The things we do as codependents are all about trying to protect a relationship and develop deeper connections. But in actuality, codependency keeps us outside of true relationship. So how does codependency ruin relationships and how can we break free from these unhealthy patterns?
We are going to cover this in three main points. The number one point is we are going to talk about the five core symptoms of codependency. Number two, the backward logic of codependency. And then third, we’re going to talk about breaking free from codependency.
Let’s start this conversation by talking about the five core symptoms of codependency.
Number one is low self-esteem. My guess would be that because I haven’t had the courage to go step into some of these things I need to because of my codependency, and it’s lowered my self-esteem. It’s had a negative effect in that way because I don’t have the confidence to move forward fully as myself. Ingrid Bacon is a London-based mental health researcher, and her research led her to define the core characteristic of codependency as “a lack of identity or a low sense of self.” So let me say that again: Codependency is a lack of identity and a low sense of self.
Did anybody ever watch that movie “Runaway Bride?” It’s Julia Robertson, Richard Gere, not to be confused with “Pretty Woman.” At the end, she takes time for herself to get to know herself. She doesn’t even know what kind of eggs she likes because she just takes on the characteristics of who she’s dating. So if the person she’s dating likes their eggs over easy, then she likes her eggs over easy. And so that’s what I think about here. You struggle with a low sense of self. You haven’t been able to define those things for yourself, step into it courageously, and show up as your full self. And it just reiterates [low self-esteem] over and over. You can’t find the meaning, can’t find the purpose in your own identity. Your needs aren’t being validated. And the lies say that you’re not a worthwhile person. Your needs aren’t important or “everything is my fault.” These things that play over and over in your head when you aren’t able to have that identity.
One of the biggest things that feeds into my codependency is a low self-esteem. And it’s interesting. I didn’t really realize how codependent I was until I became a single dad. I covered up my low self-esteem with achievement, and I piled on, whether it be the accolades of the music business or whatever I perceived that I accomplished. It was compensating for the fact that I didn’t feel worthwhile. I felt like I didn’t have anything to offer. And honestly, when I started Solo Parent, I was really struggling with this. I didn’t have confidence that I had anything to bring. It was all about other people. And as a missionary kid being brought up in the church, my needs were way at the back. It’s “everybody else first.”
Although this is just one of five core symptoms, I think it’s the essential foundation of what codependency is. And Melody Beattie, (who’s like the OG of codependency) has her new edition of “Codependent No More.” She talks about how codependency is loving someone else more than we love ourselves and taking more responsibility for someone else than we do for our own needs. And so it fuels all these other tendencies: seeking approval from others, performance, not wanting to get into conflict, valuing your ex’s experience more than your own needs. It’s just absolutely foundational. The second core symptom is people-pleasing behaviors. I was taught [people pleasing] from a young age and I am still guilty of this. I will go along to get along and abandon parts of myself and things that I need because I think it’s my job to keep other people happy, and I was raised that way.
The third one core symptom is closely tied to what we were talking about in low self-esteem and people-pleasing behavior because it creates a dependency. And that can be a one-sided dependency or a mutual dependency. Going back to the “Runaway Bride” example, that’s a dependency on someone. You can’t be yourself because you need someone else to tell you who you are, or your self-esteem/self-worth relies so heavily on someone else that you’re dependent on another person. And so you lose your individuality. I know I came out of my marriage absolutely not knowing who I was at all. I didn’t know I liked my eggs scrambled hard, and I like my eggs fried hard but there were deeper things that I didn’t know about myself—things that I enjoyed or didn’t like or was taking on because I was just trying to please him. You just totally lose yourself. And then on top of that, the lie is “I’m only lovable if I’m needed.” And I felt like he couldn’t survive without me, and I was so needed that I lost my sense of self. I was people pleasing and doing everything I could not to lose the relationship.
The fourth point is caretaking. This really popped to the top of my list when I became a single parent. I had full custody of all three of my girls, so there was a legitimate need, but I also put their needs way above my own needs. I had to take care of them, and so that’s why I rationalized, “Well, I’m just doing my job.” But the truth is, my own needs were way in the back. It was all about them. And I think that that’s something to pay attention to. If we find ourselves as a caretaker of other people’s needs, chances are you might be a codependent. A silly example of this that can apply to so many people is the question, “Where do you want to go for dinner?” And if you’re that person that says, “Oh, I don’t really care, you choose,” there it is, ding, ding, ding! Instead of saying, “Actually, I’d like to have sushi tonight.” Or, “Hey, I’m really craving Italian or Mexican” and being specific and saying, “This is what I want.”
