are the way they are supposed to be, I will work with my partners to try to correct the problems in our relationships."