My all time favorite film "It's A Wonderful Life" is all about the life of George Bailey. All his life, George dreamed of being an adventurer. He planned to travel the world. Exotic, maybe even dangerous places! Tahiti...Africa! That spunk of his quickly attracted the attention of adolescent angel Mary Hatch, who declares "George Bailey, I'll love you til the day I die."
Well, you've seen the movie; George never makes it out of Bedford Falls. One disaster after another befell him and eventually things got so bad he jumped off a bridge in an attempt to end his problems. Now the story will tell you it was George's guardian angel Clarence who saves the day, but every time George fell, it was Mary who was there to pick him up and fix everything.
Mary dedicated her life to raising her children, volunteering for the USO, and most important, fixing George Bailey.
Here's a photo of Mary after she rebelled against her mother (who wanted her to marry the rich Sam Wainwright). Mary lured George into her parlor where she's about to convince him to marry her, even though he'll tell her he never wants to get married....EVER!
Here's Mary on her wedding day, saving the entire population of Bedford Falls from economic doom by offering up a large wad of cash she and George had stashed for their honeymoon. The stock market crashed and George was in a major pickle because everyone panicked and wanted to withdraw their money from the Building and Loan.
Finally, and most important...here's Mary after the bank deposit was misplaced and ultimately stolen by the evil Mr. Potter. George fell apart and attempted suicide, but Mary rallied the entire town together and single-handedly saved the day!Like me, Mary was out to lasso the wild boy from early on. In the process she performed rescue after rescue (a term you'll be hearing a lot more about), and fixed every problem that came along. So you see....there really was no other choice for a screen name except "Mary".
I think that's what all codependents really want--to be like Mary Bailey. Able to take complete and total control of any situation; able to rescue everyone around them until they finally get their "happily ever after". See how happy they all look? Ahhhhh......that's a codependent's dream come true.Problem is, controlling and rescuing don't typically result in a happy ending in the real world. That's what this journal is all about.
1 comment:
The hell of it is that no matter how much we think someone needs rescuing, we can't rescue them unless they want to be rescued. That's where we drive ourselves crazy.
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