Begin to Heal Intergenerational Codependency
Codependent thinking habits can be so ingrained in us that we don’t even recognize when we’re having them. Putting others before ourselves and caring more about what other people think of us than what we think of ourselves are classic signs of codependency.
And while codependent thinking is so often thought to be the product of growing up with an active alcohol or other substance user, I’m here to share a different take on it, along with my top tips to help you see and begin to shift these ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world.
I like to think of my years of codependent thinking as my having this big spotlight on my head and I was constantly shining it out onto the world to attempt to please people, to get outside approval and validation.
It was like this spotlight was focused on trying to assess and figure out what others were thinking, feeling, doing, particularly in regards to myself.
And now I’ve turned that spotlight around and I focus on me, on myself first and foremost now. And it is so, so healing. Identifying where our patterns of behavior originate is really important in unpacking our relationships with ourselves, to seeing, knowing, and loving who we are under all the muck of growing up.
The people who raised us, whether our biological parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, or a collection of caretakers came into parenting with their own baggage, from their own experiences of being children in the world, and their own ways of coming into adulthood.
Growing up is hard. Learning how to be an adult is a challenging thing for most of us, particularly when the version of adulting that was modeled by your grownups was not always so emotionally adult-y. This can look like caretakers or parents who blamed, shamed, guilted, judged their kids or others, neglectful parents, or those who were so all up in their kid’s jam that that kid – maybe you, my love – felt that they had little space to be themselves, to do what was important to them, to live into being themselves.
For fear of displeasing, failing, or letting that caretaker adult down. It can be the artistic kid who was pushed into sports, the athletic kid who was pushed into Mathletes, and on and on.
Caretakers who were codependent themselves, people-pleasers, wounded folks, narcissists, folks who are unkind—they teach codependent habits, often unwittingly, to the kids in their care. Because it’s all they know. You can only teach what you know. Being an adult is a thousand times harder than it needs to be until you learn to interrupt your unhealthy patterns of relating to yourself and others and even more so, it can be really challenging, I would imagine, as a non-parent, for those who are parenting kiddos themselves.
Until you can fully learn to forgive the folks who raised you as best they knew how, which is a process, not something to push, something to hold space for, you can end up creating and passing along intergenerational harms like codependency.
Even for those of us who are not ourselves parents, we have the chance through this work to make sure that we know what is what, and that our relationships with our partners, nieces, nephews, coworkers, neighbors, ourselves are as healthy and secure, as sane and safe as possible.
We can, through careful analysis of our thought patterns, make sure that the values and beliefs that pass from one generation to the next are ones that bring peace, joy, and happiness.
Sharon Martin, a clinical social worker who does some great work around healing from codependency writes, “The boundaries between generations are porous, with values and beliefs seeping through to the next tier.”
This quote resonates so strongly for me when thinking about codependency. This concept originated in the 1970s. The term which describes relationships in which the participants depend on one another at the cost of their relationship with themselves came about in the field of substance abuse counseling.
I don’t believe there has to be substance use or abuse in a home or a family unit for there to be codependent thought habits present. Codependent thinking develops as a response to trauma, but that trauma didn’t necessarily happen to you.
It could have been several or even one generation in the past.
For example, if there was a grandparent or even a great-grandparent who had concerns with their use of alcohol or had mental health concerns, each successive generation may have had codependency modelled for them.
And they then model that for the next and the next and so on, down to you. The intergenerational legacy of codependent thinking. Please note I won’t be using words like “addict” or “alcoholic.” Those are in air quotes because I think they’re really problematic.
They’re stigmatizing and blaming and I think we need to look at those choices in context, as coping mechanisms and not to shame or blame or guilt or label anyone who uses a substance as a way to manage feelings, situations, systems of oppression that they have no other tools to manage.
We are not taught how to manage our minds, how to feel our feelings, how to communicate with and heal our inner children, how to regulate our nervous systems, how to live with and heal trauma and stress, and not everyone on the planet learns how to do these things. So people will buffer against the feelings they don’t know how to feel or process or live with, and sometimes that looks like using substances.
Casting stones at those folks who buffer or cope by overdrinking, for example, does nothing to help them, society, families, or you, my darling. So we’re not going to do it. It makes the language a little clunkier for sure, and that’s fine. It’s worth it to be loving and understanding and to hold space for everyone’s experience.
