Codependency and Detachment

Part 1 – Codependence

Most people equate codependent relationships with families of addiction, but the truth is codependency may manifest in any dysfunctional family. “Codependency is an emotionally, psychologically, and behaviorally condition that develops as a result of an individual’s prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules – rules which prevent the open expression of feeling as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems” (Beaty, 1986). 

The codependent relationship consists of one person who is needy and dependent and the other person who is the caregiver. Codependency exists when one person lets another person’s behavior affect them, and who is either expected to or feels compelled to either control the behaviors of others, or fix the problems of others.

Caregiver – expected or compelled to control the behaviors of, or fix the problems of the dependent.

Dependent – expects the caregiver to control them or fix their problems.

By nature, people who are codependent are giving, empathetic, and loving; they enjoy helping others. They have been conditioned to believe that they are responsible for the feelings and behaviors of others. Dependents have been conditioned to believe that they are inadequate and cannot care for themselves or resolve their own issues. 

Most codependent people may have similar traits as listed below:

• Think they are or feel responsible for others feelings, thoughts, actions, choices, wants, needs, well-being, lack of well-being, and ultimate destiny.
• Feel anxiety, pity, and guilt when other people have a problem.
• Feel compelled, almost forced, to help other people solve their problems, such as offering unwanted advice, giving rapid-fire suggestions, fixing feelings, loaning money, doing tasks, caring for their children, going out of their way to take on responsibilities of others that aren’t their responsibility.
• Feel upset when their help isn’t effective.
• Anticipate other people’s needs.
• Wonder why other people don’t do the same for them.
• Find themselves saying yes when they want to say no, doing things they don’t want to do, doing more than their share, doing things that others are capable of doing for themselves.
• Not knowing what they want or need and if they do know, they tell themselves what they want and need is not important.
• Trying to please others instead of themselves.
• Prioritizing the needs of others over their own needs.
• Finding it easier to feel and express upset about injustices done to others rather than injustice done to themselves.
• Feel safest when giving.
• Feel insecure and guilty when somebody gives to them.
• Feel sad because they spend their whole lives gigging to others and nobody gives to them.
• Find needy people attracted to them.
• Feel bored, empty, and worthless if they don’t have a crisis in their lives, a problem to solve, or someone to help.
• Abandon their routine to respond to or do something for someone else.
• Overcommit themselves.
• Feel hurried and pressured.
• Feel angry, victimized, underappreciated, and used.
• Find others becoming angry or impatient with them for all of their traits.
• Come from troubled, repressed or dysfunctional families.
• Often in denial that their family is troubled, repressed, or dysfunctional.
• Blame themselves for everything that is wrong.
• Have unrealistic expectations about the way they think, feel, look, act, and behave.
• Get upset when others blame or criticize them, yet they often are very critical of themselves.
• Reject compliments or praise.
• Get depressed from a lack of compliments and praise.
• Feel they are different from the rest of the people in the world.
• Think they’re not good enough.
• Feel guilty about spending money on themselves or doing unnecessary or fun things for themselves.
• Take things personally.
• Fear rejection.
• Have been victims of sexual, physical, or emotional abuse, neglect, abandonment, or family members have mental health issues.
• Sometimes they feel like a victim.
• Believe they can’t do anything right.
• Are afraid of making mistakes.
• Wonder why they may be indecisive.
• Expect perfection of themselves.
• Wonder why they can’t do things perfectly.
• Have a lot of cognitive distortions.
• Feel a lot of guilt.
• Feel a lot of shame.
• Sometimes they may believe life isn’t worth living.
• Try to help others instead of focusing on themselves.
• Get superficial feelings of self-worth through doing for others.
• Have deep feelings of low self-worth, embarrassment and failure from not being able to solve the problems of others.
• Wish good things would happen to them.
• Believe good things will never happen to them.
• Wish other people would love and accept them.
• Believe others couldn’t possibly love and accept them.
• Try to prove that they’re good enough for others.
• Settle for being needed.
• Suppress their own feelings and thoughts because of fear and guilt.
• Fear being themselves.
• Appear rigid and controlled.
• Feel bad and anxious about problems and people.
• Worry about everything, even the most insignificant.
• Focus their thoughts and conversation on others.
• Lose sleep over the problems and behaviors of others.
• Worry about everything.
• Check on other people often.
• Try to catch people making mistakes and poor choices.
• Feel unable to quit talking, thinking, and worrying about other people’s problems and actions.
