The Emotional Vampire: One Sign of Affection Is Too Many and One Hundred Isn't Enough

Let’s look a little deeper into the concept of a codependent as an emotional vampire. The mythic vampire is a human corpse that rises from the dead. It has but one life source—human blood— and so it sucks the blood out of living humans to sustain itself. The vampire can never get enough blood from others because it apparently can’t sustain its own life blood. So a vampire is always on the prowl for new victims.

An out-of-control codependent is much like the vampire. Somewhere within the growth process of the codependent person, his/her life source vein—self-love—was severed. As a result, he/she became an emotionally-lifeless living corpse. The codependent then learned to sustain him/herself on the love of others, much like the vampire sustains itself on the blood of others. Since the codependent is not able to sustain love for him/herself any more than the vampire is able to sustain blood for itself, the codependent must constantly get his/her life source from outside of him/herself, just like the vampire.

Just as the vampire is desperate for blood, the codependent is equally desperate for love, and he/she can never get enough to sustain their need. Because the codependent can’t affirm him/herself through self-love, he/she is forever at the mercy of his/her victims for every crumb of love available. This is why out-of-control codependents suck the emotional life right out of their victims much like vampires suck the physical life out of theirs. Someone who is incapable of believing that they are lovable is also incapable of believing that someone else really does love and value them.

You can tell a codependent a million times a day that you love him/her, but it will never be enough. The active codependent’s constant need for affirmation reminds me of a scene from the 1945 film The Lost Weekend. Don Birnam (played by Ray Milland) is an active alcoholic. A bartender refuses to give a desperate Birnam another drink telling Birnam “One drink’s too many for you and a hundred’s not enough.” The same is true for an active codependent. Just one sign of affection, from anyone, is too many. The active codependent is so desperate for intimacy that any sign of affection from another person is often seen as a step toward matrimony. And anyone who hooks-up with an active codependent soon learns that one act of affection is too many and a hundred is never enough. Eventually, it’s this heightened level of neediness that causes the victim of the codependent, the emotional vampire, to flee.

Of course, this desperate neediness can also help the codependent to eventually hit bottom and to seek help. This is certainly what happened to me. I didn’t understand why none of my relationships ever worked-out any more than I understood that I was sucking the life out of everyone in all of my failed relationships. I finally reached a point of being so unhappy that I had to do something or die. And so for the first time I sought help through a spiritual director, a therapist and my first Codependents Anonymous support group.

If you’re feeling like an emotional vampire, constantly needing others to make you feel OK about yourself, then seek help. It’s the only way to get onto the right path in life, to take back your power and to allow your soul to shine!