So with that said, professionals in the field recognize that the suffering and challenges experienced by folks who grew up with caretakers dealing with addiction, and those abusing, overusing alcohol in particular, reaches beyond the substance user and into the family system.
The partner of the alcohol abuser may find their mental and emotional energy directed sometimes almost entirely towards an attempt to manage, control, or make up for the addicted person, towards cleaning up their physical and emotional messes, avoiding their abuses, protecting children, otherwise attempting to mitigate perceived disaster, like a DUI or other concerns that may arise through the use and overuse of substances.
Many relationships in which an addictive substance plays a role may become abusive.
And whether that abuse is physical, mental, emotional, or otherwise, whether it’s overt, like hitting, or they’re subtler forms, like manipulation, the person on the receiving end of the abuse has to put all of their resources into survival.
Forget thriving. You need to make it through the day. Who has time to take care of themselves when they feel they have to keep everyone else’s head above water? Thought patterns, like that one, are classic signs of codependency, in relationships informed by addiction. And codependent behaviors and thought patterns are learned.
If you know codependency shows up in your habitual thoughts, or if you’re just coming to see it in your own adult thinking now, yet you didn’t grow up with active substance use, addiction, or mental health challenges in your household, there’s a good chance that one or both of your parents was also a person with codependent thinking, or came from folks who had that way of relating to the world.
The role of the codependent thinker with someone in the midst of addiction is to say the least, exhausting, depleting, entirely unsustainable. So how do they do it? How do the countless spouses, partners, children, friends of folks with addiction stay in these unhealthy relationships for the long haul?
Codependency itself may provide some answers. A once adaptive mental strategy that ends up with painful results and may keep you in things, relationships, experiences that don’t serve you long after their expiration date. I mentioned a few minutes ago that codependent relationships are those in which the participants have melded into one another and enmeshed, which is another psychological term.
It’s often a relationship in which one or both participants lose track of their own needs, wants, emotions, and life’s purpose because they focus overly on the other.
In a classic example, I’ll talk here about a woman identified human using she/her pronouns. So imagine a partnership in which one person overuses alcohol. Perhaps there are a few children in the mix.
Home life is tense. Full of unmanaged anger, subtle threats, emotional games, rejection, judgments, many of which are fueled by alcohol or the chemical withdrawal from it. The partner who is not drinking to excess may feel obligated to shield the children from the drinker, to keep up appearances in the neighborhood, to deny their own suffering due to embarrassment, shame, fear, or what they were taught in their childhood about showing your tender side.
Her codependency on her addicted spouse, her need to fix and maintain and support at all costs causes her to lose sight of herself. But the human spirit can’t sustain such a denial of self. Our hearts need love, attention and care. We seek dynamic relationships with give and take, checks and balances.
When our primary partners can’t provide that, we turn to other sources. Enter the children. The children now become a vehicle through which the parent who is not using alcohol or another substance to excess can get the emotional support and love that the addicted parent can no longer provide.
This can result in a parent-child dyad in which the child plays the role of primary emotional support for the sober parent. They may be treated like a peer, parentified, that is put into a parent role, made to play therapist, or otherwise asked to step into shoes that are far too big and complex for them, developmentally speaking.
As these children grow up, they may see the role of selfless giver, caretaker, constant supporter, fixer of everyone else’s problems as normal and natural, and often grow up seeking relationships that replicate their experiences from growing up because the mind seeks to replicate what we already know because in its way, it’s more comfortable.
And there is the chance that we may have a restorative experience, one in which we can feel safe and supported while living out our own habits. And goodness, I know I did this again and again and again. If “needy” – and yes, I’m putting that in air quotes – feels natural, or at least familiar, then needy personalities become attractive.
Someone we can fix or change or make mold to our specifications.
The spiral of codependency thus filters into the next generation.
Does this sound familiar, my love? It’s a thing. This whole spiral, this whole dance, is something that I coach around so often because it really can be so insidious and can be a pattern that’s hard to see.
While so many folks of all genders can get stuck in codependency loops, I find it’s particularly those raised as girls in houses with addiction or codependency who are taught that their job was to buoy the not addicted parent, and to keep the addicted parent as happy as possible.
To be perfect and beyond reproach, often to a child brain feels like the safest option. So that smart kiddo brain holds tight to that charge.
To not be noticed is to not be scolded or reprimanded or seen as one more problem, so maybe your child brain worked to not even be seen at all.
