Codependent Habits and How to Heal Them
Codependent thinking is common for so many of us. This is when we put someone else’s needs ahead of our own and then resent them for it.
You can begin to shift out of the codependent thinking pattern and into a mutually interdependent way of thinking, feeling, and showing up in the world.
As adults, we tend to emulate the relationships we saw growing up in our families of origin. For some of us, that means speaking our needs clearly and without guilt or shame. For some of us though, those thought habits can be quite the opposite.
Codependence is a huge and complex topic. When codependency is part of your thought patterns, it can touch every aspect of your life.
Melody Beattie, the author of Codependent No More, defines a codependent person as one who has let another person’s behavior affect them and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior.
I see that. I get that. I think there’s a lot of subtlety in there and for more on this topic, do read that book.
One of the things that can happen when we have codependent thought habits is that we can lose touch with our authenticity. We can stop claiming our autonomy in relationships.
When we look at ourselves as babies and children, we are inherently dependent on our caregivers in every way. We form attachments as we formed our thought habits. As we age, we learn to become aware of and start to shift our thought pattern as growing creatures.
For many of us, codependent thinking habits start in our early lives.
They are our behavior model as children demonstrated by codependent parents or other caregivers. Because we’re inherently dependent on these caregivers, it’s common to learn to do what they do and to think that it’s completely normal.
Codependence is common in households with addiction, alcoholism, narcissism, parents who are self-absorbed, unreliable or unavailable. Same goes for parents who haven’t done their work or haven’t healed their family legacy, their ancestral heritage of codependent habits and thinking, or when there’s violence or other abuse.
Codependency also commonly exists in households without these concerns but where you were taught that your value lies in keeping your family happy, getting good grades, or winning a competition so that you will be more lovable.
Codependency exists if you felt like your worth or value in the world was or is dependent on something other than your inherent value as a human.
The truth is, you don’t have to say, do or accomplish anything to be lovable and of value in this world.
Codependency is also common among parentified children. Those kiddos asked to act as grownups before it was developmentally appropriate. They can be asked to take care of adults and others in their lives and learn to repeat this caretaking pattern as adults for other adults.
If you grew up in these types of home environments or were asked to fill a parent role as a kiddo, then you may have learned to think and behave with some degree of codependence.
If you just say yes even when you don’t mean yes out of fear of upsetting someone else, this could be a sign of codependence. You may have never learned how to set healthy boundaries or even know what those feel like.
You may have put your self-care aside, or not even know what it feels like to prioritize your self-care, your opinions, your wants, your needs.
This happens often because what’s going on in the home isn’t discussed or acknowledged. Check out Coping Mechanisms and Obsessive Thoughts to learn more about how our brilliant child selves learn to do things that are just not great as adults.
What often happens is that things are ostensibly bananas in a home, there’s things going on that just aren’t objectively healthy. There may be abuse, there may be substance use, there may be a lot of narcissism, there may be a self-absorbed parent or one that’s not showing up.
As a kiddo, often because what’s going on isn’t discussed or acknowledged, your super smart kid brain learns to hide your thoughts and feelings around these things.
You stuff them down until your needs become foreign, first and foremost to yourself. This is when we get resentful.
When you lose touch with your own wants and needs while focusing on others, you can come to feel like you don’t deserve good things in life. You feel like you don’t deserve to be treated well or lovingly, to be able to set boundaries at all, much less to have them met, honored, cared about or prioritized by others.
It’s also super common in codependents to look externally for validation and to overreact when you don’t get that validation you desire.
Meanwhile, if you grew up feeling like you couldn’t trust others or needed to control the world in order to literally survive as a child, as an adult, you can feel the need to control or attempt to control the people in your life.
You might make demands that are less than reasonable and thereby set others up to disappoint you. A pattern that may feel all too familiar is how uncomfortable things can feel totally comfortable because they’re what you’ve always known.
Examining this can be super challenging because codependent thinking can feel like or can actually be all we’ve ever known.
So many of us have been taught to think, feel, and act in some of these ways by our culture and by our society. Many of us have those societal lessons compounded by our family of origin or our caretakers.
