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.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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