And looking at these dynamics through the lens of codependency, with attention to the intergenerationality of codependent thinking, we can now pause to identify where our own present day and historical thought patterns come from.
Classic behaviors associated with codependent thinking include:
- perfectionism, which is based on the thought, “If I don’t get this right, it could all fall apart”
- tendency to ignore one’s own needs, wants, and feelings, particularly when your thought habit is to put everyone else ahead of you
- to have weak or non-existent boundaries
- to have the habit of attempting to control or fix other people, which never works out
- to have strong guilt or shame reactions, especially when you try to put yourself first, when you try to set a boundary, when you say no, or when things aren’t what you want or need them to be, and you attempt to speak to that.
Many people who grew up in families with codependent patterns also tend to hide or stuff down their feelings until they come out sideways.
In rage, self-blame or other extremes, which can be complicated by a tendency to be a people-pleaser, in a vain attempt to avoid upsetting others.
Understanding that these tendencies and behaviors are not evidence of moral decay or some deeply flawed personality, but rather, a once adaptive, loving, caring response to being brought up in a codependent family structure is the powerful first step in your healing.
Once we have a concept to hold on to, a shelf on which to put our struggles, we can take a step back and we can see them for what they are, and then can get into the challenging but essential work of shifting our thought patterns in order to change our feelings and our behaviors.
Now, if part of you is thinking, “This all sounds familiar but I didn’t grow up with an alcoholic, Vic,” think back to what Sharon Martin has to say. Generational boundaries are porous. Beliefs and values, the good, bad, and ugly seep through.
Once again, even if the folks who raised you didn’t live with addiction, there may have been alcohol overuse or other forms of abuse generations back that set those codependent gears into motion, which are still turning today.
In my own experience, I am yet to work with a client who does not know, love, or live with an alcoholic, addict, narcissist, or codependent of one stripe or another.
Addiction and addictive thinking is extremely common, and because it’s often perceived as a sort of moral failing and associated with shame, which I do not agree with at all, I see it as a coping strategy, it doesn’t always find its way into the light. And as always, my beauty, we cannot heal what we cannot see.
So what’s a human to do to begin to unlearn these habits?
To avoid passing codependency down to your children, to not act it out with your partner or your partners, at work, in whatever arena of your life where you find yourself saying yes when you mean no, worrying about what other people think about you, people-pleasing, approval-seeking, looking for validation outside yourself, it’s vital to start with you, to learn to focus your attention and energy on healing yourself and creating new thought and behavior habits. My favorite theme ever.
Step one, start learning to value yourself.
To know just how worthy of love and care you are, and that your job in this world is to show up with unconditional love for yourself first.
I love the old saying, “You can’t pour from an empty cup,” and codependent thinking takes your energetic and emotional cup and throws it against the wall.
If you’re not attending to yourself and your darling inner child first, that is, taking you for a walk, speaking kindly to you, honoring your wants and needs, reparenting yourself on the daily, then your cup shall remain empty and you may stay anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, on edge, easily frazzles, depleted, fatigued.
So often in my years as a functional medicine provider, I saw this play out as depression and anxiety, insomnia, IBS, heartburn, adrenal fatigue, thyroid concerns, menstrual issues. All that energy pouring out of you like an emotional sieve means your mind, body, and spirit are left bereft, tapped out, not getting the emotional and energetic fuel you need to have a healthy and regulated nervous system, and a body that knows you’re there for it.
If you’re always making sure everyone else is fed, my love, what are you eating? If you’re always making sure everyone else is happy, who then is making you happy? If you’re always attending to everyone else’s needs, my perfect angel, who is attending to yours?
This is not a situation that leads you to health, but rather, keeps you running like a hamster in a dangerous and exhausting wheel, the cat always at your heel.
No wonder you’re tired, my love. Codependent habits are profoundly exhausting.
Step two, begin to share your story with trusted people.
Codependency feels shameful for most humans, so you keep it a secret. However, secrets tend to breed shame. Freedom comes when you share your story and receive understanding, empathy, compassion, love. It is a vital part of healing and regulating our nervous systems, to find our way into that ventral vagal place, which is the safe and secure part of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system.
We feel safe and secure when we are thinking we are safe and secure in ourselves, for ourselves. When we neurocept or feel safety around us. And we can use social connection as a way to feel that warm, loving feeling of the ventral vagal system coming online.