We are trained to think that being codependent is how we show love.
We are taught to put others before ourselves, deny our own truth, our own needs, and act in a way that we believe will make others feel something. We can thus feel safe or okay if we’re controlling someone else’s thoughts and feelings.
Even though beginning to change these codependent thought habits may be hard, I want to remind you to pause, take a deep breath, consider opening up some space in your heart.
My love, I want to remind you, you can do hard things.
You can do challenging things. You can change your entire life and way of thinking one little day at a time if you want to. I have this faith in you. If you don’t have faith in you yet, that’s okay. I’ll hold that space and that faith for you. Borrow mine until you’ve got your own.
Having codependent thoughts and actions doesn’t mean that you suck or that you’re doing life wrong. It’s literally just a thought habit. One that may leave you attending to everyone but you, obsessing about other people and their thoughts, feelings, wants, needs and actions—and that’s okay.
You get to pause now to raise your awareness around the ways you may be pinning your happiness on other people’s reactions to you.
Because some of us have spent a lifetime chasing approval from others to validate our self-worth, we may not even know what we truly like or don’t like.
We may not have given the topic of our own minds or our own desires enough, or any, time and thought.
That is okay. This is a process of self-discovery and maturation. We are learning to shift from emotional childhood to emotional adulthood.
The insidiousness of codependence is that this pattern can set up parts of ourselves to think that we can’t trust other people or other parts of ourselves.
We can’t trust that we know what we want and need, much less to speak our truth. If we can’t trust ourselves to have our own backs, how could we ever trust those we’ve chosen to love or to be in a relationship with to honor our truth?
We may worry that if we say no, state our needs or take a break to take care of ourselves, then we won’t be loved. We fear abandonment, which is a primal mammalian fear that can send your body into fight, flight, freeze. This sympathetic nervous system activation keeps us from taking action on our own behalf.
This is normal. If you’ve grown up with codependence in a family with alcoholism or narcissism or whatever the setting was that led you to be surrounded by codependency, it is normal to have these stories in your mind and spirit.
Remember please to be gentle, loving, kind, and patient with your adult self and your inner children as you begin these processes, or deep in the processes of releasing codependence.
One of the hallmarks of codependent thinking is to beat yourself up relentlessly. So please be kind with yourself.
Here are some steps that have worked for me and my clients to begin to move out of codependent thinking and behavior, and back into deep centered self-love.
To build trust and safety within yourself, engaging in a process of reparenting can be transformational.
Perhaps you learned in childhood that the people who love you and who are meant to care for you will hurt you, abandon you, or not support you in feeling loved.
As a kiddo, you don’t have a lot of options and you’re pretty new to this planet. You may blame yourself because it’s less scary than believing that your caretakers are simply fallible humans who may not be doing it the way you wish they were.
Reparenting means learning to show up for yourself as your own most loving parent and to care for and attend to your inner child the way your little one needed back when you were actually young.
This step is vital, especially if you learned to have codependent thinking in your childhood.
Codependent thinking can make us feel like a child no matter our physical age. It can activate our little bambino and let that little one run the emotional show.
Bringing your awareness to when your inner child or inner children may be activated for you, opens up a world of healing. You can step in and give your inner child and children the deep love and attention you may not have had as a child.
Second, in order to shift negative self-talk and self-doubt, it’s important to cultivate a daily practice of self-care by showing up for yourself in the ways that you deserve. You can practice shifting your thinking, which is the root cause of feeling negative or doubtful of yourself.
In a way, it doesn’t matter what self-care you do, just that you do it.
Whatever self-care means to you, commit to it. Take small steps and bring one teeny tiny thing in each day. Consider looking at the things that you’re already doing for yourself every day and calling them self-care.
Self-care is reparenting in action. It is about you learning to put you first.
Self-care can be simply holding space for you to drink your morning coffee. You can sit down for two minutes instead of running around taking care of everyone else.
By self-care, I don’t mean spa days or expensive trips though yeah, those things can be a delight.
I mean taking five minutes a day to do the future self planning, learning to be your own watcher to hear your own voice and saying yes and no when you want to, despite the fear.
