So...where were we?

Oh right, codependency!

For those who missed Part 1, you can read it HERE. Or, if you’re feeling just that lazy, here’s a recap from last week's newsletter: Are You Trapped Inside The “Tyranny of the Shoulds”? You Might be Suffering from Codependency

PART ONE: CODEPENDENCY

People who were raised to believe that it’s wrong to make mistakes, and that their worth comes not from what they think of themselves but from what others think of them, are growing up in shame-based environments and learning how to relate to others based on a codependent model.

This skewed metric they’ve been taught lays the groundwork for all their relationships to be imbalanced, weighted heavily in favor of the other partner.

What makes this style of relating so painful is that a person raised on a codependent model will measure their worth through other people’s eyes, which means they are unable to realize their own worth and set appropriate boundaries.

And now, onto the main event!

PART TWO: CODEPENDENCY

Karen Horney (1885–1952) was a German psychologist whose work on neurotic needs laid the groundwork for the cohesive theory of codependency that Pia Mellody, a leading authority on addiction and childhood trauma, would, decades later, come to create.

Horney believed that codependency was a coping mechanism that children were forced to develop when they could not get their basic needs satisfied.

When we’re young, we internalize how our primary caregivers receive and experience our needs. If we experience our need for comfort, or advice, or any number of primary necessities as burdens for our caregivers, or give rise to rage or other behaviors that indicate distress, we learn to split off from this part of ourselves and deny our basic needs, or we try and manage to meet our needs on our own.

When we attempt, as children, to meet our own needs, we are essentially in survival mode, because often we can only get what we need in dysfunctional ways. When these children needed nurturing or care from their caretakers and they were dismissed, reprimanded, or rejected, they learned that being good and helpful was the only way to have value and get approval.

When children grow up with parents who don’t show them the respect that they deserve, they grow up doing to themselves what their parents did to them—they reject and disrespect themselves, and then others. The pattern continues until someone learns how to stop it.

The codependent child grows into a codependent adult with an excessive fear of rejection and abandonment. Given that their family of origin prized external over internal validation, this makes great sense. When you are raised to believe that there is a right way to be and a wrong way to be, and what others say is correct and what you say is incorrect, then you have learned to doubt your own experience and do as others do so as not to upset the status quo.

It’s important to remember that a codependent person doesn’t fall back on helping behavior and sacrifice because of their need to feel loved. It’s their inability to love themselves that drives them to behave in these dysfunctional ways.

It is generally agreed and accepted by psychologists of all stripes that there are five core symptoms of codependency.

The Five Core Symptoms of Co-dependency

1. Low self-esteem

2. No or few boundaries

3. Neglecting your own needs

4. Difficulty owning your own reality

5. Black and white thinking

GETTY IMAGES | KLAUS VEDFELT

1. Low Self-Esteem

The lack of self-esteem is the driving force of codependency. When you are raised to base your value and worthiness on the opinions of others, then you are practicing “Other-Esteem.”

People who operate from this viewpoint equate approval with being valuable. Being accepted is more important than being true to who you really are.

This stance can lead nowhere but to a crisis of confidence.

2. No or Few Boundaries

Pia Mellody, a leading authority on addiction and childhood trauma, describes boundaries in her book Facing Codependence as “systems that are invisible and symbolic force fields.”

This is an excellent and apt description. She dissects them further. Boundaries, she believes, can be split this way:

1. EXTERNAL BOUNDARIES, which are used to prevent people from entering our space and taking advantage of us.

2. INTERNAL BOUNDARIES, which we use to prevent us from entering into other people’s spaces and taking them for granted.

GETTY IMAGES | We Are

EXTERNAL BOUNDARIES enable us to protect ourselves physically and sexually. We use external boundaries to control how close we allow others to get to us, and we acknowledge and respect the boundaries others use to control how close we get to them.

INTERNAL BOUNDARIES are also known as “psychological boundaries,” and they refer to the protection of our feelings, thoughts and behaviors. When we have internal boundaries we are able to be in touch with our truth and honor how we feel. We are able to know what’s true for us versus what we feel is true according to other people. Internal boundaries are a way to be congruent with yourself.