I know that when I see and hug a dear friend, I feel that system start filling my body with oxytocin and other nice feeling neurochemicals. That feeling is healing. And the more you can tap into it with others, the more you’ll be able to recognize your own ability to create that feeling for and by yourself.
This may all feel so uncomfortable at first, and that’s okay. Growth is often uncomfortable, and I want to invite you to start the process of connecting with others, sharing your story with trusted people any chance you can. With their consent to hear it, of course.
I talk a lot about the power of collective healing. How we all need one another to help us out, to show us what is challenging to see in and by ourselves. This is the role of a beloved friend, a spiritual counselor, a trained therapist, and also of an experienced coach like myself. This, my love, is an integral and vital part of healing.
Step three to heal codependency, combine nervous system regulation, reparenting, and thought work that I teach my clients.
This process is based in science, self-love, and of course, woo and witchiness. Start with recognizing when you’re feeling activated, revved up.
When you feel that internal desire to tell other people what they should do, when you feel that inner voice telling you not to share your real thoughts and feelings lest someone else not like them. When you find yourself saying yes when you really mean no. When you’re not living in your authenticity because you fear someone else’s disapproval or opinion.
When you feel that revving up start inside you, or you find yourself sinking into that Eeyore state, which nerd alert, again is that dorsal ventral shutdown, that freeze state.
So you feel yourself either sinking into that “I give up” kind of place, or if you feel yourself getting activated, I want to invite you to pause and to talk to your body. This is a thing I do all the time. I spend a significant part of my day talking to myself, to my mind, to my body, to my spirit, to my inner children.
And I want to say it clearly, it’s not a problem per se that your habit is to judge yourself or to be harsh. It’s just what you’re used to doing. It’s what you’re used to feeling, and that thought and those feelings are habits and they are ones that you can shift.
And as a person who often went into sympathetic activation, that freakout, fight or flight place very quickly and easily for so much of my life, I want to honor how much that process of going sympathetic and then judging yourself and being harsh, I want to honor how much it can feel like a problem.
I want to honor how quickly my brain would criticize me for being activated. And I want to tell you, because science, that that critical voice once served you. It is coming from a place of love and it doesn’t serve you now. It keeps you feeling stuck.
Instead of meeting a harsh and critical voice with harsh criticism, be your own most loving parent and meet that voice with love.
Consider inviting it to take a backseat, to unconditional self- love, self-care, and positive self-regard. Take some deep breaths.
Remember, you can choose your next thought to create your next feeling. Take another deep breath in if that feels safe, in, and out. All is well, my love. Remind your inner children of it. I want to tell you and all your inner children that it’s okay to set boundaries.
As you begin to do this work, the next vital step is learning where your own limits are. So as you start to do this work, the next step is knowing where you want to say yes and where you want to say no. It is not just okay but fabulous to set boundaries with a thought like, “I’m going to choose me in that situation where so-and-so often starts yelling, and I’m going to leave if there are raised voices.”
Maybe you decide to think, “I’m not going to go home for the holidays this year,” knowing your family of origin may not like it, and that’s okay. Or maybe it starts really simple, like, today, I’m going to practice taking care of my needs first before anyone else’s. And I want to call attention to the importance of the word practice here.
This work of healing codependency is about practice, learning, growing, and not perfection.
This is not about doing something in some perfect way. It’s about shifting daily into a place where you are creating a feeling of self-love and self-care.
Where you are creating space to do your future self journaling. You are holding space for yourself to try breathwork, or another meditation in the morning before you jump up out of bed to attend to others.
Or before you open Instagram for external approval, a.k.a checking your likes and DMs, or whatever your habit may be to check out instead of checking in.
Finally, in an ideal world, the original codependent relationship will be fixed and can be healthy again.
Sure, that would be great and would help to diminish the harmful effects of codependency moving forward. And in reality, this doesn’t always happen, which is where the gift of thought work comes in. You can change your relationship to any and every situation regardless of what the other person does or doesn’t change, what they think, what they say.
The person struggling with a substance, with codependency, with narcissism, what have you, may not want to change their habits. And that’s okay because you get to remember that your number one job is to learn to take care of yourself first and to let other adults live their own lives on their own terms, much like you get to live your life on your own terms.
This is the process of addressing and starting to undo and unravel the legacy of intergenerational codependency. I know you can do this, my darling love, and it starts with loving yourself first. You got this, baby. I know you do.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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