You get to practice giving yourself what you need first and can then turn to those you love.
You can turn to your beloved community from a place of deep authenticity, sovereignty, and interdependence in your own mind and body.
It’s about knowing that this will be uncomfortable but doing it anyway because this work is uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is totally okay.
I want to invite you to start to bring your awareness to times when you may feel compelled to tell others what to think or do. Consider what it would feel like to just pause, breathe, and not say anything.
What would it feel like to let others just live their own lives and thus, to begin to live your own more fully?
This is where emotional consent comes in. Ask if someone wants your opinion before foisting it on them. Ask for the emotional space you need in conversation. It’s a beautiful practice.
Begin to hold space for what can feel like scary changes.
Begin to cultivate curiosity around what life can look like when you’re not rolling around in codependent thinking, not obsessing about or trying to control other people.
Begin to get in touch with your own wants and needs, and to practice speaking them in your own mind and then aloud.
Maybe it’ll be lonely or boring to not spend your time thinking about other people the way you used to, and that’s okay. Maybe you’ll have more space for doing the things you want to do like reading, exercising or making ceramics.
You’ll have more space and time for breathwork and thought work.
You get more space and time for these things when you’re not so wrapped up in other people’s drama.
Part of living a life where you’re focused on other people is that you may be out of touch with what you actually like when you’re not basing your life story on other people’s likes. You might like country music or baking or something else that surprises you.
Shifting your focus to what you like and want is a shift towards autonomy and interdependence.
At first, there can be so much emptiness in your life when you stop focusing on others.
I want to encourage you to be curious about your thoughts, your reactions to other people and your judgments of others. Notice your likes and dislikes as you get to know yourself through the lens of autonomy—the lens of putting yourself first.
Especially as women, we’re taught that our main interests are beauty, relationships, family, exercise (as a way to stay slim and thus lovably beautiful) and for some of us now, career. These are the things that we can be interested in. I’m curious how many women, especially mothers are making time for hobbies, for creativity.
Are you making time for what really engages, invigorates, and excites you?
It takes a lot of effort to learn what you might actually enjoy, especially if that’s different from what your partner is into, or is a deviation from the patriarchy.
Learning what you like and making a commitment to doing it is profoundly healing.
You get to try new things and to see by checking in with your beautiful body and intuition what makes you feel energized, passionate, and alive.
In order to stay present, you get to learn how to tolerate discomfort, fear, anxiety, and discontent.
Often, codependent behaviors are a coping mechanism to deal with and avoid stress, fear, and other uncomfortable feelings.
The more we learn to sit with those feelings instead of immediately acting to avoid them, the more we’ll be able to build healthier coping mechanisms to address those feelings in affirming, sustainable ways.
Having needs can feel terrifying at first. You may judge it, you may not like the way it feels. That’s okay. Commit to feeling that discomfort.
One of the goals of self-care is learning to tolerate discomfort.
Part of what this process does is to help you take a grounded seat in knowing that you’re enough.
You’re worthy of claiming your autonomy, and you don’t have to continue to engage in codependent thoughts, feelings, or actions just because it was modeled for you or because you’ve always done it.
It’s not going to feel cute, but it’s a massive step forward in growing free of codependent habits.
One of the things to get comfortable with is the feeling of losing your relationships because it’s possible.
A relationship that is built on the web of lies that can be codependency may crumble once you shift the way you show up.
When you stop people-pleasing, people are no longer pleased.
The people who benefit from your lack of healthy boundaries will not be happy when you establish boundaries. That is okay. For now, don’t worry about that, don’t let your brain start spinning in those fears.
Focus on how you can build yourself up first and foremost. So it doesn’t matter if someone else tries to tear you down.
Your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health is what matters the most, my love.
This can feel scary but I can do it anyway because we can do hard things.
I also want to say that I have been there. I had so much codependent thinking, feeling, acting for my whole life until I figured it out, until a beloved friend held a mirror up for me.
So if I can do it, you can. We can do hard things and we do it together in community.
Healing these patterns in myself has been so life-changing for me and I’m so excited, honored, privileged that I get to share all of this with you.
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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