Am I Codependent?

Sometimes people come in to Codependents Anonymous meetings for the first time and their question is “Am I codependent or not?” I can relate to the question. I sat and wondered the same thing at the first CODA meeting I attended. My therapist had said “I think you’re suffering from a codependency” as he handed me a list of characteristics. Glancing at the list, I could sure relate to many of the characteristics, but I had never heard the term “codependency” before and was really clueless to what it meant.

So how do we know if we are codependent or not? Well, codependency is all about dysfunctional relationships. So we start by examining our relationship with ourselves. Then we examine our patterns of behavior in our relationships with others.

In accessing your relationship with yourself, ask yourself questions like these: Do I have a good relationship with myself? Do I truly love and value the person that I am? Do I feel really good in my skin? Do I know who I really am? Do I know and value my wants and needs, my beliefs and values, my likes and dislikes? Do I own them with pride? Do I treat myself with proper respect? Do I refrain from self-criticism and from demeaning myself with guilt and shame? Do I practice good self-care by making time for all of my spiritual, physical, mental and emotional needs? Am I my own person (meaning, do I value my opinions of myself more than I value other people’s opinions of me)?

Next, think about your relationships with others, and ask yourself questions like these: Am I an equal partner in all of my relationships? Do I respect other people’s boundaries? Do I empathize with other people’s problems while allowing them to solve their own problems? Do I believe people like and love me for simply being who I am? Am I able to be comfortable in relationships simply being who I am without any inner-need to do things for others or be needed by them? Is the inner-need to “earn” someone else’s love totally foreign to me? Am I comfortable accepting compliments and gifts from others? Am I fully myself in relationships that are interdependent and built on mutual respect? Do I set proper boundaries with others to ensure my own person integrity and well-being as well as theirs?

If you answer “Yes” to most of these questions, then you probably don’t have a codependency issue. But if you find yourself mostly answering “No” to these questions, then you do have a codependency problem.

Codependents, first and foremost, have very poor relationships with themselves. They suffer from high levels of shame, guilt and self-loathing. An active codependent has a very low level of self-love, self-worth and thus self-esteem. Self-care isn’t even on the radar of the average codependent person. So codependents have very poor boundaries in terms of protecting themselves from predators. They then end-up victimized time after time as they refuse to own their personal power and are consistently giving it away to everyone else. Codependents generally believe that everyone they know has more value than they do.

The focus of the codependent mind is rarely tuned inside and almost always tuned outside of self. Since their self-love and self-worth are very poor, codependents learn to look outside of themselves to find someone who can rescue them from themselves. They then latch-on to others in an attempt to secure some sort of love and salvation.

Once an active codependent latches-on to another person, the relationship is never interdependent because the codependent always feels lesser-than. And so the codependent is always fearful of rejection or abandonment from the other person since the codependent never feels “good enough” for that person.

As a result, the codependent will totally enmesh in the other person, taking-on their likes and dislikes, wants and needs, problems and personality in a crazy attempt to become “good enough” for the other person. To accomplish this, the codependent will engage in people-pleasing and caretaking. They will bend over backwards to be whatever the other person wants them to be, to solve all of the other person’s problems and to meet the other person’s every need, while ignoring all of their own wants and personal needs.

An active codependent knows no boundaries. They have no boundaries in place to protect themselves and they have no respect for anyone else’s boundaries. They have no understanding of affirming or validating someone else’s problem while allowing that person to solve the problem for themselves. The active codependent always jumps in and assumes ownership of problems that are not theirs to own. This is one of their primary tools for ensuring that they feel needed and thus secure in relationships. It eventually causes rifts in relationships, however, with people who are healthy enough to know that they must fix their own problems. This type of caretaking will inevitably blow-up in the codependent’s face as the relationship falls apart.

If you can seriously relate to these codependent characteristics and behaviors, then you definitely need to be in a Codependents Anonymous or Al-Anon group. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. Don’t get caught-up in denial. Do what you need to do to help yourself. You can turn your life around to the point where you can honestly answer all of the questions in paragraphs four and five with a resounding “Yes!” But you have to be willing to take responsibility for your life and your happiness, and you have to be willing to work at it every day. Today is the day to start by saying “Yes” to yourself and getting to a recovery meeting!