What is Codependency? It’s Making Another Person Into Your God

I used to find it hard to define codependency in one sentence. I knew all of the characteristics and symptoms, but I couldn’t seem to boil all of that down into a few words. Today, I can.

Codependency is choosing to make another person into your false higher power or god. The alcoholic makes liquor into their false god. The overeater makes food into their false god. The shopaholic makes things into their false god. The compulsive gambler makes the turn of a card, or a role of the dice into their false god, etc., etc., etc. It’s the same with every addict, we make someone, something or some activity into our false savior.

Why? Because over our entire lives we have mercilessly made ourselves feel lesser than every other person on the face of this earth. We’ve been so self-critical that, through the emotional pain we create inside ourselves, we are forced to find some sort of emotional relief. And the easiest form of emotional relief from our tattered self-worth is addiction. Addiction is the quick and easy false fix, or false god.

I totally disagree with the quote I placed above. Being clingy is a sign of poor self-worth and self-love. It is never “just how I am.” Being clingy/needy is how I learned to be as a child and who I have chosen to be as an adult. It was how I chose to be every day of my life before I started therapy and began my recovery program.

No one is born clingy or codependent. No one is born an alcoholic, drug addict, overeater, shopaholic or gambling addict. True some babies are born to mothers who are drug or alcohol addicts and their mothers’ misuse of drugs/alcohol does effect them. But this isn’t true of the average person. We learn to be addicts and then model the behavior we have learned, from childhood into adulthood. For most of my life I was my mother behaviorally— until I got my wake-up call.

For years I needed someone else to be my savior or false god. I believed I was worthless and could not redeem myself, and I didn’t have a real God on my side (Or so I wrongly believed). So many different people became my false god, but not a one of them could save me from myself.

Through recovery, I’ve learned that I have to be the person to save me from myself and all of the negative childhood beliefs that made me feel like the most inferior person on earth. I have to first reject all of the lies about me I was taught and I have to start replacing them with truths by accepting all of me just as God created me. And I need God’s or my Higher Power’s help to turn my life around for the better.

Today, I cling to no one. No person can be my Higher Power. Only God, the REAL One, can be my true Higher Power.