Psychological boundaries are a necessary way for us to stay in congruence with our thoughts and feelings. When we uphold these boundaries, we’re able to hear with more objectivity and consider with more perspective what feels true or untrue.

3. Neglecting Your Own Needs

As adults, we are expected to know what we need and how to ask for it. At the same time, we need to learn how to meet the needs of our loved ones.

Many children were not taught how to meet their own needs and desires. Instead, their parents simply took care of everything on their behalf. This holds children in place, and will send them into adulthood lacking the basic skills one needs to navigate life and take care of oneself.

A parent who takes care of the child’s needs without explaining anything or expecting anything of the child is enmeshed. These kids tend to grow into highly dependent adults. Adults who confuse needs with wants because they never received what they needed in childhood, which was guidance and the gift of self-reliance, have trouble pinpointing their emotional needs.

Alternately, children whose needs were neglected or ignored in childhood will usually grow into adults who believe they have no needs or wants. They will have internalized that it isn’t safe to ask for something or to express their needs or wants. Because these kids never had their needs identified, they can’t meet them. They can however meet the needs and wants of other people who state them, expecting mutuality, and often not receiving it.

Original art for How to Live by Edwina White

4. Difficulty Owning Your Own Reality

Because codependents have such flexible boundaries, they can lose sense of their relationship to reality. When a kid grows up forced to question their own experience of things, or have to explain WHY their needs are valid or watch their parents react in ways that suggest these needs are burdensome, they take these cues as the truth. They learn to value as true the signals that are sent to them and not the signals that they feel inside themselves. These responses, over time, teach a person to question what they think and feel, which distances them from their relationship to reality.

Pia Mellody defines Reality as having 4 components:

• The Body: How we look and how our bodies are operating

• Thinking: How we give meaning to incoming data

• Feelings: Our emotions

• Behavior: What we do or don’t do

Codependents have difficulty owning all or parts of these components.

When it comes to their BODY, they have trouble seeing themselves accurately, and are disconnected from the way their body is operating.

When it comes to THINKING, they struggle with knowing what they think and, often, when they find they do know what they think, they grapple with how to share their thoughts. With incoming information, the codependent often has trouble interpreting the data through an objective lens.

When it comes to FEELINGS, they either struggle to identify what they are feeling, or their feelings are so overwhelming that they collapse on themselves.

When it comes to BEHAVIOR, they have difficulty knowing what they should or shouldn’t do, and struggle to own their behavior or recognize how it might harm others when they do behave poorly.

5. Black and White Thinking

People with an inability to moderate operate in extremes. The ways they feel, dress, or express themselves are large. They are easily swallowed by their experiences. There is no gray area here—things are either right or wrong, black or white.

All of these symptoms have primed the codependent for relationship imbalances. But the main imbalance is the relationship the codependent has with themselves. Because they cannot recognize their own needs, or don’t know how to meet them, or appropriately care for themselves, they don’t recognize that placing other people’s needs before their own is unhealthy.

When you don’t know how to care for your emotional self, when you don’t know how to grow your emotional self, you also do not recognize when you are abusing and neglecting your emotional self.

GETTY IMAGES | gremlin

At the core of codependence is the inability to tolerate discomfort. If we grew up with codependent parents or caretakers, we watched as they tried to make difficulties easier for us. They tried to remove discomfort from our lives not because they didn’t think WE could handle it, but because THEY couldn’t handle it. This type of caretaking is undermining and defeating.

Children need to be taught how to manage their discomfort and tolerate challenging moments because life is filled with discomfort and hard moments. When we manage these things for our kids, we “rescue” them not just from situations but from learning how to do hard things. This creates a dependency on the caregiver instead of teaching them how to be self-reliant, and sooner than later, codependency will emerge.

I’ve been very vocal about not being so quick to rescue your children from discomfort and hard moments. It is ultimately quite destructive to development and creates a template for a very unhealthy dynamic that the child will bring with them into adulthood, and model their relationships upon.

These kids will grow up and gravitate toward people who need a lot of help. They’ll grow up thinking that fixing things for other people to save them from discomfort is a form of care.

It’s not.

