I am not sure if you have ever thought of codependence as a strategy but I have. It is this idea that if you attend to the needs of others more than your own, someday, those others will attend to your needs. Clearly a flawed strategy...but one that is nevertheless adopted often, by many.
It is clear that many a caregiver type person comes hard wired with the idea that if they engage and hold and help the wounded, then one day, surely, this other person will magically be more responsive to your own needs. It is this over-identification with this obligation to fix or aide or help others, that cause this particular anxiety management strategy to go ka-bluehy!
Thus the caregiving person goes about their lives, very unconsciously, to seek out those in need of aide, assistance and help in order to complete the cycle once more. It is like you are programmed to only be attracted to those that are in dire need of assistance. Anyone who has their shit together is gonna be a hard pass for the caregiver because with two adults to can handle their own stuff, this childhood anxiety management strategy has no use, and that just doesn’t work at all.
It is like we are set off in life with this default setting for caregiving. Anything that doesn’t allow us to repeat that pattern is lost on us. This leads us to take on the life long pattern of the hopeless task of healing others, while we ourselves remain wounded and suffering. The people we are attempting to help often don’t appreciate or value the assistance we provide, even when the assistance provided is both life saving and helpful. Those other people are not wired to ever reflect back on the value received, only to cause situations that require more caregiving, and thus repeat the cycle.
For me, anyway, I can see how I have attempted to bury myself underneath the needs, wants, requirements of others all in a vain attempt to avoid myself. Why? Because I cause myself anxiety. All the crap I think and do and say and feel. That causes me relentless anxiety that I do not know what to do with, so it is easier (not really) to just become lost in taking care of you and your needs than ever deal with my own.
For me, it has always been this rejection proof plan - if you reject my assistance, then that is on you, I was not “wrong” for providing it and then I just seek another person to assist...and in my experience, there is NEVER a shortage of people who require help and “saving”.
I also have to own that my lifelong pattern also makes me feel powerful, always the helpful never the helped. I have something to offer, and I need nothing in return. Except that was a big, fat lie! I have always needed things, lots of things, not because I am needy, but because I am human. And it is part of being human to need.
But I decided, and for me, it was a decision, that I would need nothing, ask for nothing, and then someday you were supposed to turn around and look at me, and see the unspoken, unclaimed need, and then heap on all the stuff that I was denying I needed.
I know, I know - that is fucked up beyond all fuckedupness. But it is true. Not pretty but true.
I can see, now, the errors in my thinking, behaving and acting. I can see it. And while I haven’t been capable of really changing it in drastic ways, I am making some progress. I can see my caretaking show up earlier. I can see where I want to rush in and save someone else’s day. And I can now own that I often do this because I don’t know what the fuck to do with my own life. Like at all.
So getting lost in you is just another way for me to manage my own anxiety about what the fuck I am supposed to do with myself.
Again...still.
Anyway, I know that I am always going to default to caretaking in the hopes that someday, one day, this effort will pay off for me and you will stop all the receiving and turn it around and give a little. I now see the futility of the strategy and am making the changes I can. I accept that this way of living is my default setting, hard wired into my psyche decades ago. But it is not permanently transfixed incapable of being altered. I can change. The first problem was finding out that I needed to, then the second problem was finding the willingness to want to change.
See, I like everyone else, really want my coping strategies born out of survival skills to work one magically fine day. I want them to pay off in the very big ways I always hoped they would. And in order for me to make any progress at all, I have to give up that pipe dream. I have to let go of my own ideas about what I am doing and why and the needs it fulfills, badly. I have to own that MY way doesn’t work. And then find the willingness to stop doing the thing that keeps me perpetually stuck in an anxiety management strategy that never, ever fucking works the way I think it will.
And it is HARD to give this up. I know, seems like it should be easy. But it isn’t. Ask anyone who is aware how and why they are acting out the way they are and you will get a brutally honest answer...”I really just need this to work, one time and then I will be healed.”
It takes a pretty emotionally intelligent person, an amazingly astute and insightful person to even get themselves to a place where they can admit and own that what they need to have happen is never going to ever fucking happen. No matter what. There is no universe where it works out the way you want or need it to.
It is only there at the bottom of the giant hole in your heart, that you might begin to start anew. Allowing that age old anxiety management strategy to fall away, and begin doing literally anything else in its place.
For me, this has been a hard fought battle. As it seems this childhood need of mine to be needed and wanted and helpful tends to grow back overnight like some sort of persistent weed in an otherwise lovely garden. And I hate weeding. It sucks. So I have tended to allow this particular weed to flourish in some sort of misguided notion that it was not a weed THIS TIME, but some lovely new flower that would be the jewel of the whole fucking garden.
WRONG AGAIN! Still.
But I think I see myself most clearly now and I can see that no matter what this is who I default to and so an ever mindful vigilance needs to be maintained for me in order to begin to shift the needle in the direction of less codependent and more interdependent with those people who are capable of sustaining such partnerships.
Ah, there I said it, a partnership where everyone is equal and the caregiving is something that is shared...I don’t know what that looks like, but I am going to do my best to fucking find out.
Sigh.
Or perhaps I will die trying...either way, I am doing my best to change those things I can and it turns out, I am the only one who can ever change me.
Again...still.
Fuck.
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