Codependency is an addiction to unhealthy, unproductive

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.