Overcome codependency to form healthy relationships

Have you ever set yourself on fire to keep another person warm?

Have you ever thrown yourself under the bus to make sure that someone else got a really comfortable seat on that bus?

Have you ever abandoned your own needs and wants to make sure a friend, a relative, a colleague, a date or a partner got their needs and wants met?

Have you ever silenced yourself to give space for someone else’s voice?

This, my friend, is codependency.

As codependents, we are compelled to act against our best interests.

We are addicted to self-sabotage, to throwing ourselves under the bus, to going without heat so that others stay warm, to pleasing and appeasing others, at huge cost to our wellbeing.

I consider myself an expert in codependency.

I spent decades acting out the codependent traits I learned in childhood and I’ve spent the last two decades understanding and dismantling my codependency.

That’s a lot of decades.

Put together, that’s most of my life.

And the journey continues.

The term codependency covers a multitude of ills.

At its root lie fear, insecurity and low self-esteem, while its branches include denial, compliance, control and avoidance.

Let’s start with the root.

As a kid, I didn’t feel safe, secure, valuable or enough.

I didn’t feel safe to have a voice or express my truth.

I suppressed my feelings and silenced myself to avoid annoying the scary grown-ups or rocking the already unstable boat.

In fact, I stuffed my feelings, literally stuffed down the anger, confusion, grief, loss and upset with food, then alcohol, before finding other coping mechanisms to avoid my feelings - compulsive work and exercise and enmeshed, drama-fuelled relationships with unhealthy people.

I got high or I numbed out to escape the pain I couldn’t express.

In terms of the branches, I hid in denial to protect myself.

I denied what was going on around me. I denied how I felt. I denied how much it hurt and I denied what I was doing to myself with food, booze, exercise, compulsive work and painful relationships.

I avoided my own truth and I avoided telling you the truth, because what if you didn’t like me or got angry with me?

If my baseline belief is ‘I’m not safe, people aren’t safe and the world isn’t safe’, naturally I’m going to avoid doing anything to exacerbate the situation.

I’m smart, I’m sensitive, I’m intuitive, I can read the room (all codependent superpowers, by the way. Yes, there is an upside). So why would I make things any worse for myself?

I also complied, lying down like a doormat, offering myself up to be trampled on.

I said ‘Yes, of course’ when I meant ‘No way, José’.

I said, ‘That’s fine’ when I wanted to yell, ‘That’s totally not OK with me’ or angrier words to that effect.

And finally, the control …

My control kicked in when I was a kid. I thought that if I could control what I ate and how I looked, I could control how you felt about me.

If I was thin, pretty and perfect, I could get you to love me or maybe I could make Mum happy or convince Dad to come back.

If I could just attain perfection, perhaps I’d be accepted and I’d be safe.

Only my attempts to control my eating and my appearance backfired spectacularly when I was 16. I began to binge eat and once I started, I couldn’t stop.

I also tried to control how you felt about me by pleasing you and appeasing you and by performing brilliantly at my job - until I burnt out.

At the other extreme, and I’m not proud of this, I endeavoured to control you by putting you down.

Yes, codependents aren’t always the nicest person in the room.

We feel compelled to put people at ease but we also feel compelled to put people at disease to cling on to safety, keep love at a distance or to boost our fragile self-worth.

In my romantic relationships especially, I would find fault with my date or partner, criticise and judge them, in my head and out loud.

This served a purpose.

My criticism pushed the guy away, putting distance between us, which was convenient because my subconscious didn’t want him to come too close.

Deep down, I was afraid of intimacy, afraid of loving and losing, afraid of being hurt and abandoned because of my childhood, so it felt safer to keep him at arm’s length.

Loving wholeheartedly meant letting go of control, taking a risk, and I wasn’t prepared to do that. My tender heart had been through enough.

By judging men as inadequate, I could also feel better about myself, which is handy for someone with chronic low self-esteem.

I put them down to big myself up. Again, I’m not proud of this and I forgive myself.

Healing takes time but we begin our road to recovery by understanding the grip that codependency has on our lives and relationships.