The fifth core symptom is difficulty setting boundaries. As a Christian raised in the church, it was so common to be taught and encouraged to put other people before myself and make sacrifices for other people’s happiness. And that made it very difficult to say, “no.” I tend to become overcommitted. Some of that is FOMO, but a big part is I find myself pushing past my boundaries from these codependent tendencies, not caring enough about my own needs, caring more about what someone else needs, and them being able to almost take advantage of what might be considered goodwill. But it is actually an unhealthy tendency to give away parts of myself. The paradox of those codependent tendencies is that we feel like we’re nurturing the relationship when actually we’re doing the opposite.
Let’s talk about the backward logic of codependency.
We think we’re being a good person, we’re being so giving and sacrificial, and in reality, the very things that we’re doing (that we think would grow and protect a relationship) destroy it because we are not showing up as our authentic selves. We are not asking for our needs to be met. Maybe we’re not in touch with how we’re feeling. We continue to give our time and energy to the other person, and it can become all consuming. We find ourselves being “overly invested” in the therapy world. I call this “over-functioning.” It’s where someone is exhausted and not happy in their relationship, and it’s actually destroying them and destroying the quality of the connection. They’re so busy being concerned about the other person that they’ve lost any sense of self.
I’ve gotten a lot healthier in some of these areas, but these things are daily issues for me where I feel like if I don’t do it, no one else will. No one else is going to do it. And that may be partially true, but also, if you’re not taking care of yourself, you shouldn’t be doing that. The one thing that I didn’t want to admit is I think I had an overdeveloped belief in my power to change someone’s behavior. And I saw this in my life living with an active addict before the divorce. I really felt that I caused the addiction because I was so consumed with building my own career, building a team that became another family that was a substitute for my own family, that she numbed out, and it was my fault that she did that.
So I bore the responsibility of creating the addiction. Then later as she was struggling with it, I thought that if I was just patient enough or I just did penance enough, if I just stayed in it long enough, that I would get her to the place where she would want to be healthy. And sometimes she showed glimmers of it and went to rehab, but at the end of the day, it was damaging to myself. I was building this pattern of “It’s my responsibility to control someone else’s behavior,” and that’s just not true, not healthy.
I remember in several relationships, not just my marriage, I would say, “This is what I need from you,” and not in those words, more of a protest kind of way. I’m always thinking about the relationship, and then it’s like, “Oh, why can’t you do this, this, and this? I want you to bring home flowers. I just want you to tell me you’re grateful. I just want this. I just want that, blah, blah, blah.” And then ultimately they get defensive, they get mad. And then I come back with trying to manage or shape that to get what I want or need instead of just saying, “Hey, I’m feeling this, this, and this. This is what I need from you” and stepping back and just watching. The hardest thing for me in codependency, is letting people respond how they want to respond instead of trying to control the outcome.
Jax is my 10-year-old son, and we were laying on the couch watching a show together, and all of a sudden he gets up and moves to the other couch and I was like, “Hey, what happened? What’s going on?” And he’s like, “Oh, well, you just said a few minutes ago that you get claustrophobic, and so I just wanted to give you your space.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” Well, we were talking about claustrophobia because the dad on the show we were watching was crawling under the house, and I was getting antsy watching him crawl under the house in a tight space. It made me think, “How much of that is him being thoughtful and considerate, and how much of that is him being codependent?”
I think it’s a great question, and I think only Jax knows the answer to that. It is. And that’s so tough about codependency. It can be really subconscious. It can come from our upbringing. It can run an undercurrent in our lives. And to begin to distinguish that, we have to begin to pay attention to self and start to ask ourselves, “What was I trying to accomplish? Was I just being thoughtful or was I actually trying to totally people please or not get them mad or manage their feelings or experience or take responsibility?” And so it really requires self-reflection.
How did you break free from codependency? Or are you breaking free?
I’m trying to allow things to happen as they will and not control the outcome. Also understanding that differences in people are okay and it’s the nature of relationships. We don’t have to see eye to eye on everything. Going back to the “Runaway Bride” thing, having the differences, allowing yourself to show up in the full beauty of yourself no matter what that looks like in the little things is good. It’s a beautiful part about life. I think about this with Jax, with my son. He does things differently than I do, and I appreciate that so much because it keeps life exciting and it’s such a beautiful thing that someone can fully live and be themselves. And when we allow someone that kind of freedom—particularly our kids, it shows them that they are valuable exactly as they are, and that they don’t need to shape shift. So many of us codependents do it to fit into other people’s boxes or keep them happy or manage or take responsibility for them. But when we allow them to be fully themselves without trying to squash them into a box, it gives that freedom to truly have an accurate, positive view of self. It’s one of the keys to breaking free from codependency, finding a place of gentle, humble self-love, which are the words of Melody Beatty. We begin to care as much about ourselves as we do about someone else, not more than, not less than, but as much. And that’s such a foundational part of breaking that habit. And we need to turn that gaze inward towards self first. Being in that sort of healthy, loving relationship with yourself and with other people actually makes life bigger, not smaller. It opens, it brings freedom. I think that’s a huge word with that. And it almost takes off the blinders a little bit and the things that cause you to have tunnel vision. I would say that codependency is tunnel vision towards managing another person.