• Unable to focus on their own life because they’re more concerned with the problems and behaviors of others.
• Spend all of their energy on others.
• Wonder why they don’t have energy.
• Wonder why they struggle with completing their own tasks.
• Experienced trauma caused by other’s choices and behavior causing sorrow and disappointment.
• Fear of allowing others to live their life organically.
• Often feel like failures.
• Struggle with managing their own feelings.
• Feel controlled by other events and people.
• Ignore their own problems or remain in denial about them.
• Believe their own circumstances aren’t as bad as they really are.
• Believe that things will get better without working on them.
• Stay busy to avoid their own issues.
• Become confused.
• Become depressed.
• Become physically ill.
• Become workaholics.
• Impulsively spend.
• Develop a dysfunctional relationship with food.
• Believe lies or lie to themselves.
• Wonder why they feel their lives are out of control.
• Feel unhappy, discontent, or in conflict with themselves.
• Believe that other people or events will provide happiness for them.
• Look for happiness in their environment instead of working on their issues.
• Fear abandonment of those they believe are providing their happiness.
• Feel that their parents never loved or approved of them.
• Don’t love themselves.
• Believe that others can’t or won’t love them.
• Desperately seek approval and love by settingling for unhealthy or abusive relationships.
• Equate love with pain.
• Feel that they need people more than they want them.
• Try to prove they’re good enough to deserve love.
• Don’t take the time to realize whether others are healthy for them.
• Worry whether other people love or like them.
• Center their lives around other people.
• Look to relationships to provide their good feelings.
• Lose interest in their own life and become consumed with their romantic partner.
• Fear abandonment.
• Believe they can’t care for themselves.
• Stay in unhealthy or abusive relationships.
• Tolerate abuse to avoid being alone.
• Feel trapped in relationships.
• Leave one bad relationship for another.
• Wonder if they will ever find love.
• Blame others.
• Avoid communicating their needs and feelings.
• Think other people don’t take them seriously.
• Take themselves too seriously or not serious enough.
• Communicate passive aggressively.
• Avoid getting to the point.
• Are confused by what they want and need.
• Walk on eggshells.
• People please.
• Avoid conflict.
• Neglect setting boundaries.
• Blame themselves or blame others.
• Believe they don’t deserve to have an opinion.
• Lie to protect others and themselves.
• Have difficulty communicating assertively.
• Avoid honest emotions.
• Believe what they feel and think is unimportant.
• Self-critical, self-degrading, self-contemptuous.
• Apologize for everything.
• Tolerate things from others that are unhealthy or abusive.
• Let others hurt them again and again.
• Wonder why they are hurting.
• Avoid taking steps to change their circumstances.
• Become angry and intolerant.
• Avoid trusting themselves, their feelings, decisions and others.
• Believe they are abandoned by their faith.
• Lose their faith.
• Feel afraid.
• Live with people who are afraid, hurt and angry.
• Fear their own anger.
• Fear the anger of others.
• Fear that others will abandon them if they express anger.
• Fear eliciting the anger of others.
• Repress their own feelings.
• Have intense emotional outbursts.
• Feel shame.
• Punish others for their issues.
• Feel guilty.
• Feel anger, resentment and bitterness.
• Feel intense anger.
• Either are submissive or dominant in their intimate relationships.
• Confuse sex for love.
• Deny themselves a healthy intimate relationship.
• Fear intimate pleasure.
• Deprive themselves of intimate needs.
• Withdraw emotionally from an intimate partner.
• Feel revulsion toward an intimate partner.
• Stonewall.
• Lose interest in intimacy.
• Avoid intimacy.
• Wish their partner would leave, die, or read their mind.
• Have strong romantic fantasies about others.
• Consider having an affair.
• Become hyper responsible.
• Sacrifice their own happiness for the happiness of others.
• Find it difficult to have emotional intimacy with others.
• Find it difficult to be spontaneous and uninhibited.
• Express passive, aggressive or passive/aggressive responses to their own behavior, such as helplessness, crying, and feeling hurt, expressing dominance, anger, and violence.
• Have inappropriate emotional responses.Feel shame about family, themselves, or their issues.
• Feel confused about the origin of their problems.
• Cover up, life, and protect the issue.
• Avoid seeking help because they don’t believe the problem is that serious or they don’t deserve help.
• Wonder why the problem doesn’t go away on its own.
• Feel exhausted, lethargic, and lack energy.
• Become withdrawn and isolated.
• Lack routine and self-care.
• Become neglectful of their own responsibilities.
• Feel hopeless.
• Plan to escape their relationship as they feel trapped.
• Have suicide ideation.
• Become very emotionally, mentally, and physically ill.
• Experience eating disorders.
• Become addicted to drugs and or alcohol.

As you can see, if someone who is codependent doesn’t work to overcome their problems, they will eventually escalate their problems.

