Maybe you grew up in a dysfunctional home in a codependent relationship. In the best-selling book, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls talks about her difficult childhood. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother abdicated the role of her caretaker, and the children were left to fend for themselves. Walls’s parents made her children serve them, not the other way around. Your situation may not be that deeply dysfunctional, but it doesn’t have to be to grow codependent.

What does it mean to be codependent?

Basically, you are codependent when you are in a relationship where someone who is pathological, possibly with an addiction, controls you. The dysfunctional relationship puts you in a position to help or allow another person to be immature, irresponsible, or incompetent in some way.

Children who grew up with a tenuous bond with their parents, as Walls did, were in a constant state of anxiety. They had to forget their own needs, let alone what they wanted. They even had to forget who they were at their core in order to survive. You don’t have to be the child of an alcoholic to feel like you’re not good enough and that your own feelings are worth it. Children with parents who suffer from narcissism, borderline personality disorders, and other issues may feel just as insecure.

What happens when codependent children grow up?

As children, they learned to sublimate their needs, and most continue in that pattern. Their self-esteem has eroded, so they need the approval of others, just like in their childhood. They pay more attention to the feelings and needs of others than to their own, and tend to others so that they are not abandoned or rejected, as they fear they would have been as children. They do not have the ability to assert their own needs in a relationship and often end up with a partner who continues the pattern of codependency.

However, having learned in childhood how to manage others, they can appear completely confident and competent. Because they are the person others depend on, they seem mentally and emotionally strong. They understand from experience that they should not depend on anyone else. They are the problem solver, the caretaker, the decision maker, and the savior. They are driven by the need to be loved and accepted, as they never were by their original parents or caregivers.

Codependents need to be needed.

So they look for someone they can ‘help’ and therefore feel good about themselves. But what often happens as the relationship evolves is that they support the other person’s negative behavior, whether it be incompetence, immaturity, irresponsibility, or poor mental and physical health. If they end up with an alcoholic, for example, they allow the behavior by covering for their partner. They continue to rescue their partner, while feeling very needed, out of trouble. They are actually adjusting to unhealthy behavior. Unfortunately, the result is that they prolong that behavior for as long as they allow it.

More on codependency next time.

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