Hello codependency, my old friend!

(Don’t) stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

You’re out there in the world, quietly celebrating your wins, feeling like you’ve defeated most of your old, terrible behavioral habits, and so, naturally, you realize that you’re solved!

You feel triumphant!

No longer do you need to be vigilant, or even moderately on top of all the things you’ve worked for decades upon decades to put into place, like boundaries, your predilection to place other people’s wants and needs before your own, your maladaptive people-pleasing pathology, and/or all the other basic behaviors that at some point made their dysfunction clear to you.

You. Are. Fixed.

Basically a superhero.

You start dating someone, or you make a new friend…

And then…

Weeks, maybe months, or even a year from then…

You feel a familiar gnawing inside your chest cavity. It’s one part resentment, two parts dread.

You’ve had an emotional relapse.

And you find yourself back in the same complicated emotional dynamic from which you’d worked decades to extricate yourself.

That’s the bummer about getting better at things. You have to constantly renew and maintain it. It’s a practice. Just like yoga or eating healthy.

And if you’re wondering what this “what” is that happens, it’s the inclination to render one’s own needs and wants secondary to others; to confuse caretaking for friendship. (Caretaking is rooted in low-self esteem; caregiving is a pure expression of love.)

This dynamic plagued me in my twenties and thirties and I wound up in one co-dependent relationship after another. As I grew older, it took less and less time to be filled with resentment and then rage. And then, ultimately, I’d end the relationship.

When I learned that this dynamic had a name, I read about it extensively and worked valiantly to change my ways, first understanding why I was this way, and where it came from.

This specific equation of placing other people’s needs above your own is known by lay people as: codependence.

Clinicians may call it Affective Dependence, and despite how it sounds on the tongue, it's not a mental illness; it's a psychological construct shaped by one's culture and environment. It is also not, at its core, about being in a relationship with an addict.

At its base, codependency is a dysfunctional relationship one has with themselves, and this leads to problematic imbalances in our other relationships.

Codependents were raised to believe that it’s wrong to make mistakes, to be imperfect, to show emotions, or to look different. Their environment was shame-based and they were taught to base their worth on where they fell compared to other people. The message they received was that positive external approval made them worthy and valuable.

Codependency is characterized by people who are over-caring, lack an ability to set and maintain boundaries, and have an overwhelming need for approval, affection, and acceptance.