Activities:

1. Go through the checklist above and mark each characteristic that you feel applies to you with a 0, 1, or 2.
   1. 0 = never a problem
   2. 1 = occasionally a problem
   3. 2 = frequently a problem
2. How do you feel about what you have learned about yourself so far?
3. What do you think would happen if you learn to detach from codependent tendencies and behaviors?
4. What would happen if you could overcome the codependent behaviors?

Part 2 – Detaching

The first step to overcoming being codependent is to emotionally detach from those who are inappropriately dependent or needy. 

Detaching is not leaving the person we love, but instead it’s leaving the agony of the involvement. – Unknown.

Oftentimes people who are codependent get quickly attached to others. They often seek out people who are in crisis as they want to feel needed. Codependent individuals primarily attach to the people in their environments. When someone who is codependent becomes attached, it means they become over-involved and often hopelessly entangled in the problems of others. This attachment may look like some of the examples below:

• Excessively worried about and preoccupied with a problem or person.
• Becoming obsessed with and controlling people and their problems in our environment.
• Become reactionary when interacting with others.
• Become emotionally dependent on those around us and their problems.
• Become caregivers, rescuers, enablers to those around us, so we feel needed.

Being over involved with another individual will only cause chaos in our lives and those we’re trying to “help.” We will spend all of our time and energy focusing on fixing the issues of other people instead of prioritizing and focusing on our own issues. Worrying, obsessing, focusing on things out of our control will only cause more issues for everyone. If we focus on our own needs and encourage others to do the same, we will all be better off.

Detaching consists of being responsible for ourselves. It’s realizing that we can only control ourselves and we can’t fix anyone else regardless of how much we worry and try. When we allow others to be who they are, it creates freedom for responsibility and growth. 

We must learn to live in the present and allow life to happen instead of trying to force and control it. It’s imperative that we accept that we can’t solve problems that aren’t ours. We are only responsible for ourselves and the things we have control over – our life and our problems. We all have to face the natural consequences of our choices. This is how we learn and grow. This is how change is elicited, by learning what works and what doesn’t. 

Accepting reality is accepting that the facts exist and we can’t change that. Not all problems have to be solved right now, some will never be resolved and that’s okay. Let’s stay out of the way of others, so they can do what is necessary in their own lives. We can observe, validate, and support, but we cannot push our feelings, thoughts, ideas, opinions, values and morals on others.

Detaching from others doesn’t mean that we don’t care. It means we love others enough to step away from trying to control things that are beyond our control. It means that we want to empower others to realize they are capable of solving their own issues. We stop contributing to the conflict and chaos when we become an observer instead of a controller or savior. 

The reward of learning to detach is serenity, peace, the freedom to give and receive love as an observer and supporter. When we step back from trying to control things beyond our control, we give others the freedom to resolve things for themselves. We allow ourselves and others to hold ourselves accountable and be responsible for the things we choose, the way we behave, and the way we interact with others. We stay in our own lane and mind our own business.

Detaching allows us to stop worrying, stop being fearful, stop feeling anxious, and allow ourselves to enjoy life. We allow ourselves to focus on self-care, nurturing relationships, and work on our own health and well-being.

How do you know when to detach? When it feels the most difficult to let go is exactly when we need to detach.

Activities:

1. Write about a person or problem in your life that you worry about excessively. Write in as much detail about this person or problem, how it affects you, and what issues it’s created in your life.
   1. Write about how you feel about detaching from this person or problem. 
   2. What do you think will happen if you detach?
   3. Will the outcome happen whether or not you detach?
   4. How has trying to fix the person or the problem worked so far?
2. If you didn’t have the person or problem in your life, what would you be doing instead?
   1. How would you be feeling and behaving?
   2. Sit back, close your eyes, and visualize yourself living your life, feeling and behaving as if you have no cares in the world.
      1. Now visualize a box. Visualize yourself picking up everything you cannot control in your life and placing it in the box.
      2. Now, visualize yourself putting a lid on that box and locking it up tight.
      3. Visualize how light you feel now that you have relieved yourself of everything in your life that you cannot control.
      4. How does your body feel now that you feel relieved?
3. Write down a list of problems in your life that you can control.
   1. Beside each item, write down 1-3 ways you will actively take steps to resolve the problems. 
   2. Give yourself a deadline and remember that it can always be changed if you aren’t able to meet it exactly on time.
   3. Write down some affirmations to maintain your motivation.
   4. Each week, sit down and reconsider your list. Mark off what you have resolved and revise any steps that aren’t working.
   5. Remind yourself that you are making progress and working toward resolving things in your life that you can control

Resources:

Beattie, Melody. (1986). Codependent No More. Hazelden Publishing Center City, Minnesota 55012.