Jennifer Beall, LCPC, LCADC
Think about the last time that someone important to you was upset and you didn’t know why. How did you react? Did you express sympathy and offer them support, if appropriate, without being drawn into the feelings yourself?
Maybe, instead, you found yourself wondering if you did (or didn’t do) something that made them upset, even if there was no evidence to support that idea.
If your first instinct was to take responsibility for their feelings, you may be codependent. And if you are codependent, you probably learned that coping mechanism when you were a very young child.
Young children are narcissistic by nature; they believe that they are the cause of everything that happens in their world. Therefore, if one of their caregivers is upset, they believe it is their fault. And they assume that if they are responsible for their caregivers’ feelings, they must also be able to change those feelings; they just have to figure out what they’re doing wrong so they can fix it.
If a parent is an alcoholic or has something else going on that makes them unable to adequately meet their child’s needs, an unhealthy dynamic develops. The child knows when their parent is unhappy and assumes it’s their fault. The parent is unable or unwilling to take appropriate responsibility for their own feelings and actions, thus directly or indirectly supporting the child’s belief that they, not the parent, are the source of whatever is going on.
This is the heart of codependency. Someone who grows up in this sort of family often develops the belief that it’s their job to take responsibility for the thoughts, feelings, and actions of other people. Because this pattern develops in childhood, their unconscious assumption is that if they take responsibility for the other person in a relationship, that person will, in turn, take care of them, as their caregivers should have done when they were kids.
A codependent person might be labeled a people pleaser and told that they have control issues. They may be accused of being manipulative. A codependent person who tries to control and manipulate others isn’t generally an evil puppet master trying to pull other people’s strings, though; they’re trying to keep themselves safe. As a child, they learned to try to manipulate their parents into taking care of them so that they would survive.
People who are codependent don’t learn effective ways of being in relationship and handling emotions because they don’t see those things being modeled by their parents. They may become aware, at some point, that there are healthier ways to interact with other people than the ones they learned, but it might not even occur to them to try to learn those approaches themselves. They’ve only known one way of being in the world, and they probably assume that it’s just how they were made. And if that’s true, they might not see a point to trying to change.
The truth is that no one is born codependent, and things that can be learned can also be unlearned. If you are codependent, I can help you to develop more effective ways of being in relationship with others. If that would be of interest to you, please fill out a contact form, book a consultation, or call or text me at 410-888-0590.