Such a hard word. It applies but I really wish it didn’t. I feel like when I am doing inventory work, I either land over in the desolate desert of codependency or on the island of self involvement...perhaps this blog allows me to do both, again. Still.
And indeed that was the purpose. This is a place for me to be real and to share my struggles, trials, tribulations, victories, despondencies and the like. Because none of them are uniquely mine, I am not so different to you. Or you to me. We all struggle with the same shit for likely the same reasons. Life is very lifey.
I saw the best definition of codependency the other day:
Ensuring that someone else’s life is better than yours to your own detriment.
It could also be the definition of parenting...just saying.
I think codependency has gotten a bad rap...I mean, all good, healthy relationships need you to put someone else’s needs before your own and that you will have to do this sometimes to your own detriment...but I think where codependency crosses the line is when you use this strategy in all your relationships. It becomes the way you relate and the scales tip way off balance for all involved.
Consider parenting, it is our job to put our children’s needs first and often that means we worry more, sleep less, take less vacations and spend more time in sporting venues than we would select all by ourselves. But when we make sure our children’s needs are met in violent overthrow over our own needs, we have just stepped over that line from a healthy codependence, to the toxic kind.
When seeking to improve someone else’s life over your own becomes a WAY of being, it might be time to look at the underlying causes and conditions. What are YOU really getting out of this?
In my own experience, I get a sense of purpose, this other person needs me and that makes me feel good. I am a caretaker so being needed and wanted is an essential part of me feeling good about myself. But if I am honest, and sometimes I would much prefer to lie my ass off, I also do it so that I can disappear. I become subsumed in you so that I don’t have to deal with the varied and complicated feelings I have about you, myself and our relationship.
And for me, especially toxic codependency looks like me continuing to allow you and your life to be more important than my own, making choices and decisions to support you over me, to put myself in financial peril, emotional angst and sometimes physical danger so that you and your life gets to continue in a way and manner that suits you. And for me, codependency always comes with an inability on my part to first notice I have crossed the line, then a staunch and severe commitment to justifying why I have to keep doing what I am doing, while knowingly putting myself out in ways that are not good for me.
But so long as I keep the focus on you, then I really can not examine me. And if I am not looking at me, then I have all the time in world to look at you, which is a much more acceptable inventory for me to take...I mean, it is totally unhelpful...but it somehow feels better to light you up and all your bullshit, than to look at and deal with my own.
I am sure, at least for me, mine comes from this innate sense of not being worthy. I have written about this before, many times. I am not exactly sure how this default setting got installed in me, but I can tell you that it is there and it proves to be harder to eradicate than I would like.
On the surface, I know I am a worthy person. Upon closer examination, I can also summon up a nod in that direction of worthy also. But there is something inside me, deep within, that ultimately feels like I deserve to be punished, ignored, mistreated and the like. And I have been working at it and around it for years, with limited success I might add.
I have come to a place where I am just going to accept it. That there is this baseline unworthiness that exists in me that I may never be able to eradicate or change. And this feeling I have about myself is going to just be there. In all I do and say and live. However, perhaps this quiet acknowledgement will allow me to see how it is operating in my life more deeply than my previous full frontal assault on annihilating it. I mean, here I am at 54 and it is still here and it is still messing me up.
I am codependent. There I said it. I own it. It is mine. I am not going to try to come up with reasons or excuses as to why I need to behave the way I do, I am just going to accept that I do and move on from there.
And now that I have accepted this somewhat embarrassing fact about myself, perhaps I may eventually find some contrary action to be had that lands me in a different place than where I keep ending up...which is allowing myself to engage in relationships with others to my own detriment. I mean, if I do not feel supported, loved and heard in my relationships, what the fuck am I even doing there? It is not the other person’s job to change, it is my job to acknowledge my needs are not being met and I need to communicate those needs clearly, without rancor, and then see what the other person does. If there is no change, or accommodation, then I need to make perhaps a different choice.
Sounds simple, right?
It isn’t. It is a gross departure from my way of living where I rarely look at what I need but if I do, then I come up with a laundry list of things I need you to do to change so that I will feel better, then I lock into position attempting to get you to give me what I need. When all along I could have just accepted that you can’t, you won’t or are unable and I need make decisions about us that comport with the reality I actually live in. YOU do not need to change. I DO!
I was sitting in meditation last night and I had this moment of AH HA! It isn’t anyone else’s job to give me what I need. I am not a child. Children must sit around and wait for the adults to give them what they need. I am a grown ass woman, and it is my job to get out there and make it happen. I do not wait, I take action. I attempt to share the things I need and then watch what you do, if you cannot or will not then I, not you, need to make some changes...
I know, I know, not a revelation for most of you, but for me, last night in the quiet evening settle down, the peaceful calm of sitting on my cushion in the backyard, I saw the futility of my way, and I saw a possible other way to be. And that was fucking miraculous for me.
Probably pretty pedestrian for the lot of you, who are likely more evolved and perhaps less damaged, but I share this anyway, for you to scoff or judge but also perhaps relate. And perhaps you are more like me than you might care to admit. So I hope that my transparency about the things that kick my ass and eat my lunch might inspire a similar examination in yourself and to know that I am always here to kick it around with, I have been there, clearly. Happy to share the progress, the lack of progress and all that remains in betwixt.
Again...still.
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