I got to a place where I didn’t even know what I wanted. You used the example earlier, Elizabeth, of choosing where you go, and honestly, most of the time I don’t really care. There are some times, but beyond those moments, I didn’t really know what I wanted in a relationship or in my life. I mean, I had dreams and aspirations of achievement and building something and starting something, but as a person, what was it that I was hungry for or what was it that was really important to me? And I think what started it for me was I started blogging. I won’t journal for my own sake. I’ll journal in the form of a blog for other people that tells you that I’m a codependent because I couldn’t have the discipline to go, “This is going to be good for me. I’m going to start journaling what I want.” And so to me, breaking free of codependency looks like taking the moment just for yourself, journaling out, talking to put it out there, and think, what is it that you want? It’s hard for a codependent to get started but once you start the flow, it just starts coming. But it takes time and effort and focus to be able to start identifying. It’s not just about trying to control your feelings or your experience with me and that kind of thing. Those are all disciplines that I can get my head around. But at the root of it, the self-esteem thing that you were talking about, “I don’t deserve to get what I want” was a root thing that I needed to pull out. I do think that it has to do a lot with just getting in touch with what you want. It can be uncomfortable as a recovering codependent to begin to elevate my own needs and wants in that way. And I never want anyone to swing to the other side where they’re very selfish. But elevating oneself to the equal position of somebody else is important because of that idea of worth. We all have inherent worth and we’re each valuable, and that can really protect us from becoming overly dependent or overly independent. It allows us to have an accurate view of self and an accurate view of the other that can equal a healthy relationship, which is challenging if that hasn’t been modeled for us, if it hasn’t been our experience, if we’ve tried to ask for our wants and needs to be met and then they’ve been met with anger, aggression, or neglect. And so it’s difficult. And so wherever you are in this journey, I think it’s so important to remember that idea of being gentle and kind to yourself.
How does this idea of self-care, putting yourself first, all this, how does that play into your faith walk?
I think of what God summed up in the two primary commandments of “How do I walk this journey? Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself.” We can only love people well to the ability that we love ourselves. Otherwise, it’s an unhealthy way of managing, controlling, enabling in a twisted, very human attempt to get what we want or need to feel safe and connected. But in reality, we’re not honoring that connection to God and self if we are giving away all of our boundaries and not considering what we want and need. We can’t truly love others without loving ourselves first.
This is an ugly, ugly little truth about me. It would come Friday afternoon. These were in the later days of our marriage. My ex was excited to be off. It’s Friday. He may have already started drinking by this point. He’s bouncing around the kitchen, looking forward to what’s happening. He’s flirty, fun, trying to keep things lively, has music playing and all that stuff. I did everything I could to bring him to my level of ugly mad. He was already drinking. Great, here we go again. This is going to be another long weekend where he’s passed out by whatever time and he’s going to binge all weekend and then come Sunday, he’s going to be “poor, pitiful me,” crying because it’s Sunday and he has the blues. It was the cycle that happened every weekend. And Fridays, I was just not okay. And I would do everything I could to pick a fight. I just wanted him mad. I didn’t want him to be happy and excited. And I think that’s one way that my codependency showed up. But then on the flip side of that, on Sundays, when he was pitiful and upset, I was great. I hadn’t done a weekend of drinking. I went to church that day. I had a great afternoon with Jax. I’ve dealt with everything that needs to be dealt with, and now he wants to bring me down to his level.
And if he’s in a bad mood, then everybody needs to be in a bad mood. I think about how we unintentionally do that to other people. And I allow other people to dictate my feelings in that way. If Robert’s in a bad mood, then all of a sudden I’m in a bad mood. I came in perfectly fine, but all of a sudden I’m in a bad mood because you’re in a bad mood and I’ve taken it on. I think a lot about having a healthy balance of dependence, interdependence. I can be okay even if I walk in a room and Robert’s in a bad mood. I can be okay enough to say, “Hey, I noticed something’s going on. What’s going on? Is there anything you need from me? How can I be here with you in this kind of thing?” But then I can walk out of that room, pray for him, feel confident that I’ve shown up with all I can and carry on knowing that I need to keep Robert in my prayers, but I am not going to be in a bad mood the rest of the day because of it. It’s not yours to carry. It’s not yours to own. Those are his boundaries of containment for his feelings and emotions. You have your own.
