Change Leads to Awareness, and Awareness Leads to Recovery

“I didn’t know I was broken until I wanted to change.”

Bleachers, I Wanna Get Better (2014)

No one suffering from codependency, or any other addictive personality defect, knows that they are “broken” until one day they decide they need to change. That day happened to me in early October of 1995.

Prior to that day, I had no idea that I was the one with the problem. I knew I was rarely happy and I knew that most all of my relationships had a pattern of falling apart. But I thought it was always the fault of the other person and that fact that they refused to change in the many ways that I insisted that they change.

It never once had occurred to me that I was the one who truly needed to change because my patterns of behavior were dysfunctional and extremely broken. The only change I was willing to engage in was a false sense of change known was people-pleasing. Yes, I would pretend to be whomever someone else wanted me to be; meaning I would pretend to like what they like or believe what they believed. But that was it. And that change was only going to last as long as it took to hook someone into liking me.

But in 1995 the blindfold came off my eyes. I was so bitterly unhappy that I finally asked myself “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I build good relationships? Why does everyone fight me and then walk out on me?”

Yes, I didn’t know I was broken until I wanted to change. And that very day I wanted my life to change so bad, that I finally made an appointment with a therapist. And it only took one visit to discover what my problem was: codependency.

In the many follow-up visits, I discovered just how broken I really was. It seemed my every pattern of behavior left broken bits of me and others scattered across my history. From my people-pleasing to my caretaking to my playing the roles of victim and martyr; from my need to shame and guilt people into being and doing what I wanted to my need to spy on people I proclaimed to love because I couldn’t trust anyone. All of the ugly truth poured out before my eyes—and, after I accepted it, it gave me the chance to start over again; to change in positive ways.

I started reading Melody Beattie books and attending Codependents Anonymous meetings twice, sometimes three times, a week. Along with the therapy, I turned my want to change into actual positive change itself. I learned to stop being a people-pleasing caretaking victim and to start being the real me.

Anyone can do this. But we first have to discover our brokenness by acknowledging that deep aching need to change. So we need to turn inward and listen to ourselves. Once we stop looking outside ourselves for someone else to blame for our unhappiness and start looking inside ourselves, we will find that we have a deep desire to change. We will then learn to discover our own brokenness. And with that awareness, we can begin the positive journey of changing our broken patterns of behavior into healthy ones.