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Years ago, when I was now a new mother of three children, and figuring things out on my own, with my own new discoveries about God, etc., my mother gave me a set of tapes (not CD's) about "co-dependency". They were produced by a very respectable man, but I thought, "What is this? I'm not co-dependent on anyone - how stupid, and I gave them back. 18 years later, my marriage would be dissolved after 24 years, and my life was in a really BIG mess. I was severely co-dependent and oddly, that all began in my childhood home. When I heard the characteristics of a co-dependent person and family and how it all works, I was stunned. My family had been the worst epitomy of a co-dependent family, worse yet - raised in a cult (the Worldwide Church of God). This is some of what I learned. Here goes:
In her groundbreaking book Codependent No More, Melody Beattie undertakes the difficult task of defining codependency in a single sentence: “A codependent person is one who has let another person’s behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior” (Beattie, 1992, p. 36). This definition is at least a good attempt to encapsulate the concept, but the reality of codependency is far more inclusive and complex...... (and the concept all started with a mate or family members dealing with the "out of control" alcoholic family member that then becomes dysfunctional and eventually, the term came to mean "any dysfunctional family relationship".
Beattie explains that at the heart of understanding what co-dependency really is, is to understand, face and realize that a person’s recovery lies “not in the other person” but in fact, lies within ourselves......We are the ones who need to begin to realize that we have “allowed” the other person’s behavior to affect us........ and facing this truth, we must now begin the process of trying to turn this around, to stop obsessive controlling, obsessive helping, fixing, caretaking (of others), etc. If not, we’ll slowly plummet in our self-esteem (which again, we allow to happen) which can cause us to at least border on self-hatred Beattie says, as well as self-repression, low self-worth and heaping on ourselves plenty of anger and guilt. Beattie adds that many of us co-dependent folks manage to find peculiar people with whom we have a peculiar dependency as well as “an attraction to, and tolerance for the bizarre”. She says we co-dependents tend to be “other-centered” which “results in abandonment of self, communication problems, intimacy problems and an ongoing whirlwind trip through the five-stage grief process.” (Beattie, 1992, p. 36)
Do you recognize some of those qualities from my story of the deterioration of my first marriage? Do you recognize any of them in yourself? These notions are important here because co-dependency also causes anger and resentment. As Darlene Lancer, JD, MFT writes in a 2018 article, when we don’t do what we want—or when we do something we don’t want to do because we feel like we have to, we feel angry, victimized, unappreciated, uncared-for, powerless, and unable to be agents of change for ourselves (Lancer, 2018). Although repressed and often unconscious, Codependents have a huge amount of anger and pent-up emotion and often have no idea how to manage it. Excerpts from "Awakening from Unconscious Resentment" (Chapter 4 - Blood Boiling) by Angela Clark #codependency #self-love #self-abandonment #powerlessness #communiction problems, #intimicy problems, #grief
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