Maybe you’ve realized that you’re always putting your partner’s emotional needs before your own. Yet when you try to imagine focusing on yourself and reclaiming your independence, you don’t feel a sense of freedom. Instead, you feel fear. Or perhaps you know that your parents rely heavily on you in adulthood. You’ve had to be at their beck and call, to the detriment of your own relationships, career, and financial stability.
We all need people whom we can rely on. Human beings need the support that close relationships provide in order to thrive. However, close relationships can also be characterized by codependency when they become imbalanced. Here’s what codependency looks like in action and why it can be so destructive.
What Does a Codependent Relationship Look Like?
If you’ve always viewed your codependent relationship as “normal,” you might not notice just how harmful it is to your mental health and emotional well-being. In a codependent relationship, which can be a romantic relationship, friendship, or familial connection, one person relies on the other to fulfill their needs without giving much in return.
However, rather than step away from the unfair situation, the “supportive” person becomes entrenched in this arrangement and begins to feel as though they need to be needed. Without supporting the codependent partner, they worry that they won’t have any purpose in life. They might not necessarily be happy, but psychologically, they crave the feeling of being needed.
Losing Your Sense of Self
When you’re in a codependent relationship, you gradually lose your sense of self. Your identity becomes so wrapped up in the other person that after a while, you don’t know who you are without them anymore. You play a specific role in their life, and they play a role in yours — and you can’t figure out how to break out of these roles, or what would you would do if you were no longer in each other’s lives. In a codependent relationship, both people lack boundaries.
Walking on Eggshells
You don’t want to risk losing the codependent relationship, even if it’s unhealthy. Therefore, you end up walking on eggshells to avoid conflict. Even if your feelings are hurt, or if you’re uncomfortable, you don’t want to speak up for fear of offending the other person. You’ll end up apologizing even when you did nothing wrong. However, the other person would not do the same for you.
Pushing Your Needs to the Backburner
Codependency means fulfilling one person’s needs at the expense of your own. Your own needs are always secondary. You might drop whatever you’re doing to help the other person out when they call you. Worse, you know that if you don’t do this, you’ll be facing a guilt trip. You often feel like you need to check in with them before you make any big decisions, and you don’t commit to things that would interfere with the codependent relationship.
The Difference Between Caring and Codependent
It’s important to distinguish between a caregiver relationship, in which one person is physically and emotionally dependent on another due to their vulnerabilities, and a codependent relationship, in which both people could function independently of each other, but end up trapped in a dysfunctional connection.
A parent caring for their young child and sacrificing their own “wants” for their child’s needs is not an example of codependency. In adulthood, a caring relationship is based on sharing, not on taking advantage of another’s generosity.
————
Are you struggling to break free from a codependent relationship? Working with a therapist can help. Reach out to us to discuss your options for scheduling your first session.