DESPERATE!!! for Affection

The codependent personality is always desperate for affection. Even years into recovery this fact remains unchanged for many people. Why? Because we are still lax in our willingness to meet our own emotional needs. Deep down we still want someone else to fill the void. And every person who comes along who shows the slightest interest in us—who smiles at us, who treats us with kindness or who flirts with us-- becomes our latest, greatest redeemer.

Yes. We are so desperate for intimacy that we fall right into the trap again and again and again. Every smiling face offers us the hope of avoiding self-care. We want the easy way out. We want to be rescued. And our thinking is skewed in so many wrong ways we can’t possible see straight.

First, we are forgetting that only WE can fill-up our emotional emptiness through proper self-care and the aid of a Higher Power. No one else can fill up our empty spaces. We have to invest time in loving who we are and in treating ourselves the way we want others to treat us: with love, gentleness and respect. We need to be OK with us before we can expect that anyone else should be. In other words, we need to honestly befriend ourselves.

Second, we need to learn to make friends with others. Notice that the word “others” is plural. The problem for most recovering codependents that I know is that they still think singularly. They aren’t interested really in befriending themselves and in making friends with others first—as a means of learning how to gradually build healthy friendships. Instead, they are still focused on finding THE ONE. They don’t look to make friends in the plural, nor do they want to allow friendships to eventually grow and lead them into healthier states of relating to themselves and others. They still desperately want THE ONE.

And the search for THE ONE is a major red flag that we are still refusing to take care of our own emotional needs. No matter how “recovered” we believe ourselves to be, if we are still searching for THE ONE-- the redeemer-- before we even learn to be comfortable with ourselves, before we learn to simply make friends with others, then we are SCREWED.

So here’s the Formula for Self-Destruction: We refuse to meet our own needs, we attach to the first person who offers us attention, this person is emotionally unavailable and has no sense of commitment, we expect them to be our emotionally filling-station for life, they expect us to be their emotional filling-station for a night or two, we loose ourselves in them and they quickly withdraw after they’ve gotten all they need from us. They move on and we die another emotional death. Many of us die a million deaths and still we don’t learn our lesson.

And here’s the Formula for Self-Reclamation: We begin the practice of self-care. We take time to connect with ourselves through reading, prayer, self-affirmation and self-discovery. We practice kindness with ourselves—a totally new concept. We work at seeing ourselves as we truly are: lovable. We treat ourselves as lovable. We say “no” to others when we need to take the time to meet our own needs. We eat right, exercise and get comfortable being with ourselves. We attend recovery meetings to keep our focus on moving forward into healthier living. We look to make friends with people of our own gender or of the opposite sexual orientation. This keeps us safe from falling back into the trap of looking for THE ONE instead of looking to make necessary friendships.

Gradually we create a network of friends who compliment us and who we enjoy spending time with. They meet a basic need that we all have for friendships but they are not filling-up our neediness because we are taking care of our own needs. Eventually over time, after we have filled-up the bottomless pit inside us ourselves, we may meet THE ONE. But it will be the REAL ONE: Someone who is emotionally available to us, someone who we are emotionally available to. We will come together to compliment each other, not to feed-off each other. Our relationship will be filled with comfort, not with desperation.