Care is allowing your children, friend, or partner to learn to tolerate discomfort so they can learn how to manage and get through hard things.

Thing is, if we don’t know how to do that for ourselves, we’ll never know that racing to soothe a person is less loving than backing off, and allowing people the space to experience, and handle, the full expression of their emotions.

Mental Health America has a list of characteristics of co-dependents. I’ve included this list, taken from their website. Read through and see if any are uncomfortably familiar:

• An exaggerated sense of responsibility for the actions of others

• A tendency to confuse love and pity with the tendency to “love” people they can pity and rescue

• A tendency to do more than their share, all of the time

• A tendency to become hurt when people don’t recognize their efforts

• An unhealthy dependence on relationships. The co-dependent will do anything to hold on to a relationship; to avoid the feeling of abandonment

• An extreme need for approval and recognition

• A sense of guilt when asserting themselves

• A compelling need to control others

• Lack of trust in self and/or others

• Fear of being abandoned or alone

• Difficulty identifying feelings

• Rigidity/difficulty adjusting to change

• Problems with intimacy/boundaries

• Chronic anger

• Lying/dishonesty

• Poor communications

• Difficulty making decisions

Mental Health America also has a questionnaire to identify signs of co-dependency.

“This condition appears to run in different degrees, whereby the intensity of symptoms is on a spectrum of severity, as opposed to an all-or-nothing scale. Please note that only a qualified professional can diagnose co-dependency; not everyone experiencing these symptoms suffers from codependency.”

GETTY IMAGES | ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

1. Do you keep quiet to avoid arguments?

2. Are you always worried about others’ opinions of you?

3. Have you ever lived with someone with an alcohol or drug problem?

4. Have you ever lived with someone who hits or belittles you?

5. Are the opinions of others more important than your own?

6. Do you have difficulty adjusting to changes at work or home?

7. Do you feel rejected when significant others spend time with friends?

8. Do you doubt your ability to be who you want to be?

9. Are you uncomfortable expressing your true feelings to others?

10. Have you ever felt inadequate?

11. Do you feel like a “bad person” when you make a mistake?

12. Do you have difficulty taking compliments or gifts?

13. Do you feel humiliation when your child or spouse makes a mistake?

14. Do you think people in your life would go downhill without your constant efforts?

15. Do you frequently wish someone could help you get things done?

16. Do you have difficulty talking to people in authority, such as the police or your boss?

17. Are you confused about who you are or where you are going with your life?

18. Do you have trouble saying “no” when asked for help?

19. Do you have trouble asking for help?

20. Do you have so many things going at once that you can’t do justice to any of them?

MHA writes: “If you identify with several of these symptoms; are dissatisfied with yourself or your relationships; you should consider seeking professional help. Arrange for a diagnostic evaluation with a licensed physician or psychologist experienced in treating codependency.”

TREATMENT

What Does a Healthy Relationship Look Like?

Adults who suffer from codependency issues and want to unlearn their maladaptive patterns would be best suited to treatment that allows them a safe space to explore their early childhood because this is usually when and where these behavioral patterns were developed.

There are plenty of books to read (i.e., The Collected Works of Karen Horney, for starters), group and individual therapy, or a combination of treatments that helps the sufferer connect to the dynamics in their childhood. When we (those of us who are codependent) begin to understand that our behavior was shaped by the way our caregivers reacted to us when we sought them out with our needs, then we can begin to distinguish our role and our pain from theirs. And it’s from this place that we can build new frameworks and structures for our behavior to thrive.

When we understand why we do what we do, and become informed, then we can change and can break the patterns inside our own families.

One thing to remember, though, is that when we learn new ways of behaving and being, ways that protect us, we need to maintain the practice constantly. And when we slip (and we will slip), it’s okay. Like anything, when we lose our place, we find it again, and we start from there.

Our goal is to learn, over time, how to rely on ourselves first before knowing who is reliable. When we learn how to stay true to our own needs and desires, only then will we be able to know when someone doesn’t have our best interest at heart.

Something I’ve learned the hard way is that avoiding doing the thing that must be done is more painful than doing what must be done.

And you? Does any of this strike a chord with you? Tell me in the comments!

Until next week I remain,

Amanda