Their mental attention is focused on pleasing you. They are not aware of what they want; your needs are more important than theirs. For them, love is not given or received, but constantly desired. In their eyes sex can be a tool, a threat or the pinnacle of intimacy.
They are the codependents – sufferers of a compulsion to feel needed.
Codependents use their friends, partners or even their children as their sole source of identity and self-worth, as well as a way to cover up traumatic childhood experiences. In other words, imagine being addicted to another person as though they were living, breathing heroin. Without this other person you would not know what to do or how to live. Codependency is based on low self-esteem and pushes an individual to change themselves according to others, to view their own life as a mirror image of someone else’s desires.
To be clear, codependency is not a disease or a mental disorder, it is a pattern of behaviour stemming from the environmental, intellectual, spiritual and emotional conditions of a person’s childhood. After all, the nature of your upbringing will determine the manner in which you mature – the adult that you’ll become. Parents with addictions, mental disorders or abusive personalities taint a child’s understanding of what constitutes a healthy relationship.
‘Jane’ was one such child.
I met her at a Codependents Anonymous meeting in ‘Biala’ community health centre. We sit in a room usually reserved for Alcoholics Anonymous, politely exchanging pleasantries as the wall clock chimes on, breaking the awkward silence with every second. A middle-aged woman, Jane, nervously awaits my line of questioning like a child waiting to be grilled by the principle. In front of her are neatly organised booklets, handwritten notes and highlighted articles that she constantly refers to, as though the words have somehow changed since she last read them.
Nerves wrack her speech and her voice quivers with every sentence. As a codependent, Jane finds it difficult to talk to strangers – the echoes of an abusive past hamper her confidence. Now, the Secretary of Codependents Anonymous, Jane works closely with others seeking help.
“I was in a family of seven children. I was neglected, abandoned, enmeshed and abused,” Jane tells me. “In my life today I’m acting out childhood behaviours when I come into stress or situations that are new or I haven’t dealt with yet.”
Jane’s father and grandparents were alcoholics and her mother was addicted to prescription medication as well as over-eating. Interpersonal boundaries were something Jane never learned from her parents – neglect and abandonment will do that to you. Instead, her parent’s addictions cemented unhealthy attitudes into Jane about herself and how she should be treated. She never learnt to stand up for herself because such behavior would be met by physical violence. The result is crippling shame and fear holding a shadow over her every move.
“When I first came into the program I thought everything was fine, I didn’t know I was living in a dream, that I was creating a fantasy around my whole life,” says Jane.
“I was just a doormat; I was afraid of people and afraid of sticking up for myself…usually as a codependent I don’t ask for help and try to deal with this stuff by myself.”
With her parents dependent on their respective vices, it became nigh on impossible for Jane to establish healthy emotional, mental, physical and sexual boundaries with other people. In families affected by codependency, boundaries change day to day depending on the household’s emotional climate. The unconditional love of the family can be destroyed by incest, the safety and security of home can be tarnished by physical abuse, and self-confidence can be undermined by constant verbal belittling. Growing up like this was all Jane knew and the result was a compulsion to feel loved and needed at any cost.
“I was a love addict,” Jane tells me. “I’d set up a fantasy about a certain person in the office and then make them my higher power. Whatever they did or said they were controlling me ‘cause that’s what I wanted out of the relationship.”
With miserably low self-esteem, codependents look for love in the wrong places, often changing their own identity to suit whatever partner they are with. In essence they make another person their ‘higher power’ or God. Junkies revolve their lives around crack, alcoholics plan their day according to vodka, and codependents live by the standards of another person.
There are variations of codependency: some use sex to numb their feelings whereas others avoid it out of shame of unresolved sexual experiences. Some codependents were forced to look after themselves growing up and so feel compelled to lend a helping hand even when it is not needed. Others have been rejected so much in the past that they cannot say ‘no’. I’m drawn to one example where a woman, despite knowing her partner had herpes, kissed his sore ridden lips upon request (the fear of rejection being stronger than the fear of infection).
It is these attitudes that make it difficult for codependents to actually realise that their behaviour has been conditioned by abusive circumstances. Furthermore it leads to people avoiding help because they don’t understand that codependency is treatable and not necessarily part of who they really are – I mean we’ve all had the crazy ex right?
But here’s the cusp.
The characteristics and patterns of codependency are embedded into the underlying features of other addictions such as alcoholism and substance abuse. Instead of chasing a high, codependents become totally and utterly reliant on another person, in the same way a junkie becomes reliant on drugs.
So how do you treat this?
Apparently like any other addiction: with a 12-step program.
“We look at the codependence as the root cause of why people then take on a substance as their higher power that’s controlling them but they actually have to go to AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) to deal with the substance abuse. Codependency doesn’t heal there,” Jane says.
Codependents Anonymous uses a 12-step recovery program based on Alcoholics Anonymous, including step three which states they must “…turn our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.”
I find it questionable that part of treating a dependence on other people involves becoming dependent on a spiritual entity but Jane stresses that ‘God’ can be whatever the individual wants it to be. Therefore Codependents Anonymous not a religious program but more of a spiritual one with many recovering codependents viewing ‘God’ as the compassion and sympathy shared during support group meetings. Yet Codependents Anonymous has worked for Jane and must be doing something right as the program approaches its third decade of existence.
“I started to see life for what it really was,” says Jane.
“As kids we can’t talk back to adults so we bring that into our adult life and don’t know how to speak up for ourselves. So when I put all that away, when I take all that away, and also take away the PhD letters after the name, take away the house in the right suburb, the right clothes, the right car, take away everything that gives me self-esteem then there’s just me left. Then I have to look at myself: what am I, where do I get my self-esteem from? The self-esteem is coming from within now that I’m healthy.”
The traits of codependency are broad and as I read through them there are one or two I can associate with myself. We all teeter on the edge of codependency from time to time, whether it is during an intense break up or a chemical high but it really comes down to the luck of the draw on how our parents raised us.
For those unlucky enough to be raised is emotionally damaging households, society can be cruel but if you look hard enough there are places, hidden away but full of caring people that are willing and able to help.
All you have to do is reach out.
If you or someone you know is affected by codependency you can find help at www.codependentsanonymous.org.au
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Dominic Cansdale is a budding journalist and a political nerd. You can follow him on twitter at @DominicCansdale
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