Calling all Codependents
Codependency is a survival strategy. In an effort to seemingly support your partner, you end up enabling their potential addiction, poor health, lack of maturity, irresponsibility, or difficult behavior. You place your own needs aside to make sure your partner’s needs are met, even when meeting them contributes to your own sense of unhealth.
When I talk to people in divorce with codependent tendencies, it is clear that they ended up in this place out of a need to protect themselves from a perceived threat. When presented with a threat from their spouse, they stepped in from a loving place in themselves to manage their spouse’s feelings. They sought out equilibrium, peace, and calm, and in doing so, they generated for themselves the complete opposite.
It started as love, but it ended up as rather unloving. We know that love at its core is defined by freedom for the other. Codependent love suffocates freedom both for the codependent and the recipient of their dependency. Codependent love communicates that you do not trust someone to handle their own decision making. It steps in and over-functions out of a sense of obligation to protect that person from disastrous results.
Codependency is the natural and understandable outcome of a relationship that tipped out of balance. It starts when we lose our solid sense of self that is so critical to forming healthy relationships with others. When we organize ourselves around someone else’s feelings and outcomes, we sacrifice ourselves and disappear into the other. It can be very hard to see this tendency in ourselves until the distance of divorce exposes it.
Developing boundaries is a key step in recovering from codependency, but can feel unloving initially. The reason this happens is because codependency masquerades as interdependency in marriage. Of course we want to consider the other. Of course we want to go out of our way for them. Of course we want to provide support. But interdependency is marked by a coexistence of yourself and the other in relationship. It acknowledges that both partners are showing up for each other to meet the needs in healthy ways. In codependency, the effort is usually one person showing up for the other in ways that don’t support long term health.
So what is a codependent to do? As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, it may be simple, but it isn’t easy. Try these journaling prompts to start getting perspective on it:
Think about and feel in your body what it means to tolerate uncomfortable feelings. Healthy relationships with other people can sit in uncomfortable feelings without solving them for others. What happens for you when uncomfortable feelings are truly felt?
Reflect on what is your responsibility in your relationship and what is not your responsibility. What drives you to take more responsibility than is necessary?
Expand your definition of love. Codependent love says, “I can’t trust you to handle your own life and consequences.” A deeper, more differentiated love can say, “I trust you to handle this, even if the way you handle it isn’t always healthy or in line with what I think is best for you.” What would it look like to watch someone make decisions that don't align with your highest goals for them?
Recalibrating from a codependent love relationship is essentially an invitation back to a more regulated relationship with yourself. It gives you permission to keep your side of the street clean, regardless of what is happening on the other side of it. After divorce, you can organize yourself around your own feeling states and outcomes, not those of your former partner. It’s a long road of healing, but essential to your enjoyment of your own life and the life you may wish to have with a future partner.
