Own Your Life and Allow Others to Own Their Lives
It’s pretty foreign for an active (non-recovering) codependent to focus on their own personal problems. Active codependents have been trained to focus outside of themselves. So an active codependent often lives to solve the problems of other people. In this way active codependents live vicariously through the lives of others. It’s how they (the codependent) avoid taking responsibility for living their own lives. Typically, if someone, say a friend, comes to an active codependent with problems, the codependent will immediately feel the need to “own” their friend’s issues. And they (the codependent) will do just that. He or she will take on their friend's problems as if they were his or hers to solve. For example, a friend comes to you with money problems. He’s completely overextended himself financially and he’s in a panic. He can’t pay his mortgage this month, he’s in arrears on his credit card payments, his utilities have been cut-off and he’s now being hounded by collec...