What is Codependency?

Codependency is chronic attachment insecurity characterized by people-pleasing in response to trauma.

If you rely on dysfunctional behavior to stabilize your identity, you are codependent. If a relationship is stabilized by dysfunctional behavior, the relationship is codependent.

Codependent relationships can exist between parents and children, romantic partners, friends, coworkers, bartenders—anybody who needs another person’s dysfunctional behavior to validate their own identity. This unhealthy situation usually begins during a stressful time when the need to survive leaves no other choice but to comply with a more aggressive person.

Unable to run, fight, freeze, or seduce, you settled on people-pleasing. It was the most reliable instinct to secure your safety in an abusive situation, and in some cases may very well have saved your life. People-pleasing is a trauma response designed to protect you from dying or being abandoned.

Stockholm Syndrome is surprisingly similar. When someone is unable to escape a volatile aggressor who is threatening their safety, they sometimes become empathic with their captor and try to be helpful to them. Grateful for not being destroyed, they treat their captors like the ones who gave them life. They look for any kindness beneath all the aggression to convince themselves that they and their captors are on the same side. They become “hypervigilant to the needs and demands of their captors, making psychological links between the captors’ happiness and their own.”

Does this describe any marriages you are familiar with? Or mother-daughter relationships? Maybe you got caught up preventing a strong person from destroying themselves, and did so by making the definition of their happiness identical to your own. They might not have threatened you, but something about the situation brought out behavior that put your own needs beneath those of someone else.

You just wanted to be “good.” People-pleasing is a subconscious reaction to tremendous fear, and like those who fall under the spell of Stockholm Syndrome, you got stuck in survival mode, and you remain in an emotional prison of compulsive self-sacrifice.

When someone is strong enough to play an aggressor, they can use the threat of violence to prevent others from abandoning them, and secure their survival. When genuine abandonment fears are provoked, survival instincts can cause a person to flatter, guilt, degrade, coerce, or otherwise manipulate others into staying close to them. Making others dependent on you, and making yourself dependent on others, may be the lowest form of human bonding, but it is an outstanding survival strategy. Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of your happiness and authenticity.

Codependency has been unnecessarily complicated by a lack of standard definition and absence in professional psychological literature. Many psychologists don’t believe codependency is real, or they minimize it as an addiction to a romantic interest, or justify dysfunctional behaviors as acceptable.

Many people use “codependency” interchangeably with “dependency”, referencing their observations of people, relationships, pets, inanimate objects, and substance abuse.

“Codependency” can describe infatuation, abusive relationships, over-involved in-laws, and heartbreak, as well as compulsive people-pleasing, romance obsession, and toxic self-sacrifice; an enigma consisting of too many named and unnamed parts to understand and talk about comprehensively.

It has been said that knowing is half the battle, but in the case of codependency, it’s probably more like 90%. Knowing the thought distortions underpinning codependent logic, associated behavioral tendencies, diagnosable dysfunction, and recovery options are a life raft from which you can escape the sea of uncertainty. It can also protect you from getting sucked back into toxic whirlpools in the future.

Identifying codependency in oneself is usually not a pleasant experience. It is even less pleasant to take real-life here-and-now steps toward securing your independence from toxic relationships. But facing it is the only way to walk out of your emotional cage and into a bright, shining world of emotional freedom.

If you know you are codependent, any voice in your mind saying otherwise is your ego. It is the same voice that allowed you to believe your needs were secondary. It whispers in your ear that emotional freedom is already yours. It promises that pursuing the same dysfunctional relationships will eventually produce a perfect person who gives you an emotional high that never ends.

This pursuit is how your ego maintains control of you. It feeds off of your insecurities. It cannot survive if you break out of your emotional prison, so it tricks you into thinking that pleasing others will make you free.

At the core of all codependency is a dysfunctional relationship with yourself.