My codependence caused me to do all sorts of things I thought were thoughtful and kind, yet I was blindsided by the lack of gratitude. I used to stay with guys years after I broke up with them in my head, worried I would hurt their feelings. I now understand that it’s insane and selfish to think that staying with someone for an extra year is helping him, given you’re basically stealing a year of his life. Codependence isn’t about actual altruism, it’s about being lost in the fallacy that you need to protect everyone from reality and uncomfortable feelings.
Codependence is a particularly insidious condition because it masquerades as being “super nice.” It’s a disease that tricks you into thinking that caretaking and people pleasing is kind, when it’s actually condescending toward the other person and ends up making you resentful of the people you’re “helping.” Real quick, I know the word disease may sound harsh and icky, but I’m comfortable with calling it a disease because it’s progressive and habitual and there’s no panacea for it. From what I can gather about codependence, it’s not something you can cure per se, but if you build up your self-awareness and self-esteem, it is something you can curb and manage. Calling it a disease also helps me to take it more seriously, since before my therapy for codependence I tended to see my behavior as “being a good person” or “doing the right thing” instead of how I routinely neglected myself while focusing on others, hurt myself with my expectations of reciprocal treatment, and auditioned for people’s approval. That said, I now know that none of this information should be on my online dating profile.
Codependence can be tricky to diagnose because it’s so socially acceptable and even rewarded in our culture. Buying gifts, lending someone money, driving a friend to the airport—these are all filed under being selfless or having good manners. But as a very wise friend of mine once said, “People pleasing is a form of assholery” because our seemingly benevolent behaviors often have sticky motives. These could include needing someone to like us, fear of abandonment, setting ourselves up for disappointment, victimizing ourselves, and trying to maintain a perfect reputation to give us an identity, since we tend not to have one without feedback or validation from others.
The motives part was very confusing to me at first because I had a hard time delineating what was and wasn’t a clean motive. My brain commingled so many dynamics from my childhood that I truly always thought I was doing the right thing, but a lot of my behavior benefited nobody. For example, I now know that it’s “nice” for me to drive you to the airport, but not so much if a week later I text you, and when I don’t hear back in an hour, I think, “How dare she! After I drove her to the airport on a weekday!” followed by stewing in my self-righteousness and resentment, making myself the victim. See how this “nice” gesture is not at all nice given that there are strings attached in the form of impossible expectations? Doing kind things for people and then being angry when they don’t reciprocate by behaving the way we need them to in our heads is how we re-create feelings of being a victim, which is a very easy comfort zone to get cozy in. This batshittery is often described as “taking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Before I started working on overcoming my codependence, I used to pound that metaphorical poison with a metaphorical beer bong.
Before I rewired my brain on the codependence front, I was always micromanaging someone else’s experience: I was always making sure everyone was eating, the right music was playing, the AC was at the right temperature. I would tiptoe around everyone else’s needs (real or imaginary) and limitations, yet martyr myself by tolerating an endless amount of discomfort and stress. For example, I lived with giant cockroaches in my apartment for years because I didn’t have the courage to stand up to my landlord. I ate food I was allergic to because I was afraid of offending a dinner-party host. In college, I answered to the name Wendy for years because I was too afraid to correct someone in my building who had misheard my name when we first met.
Now, for those of you who relate, welcome! Let’s become besties and make a big mess! And for those of you who are baffled about why I’d engage in this kind of emotional cutting, the long and short of it is that being disappointed by people was my safe place, so when people didn’t disappoint me, instead of enduring the anxiety of waiting for it, I’d jerry-rig the situation so that it would happen right away on my terms. From what I gather from the gaggle of experts I’ve overpaid to explain these emotional gymnastics to me, as adults we tend to re-create whatever happened to us as kids so our minds can maintain the chemical equilibrium that we’ve acclimated to. Being disappointed was my comfort zone so my brain would choose familiar insanity over unfamiliar sanity every time.
Okay, so you’re getting the gist of what codependence is, but you’re probably wondering how one becomes codependent in the first place. I’ll tell you, because if you consult WebMD you’ll just end up deducing that you have leprosy, so allow me to save you a bit of panic. There are a myriad of ways someone can end up being codependent, but in my case it was a couple of specific things. First, I believe some of my family members may have been codependent, which they got from their parents, who got it from their parents and into the matrix we go. I’m sure the generations before us had good intentions and did the best they could—in fact, most of them were probably straight-up heroes—but our grandparents and their grandparents were alive at a time when therapy and self-awareness weren’t really a thing. There wasn’t much time back then for self-help, given they had to spend most of their time dodging scurvy and cannonballs.
Codependence thrives in alcoholic households. And let me just throw out that when I say alcoholic, I understand that word as describing a dynamic of continually doing something despite negative consequences. I’m not an addiction specialist, but smart ones have told me that alcoholism doesn’t just apply to cartoon bums pounding bourbon from brown paper bags, it can be used to describe overusing anything to anesthetize discomfort: eating, drinking, fighting, cheating, gambling, worrying, shopping, or in my case, controlling. And by controlling, I mean micromanaging circumstances so everyone is comfortable so there’s no conflict. Why? So I can feel safe, ya silly goose. This behavior kept me safe as a child, but made me annoying as an adult.