Codependency causes you to carry the weight of the world if you choose to and you do not have to. It’s identifying and understanding that the both/and can live in the same place. You and I can have very different experiences about something. I could be in a bad mood, you could be in a great mood, and they both can exist in the same place. Harmony doesn’t mean that we’re a hundred percent aligned with the same experience. Harmony is actually complimentary. In a musical sense, it’s not the same note. It’s harmony. And I didn’t really recognize that until later in my solo journey. But as we embrace this both/and idea, my kids may be upset with me and it may be challenging and it truthfully is challenging—they’re not just moaning about it. And it can be okay. Both/and was never part of my codependent conversations. If we don’t deal with codependency, you will carry that into the next one. If you don’t get a healthy muscle built up during your solo season of recognizing codependency and how that needs to be worked out, I pity the fool. I pity the relationship because you’re going to be carrying that with you. And if you haven’t worked it out, this cycle will repeat. You can obviously heal later and I still am healing, but what a perfect opportunity right now to understand that not only do you need to not be codependent, you need to understand it will ruin relationships. And the cycle continues not only in yourself and your relationships, but we pass those behaviors onto our kids. They will become who we are. So much more is caught than taught. It’s so important to address this (maybe ironically) with our kids’ needs in mind while also honoring ourselves. I don’t want my kids to be outsourcing their happiness to another person. Happiness is an inside job, and we each have to take responsibility for that. And that’s one of the keys as a recovering codependent.
Earlier this month, we talked to Chip Dodd about loneliness. And being a codependent is an incredibly lonely place to be. And ironically, we are codependent to avoid disconnection. It’s a catch 22. We have to be gentle with ourselves because it takes time. And the truth is, everything we talk about as far as dysfunction in our life came because we were trying to cope with something that felt unbearable. So be patient, there’s a reason it’s there. There’s a reason that you’re codependent. God knows about it, you’ll find out about it. But take your time and be patient and gradually work your way out of it. But it is really key for us to get rid of in our lives as much as we can. And I’ll tell you this, I’m married again, been married 10 years. I still deal with this all the time. Od habits die so hard. I mean, it’s crazy. And I think that sometimes we can see some progress when, instead of working in codependent behaviors, maybe our thinking is codependent—but we’re not acting on it as much. So I reiterate that. Be kind and gentle to yourself. We’re all in different places.
Takeaways
- There are five core symptoms of codependency including low self-esteem, people pleasing behaviors, difficulty setting boundaries, caretaking, and dependency.
- With codependency, the very things that would normally grow and protect a relationship actually bring harm to it. There’s a backward logic taking place, and you’re not stupid if you’re buying into it.
- We need to become aware of our codependent tendencies in order to break free from them. And I think that is absolutely the number one thing we need to identify.
Listener Question
When you fight or have conflict with someone, do you allow that to happen in front of your kids?
Some people are very good at guarding their kids from a fight or conflict with someone, but even when it happens with our kids, I think conflict is a real part of life. It’s inevitable and it’s important. That whole idea of differentiation and being your own person invites conflict. And sometimes codependents are very conflict-avoidant, so we don’t enter into it and that isn’t healthy either. If you let your kids see conflict or you experience conflict with them, what they also need to see or experience is repair. Do we go back and talk it through? How do we go back and talk about it? Are they allowed to be themselves and have a voice and let their feelings be heard and validated? Do they see that you allow that in you too? Or if they see a fight between you and their co-parent, do you go back and say, “Hey, listen, your dad and I talked that through. I know we had those words in front of you, but we do care about each other. We care about you. And we talked it through and we are okay now.” I think it’s really important to help our kids know that we are doing the hard work of repair because conflict is inevitable and it’s healthy.
We want to control the experience that our kids are having or witnessing. And I’m not saying you have conflict in front of then on purpose, but the repair piece is so important. I couldn’t have said it better myself for sure. Something happened the other day and there was a conflict, and I went up to my room to cry it out. Jax came upstairs and caught me crying and he was like, “Are you okay? What do you need?” It was so sweet. I was like, “I’m good, buddy. This is what happened.” I didn’t give him all the dirty details, but I just said, “This is kind of what happened, but I’m going to be okay.” But maybe I need to go back to him and say, “Hey, just want you to know we worked that out. Everything’s good.” I think the repair piece is huge.
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Resources
Codependent No More by Melody Beattie
