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What Is Codependency?
by Wendy Freebourne
Codependency is an addiction to unhealthy, unproductive relationships.
You repeat patterns that cause you pain, yet you feel unable to break
them. These relationships have a compulsive quality; you get hurt,
but you keep going back for more, in the hope of changing something.
In codependent relationships you comply. You adapt to the dysfunction
of the relationship and deny your own reality, especially what you
are feeling.
You also control. You try to manipulate your partner, and the relationship,
to be what you want them to be, when they may not be. You control
yourself in order to try to fit when you do not. So compliance is
a passive way of controlling.
Compliance and controlling are essentially dishonest. Dishonesty
in relationships does not, ultimately, work; clarity and honesty
do. Denial of what is causes it to backfire on you, to appear in
unexpected and uncomfortable ways. If you deny your own reality, you
will attract it in the form of painful lessons, taught to you by
your enemies, or those who hurt and anger you in some way.
When you comply, adapting with the needs of another person, bending
yourself to fit, you lose your sense of self. This causes you pain.
You are in a constant state of grieving for this lost Self, and longing
to be united with it again. You transfer this longing onto another
person, so that they become your Self; you fall in love with them
as a reflection of yourself that you do not own. They become your
soul.
You become dependent for your sense of self. You feel you cannot live
without the other person, because, without them to reflect you, to
give you life, you cease to be. You merge with them, you lose your identity,
your boundaries, and have no protection, are open to abuse and violation.
You become addicted to the thrill, the rise in adrenalin, that makes
you feel vital and alive. You deny the fear you feel. Because the denial
of feelings keeps you numb and dead, you need a `fix` to wake you up
again; you crave more. This is the basis of love addiction. Dangerous,
non-productive relationships become exciting; you do not register
danger, but get high on it instead.
This merging is what we call falling in love. In fact, you fall
in longing. Healthy people grow to love, gradually, as they get
to know each other. You cannot love what we do not know. Healthy people
form relationships that are not exclusive, that create love. People
around them feel it. Codependents create relationships that shut
others out.
You can experience this pain as a longing for God, putting that God
outside of yourself and giving him/her responsibility for your life.
You use spirituality as your drug, as an avoidance, to deny your feelings,
your reality. You can space out on it. Or you make gods of other people.
Your compliance to their needs gets them to rescue you. You try to
get them to parent you, to meet the needs that were not met for you
in your infancy, when you are not an infant now, and when those needs
are no longer appropriate to your adult life. You abdicate from responsibility
for yourself but take responsibility for others instead, just as you
tried to do for parents who were inadequate for you. In handing over
control of your own life and trying to control the lives of others,
you create even more pain, when you are trying to avoid or heal it.
The more you deny yourself, the more you are trapped in pain and
longing; the more you are constantly searching. But you will never
find the Self that you are seeking in other people, in relationships,
because it is not there, outside of you, it is inside you; it is not
a god, but your own divinity.
The other paradox is that, as long as you involve yourself in other
people's lives, trying to live through them, at the expense of your
own; as long as you sacrifice your Self and your life to someone
or something else, rather than contributing towards the greater
whole, the emptier you will feel, and the more you will depend on
those outside sources to fill you up. You compromise for the sake
of a false sense of security and accept less than you would like
it to be.
This is the addictive quality of codependency. You use people and
behaviours; you may use substances too, to kill the pain of your non-being
and to fill up the emptiness, the void that you feel, when you do
not have a life of your own, a sense of meaning and purpose. You cannot
have a life until you have a self to live that life, which means
a complete self with personal desires and feelings. Yet you are afraid
to confront yourself. You do not believe in your ability to create
your own reality, to fill yourself up from your own resources, because
you have been taught dependency. Codependency has been encouraged
in our society. We are taught to believe in our helplessness because
this benefits others and gives them a sense of a power that they
would not otherwise possess.
When you hand over your responsibility, you become a victim. You blame, shame, and express your anger as rage and impotence. You
feel constant frustration and resentment. Most of your strategies
are set up to avoid your greatest fear, abandonment, and feeling
it. As well as clinging, to people or fantasies, obsessions, you
isolate in order not to feel the need for other people. Then you
may get your needs met in manipulate ways, by making people dependent
on you. This is called counter-dependency. You appear not to need
anybody.
You fear intimacy because you will lose your boundaries if you do not
know how to be an individual, with your own identity, separate and
independent. Mainly you have not been encouraged to separate, in
healthy ways, from your family, from dependencies in your society.
You have not been encouraged in self-responsibility. Yet you have
been encouraged to appear independent and not need anybody.
You have experienced pain in the past, losses you have never
grieved. You will experience losses in the future. But the pain you
feel when you grieve is short-term, freeing, cleansing, sweet and
releasing, soft pain, when you dare to look inside yourself and
face this pain of the past. It is different to the hard, long-term
pain of pain on pain that you accumulate when you put yourself into
relationships or situations that recreate the pain of your childhood
and prevent you from taking responsibility for yourself and yoor
life today.
You do need other people, in a healthy way. A healthy society functions
through inter-dependence. I believe that your developmental process
takes you from dependence, which is biological, healthy and normal
for infants, through independence, which you need in order to separate you from your family and create an identity, to inter-dependence. It
is only when you are a separate human being that you can share who
you are with others.
In my experience, it is important to examine the underlying causes
of pain and distress, to draw a map of your childhood as the
matrix out of which you, as an adult, were formed. I have never found
it helpful to dwell in the past, but only to use it as a reference,
and also to be able to identify when you are living in it, and not
in the present. I think it is important to respect these regressions
for what they are, and to feel the feelings as they arise, learning
to accept them as real for then although not appropriate for now,
converting them into what is appropriate for your age, needs and
abilities today. In this way you can find your way out of codependency.
Your sharing will then be out of choice, from a place of freedom
in yourself. Your relationships will complement what you have, rather
than compensating for what you lack.
Adapted and reproduced from a paper published in The Natural Network
Newsletter 1996
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