Am I ok if you’re ok? Observations on co-dependence

May 19th, 2010 | 1 Comment

Question: How many co-dependents does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: I don’t know, what do you think? While the word “co-dependent” is often used pejoratively (as in, “my mother is so co-dependent”), the truth is that we are all a little co-dependent at times; who doesn’t want to be well regarded, praised, etc? But what does it mean in a deeper, psychological sense?

First off, the term “co-dependence”, like many terms so breezily used, is synonymous with suffering. People who suffer from co-dependence are not weak or defective; in most if not all cases they have, somewhere in their past, been injured by defective caretaking or by someone close to them, and this injury has impaired their ability to form and maintain healthy relationships. Most often, co-dependence means that one’s sense of inner existence is entwined with another person’s outer existence. The person’s “self” is enmeshed with perceptions of the other. When such a person looks at someone else, they see themselves. When they look at themselves, it’s through the eyes of someone else. Thus, to suffer co-dependence is to live in illusion, to chase a mirage – sometimes to the point of madness.

This mis-shapen sense of personal identity develops when basic boundaries, trust and autonomy gets trampled, usually in childhood; the young person feels unsafe, unloved or unworthy by a caretaker (a parent, older sibling, etc). This person may feel as though the caretaking adult “depends” on him or her to exist without falling apart.

Sometimes children unwittingly “threaten” parents, by having feelings parents have no capacity for processing; these parents then over-react or try to squash or censor the “offending” child that they themselves find overwhelming. For instance, a child may be just a little too truthful, asking his parent why he/she drinks so much or gets angry for no reason. The message is: “That’s not true, now shut up!” or “You’re making it up” or “Get over it”. Or perhaps the child is a little too energetic, playful or “childish” (sic) for the parent’s comfort, and so the child is punished accordingly, shamed into silence or hurried into “maturity”. Often the parent also suffers from co-dependence (in addition to anxiety, depression or other disorders) and his or her own true self is enmeshed with the child’s. The child’s “problem” becomes the inner state of the parent, who has to “get rid of” those feelings because the parent lacks the stability and resources to deal with them.

The message for the child could not be clearer: stop being yourself and be who I need you to be, or else I’ll reject/abandon/emotionally destroy you. This forms a pattern of warped perception that can be very difficult to change. In this case, well being might be dependent on the philosophy of, “I’m ok if you’re ok.”

What usually develops out of this are behaviors such as approval-seeking, isolating from or controlling others (to receive their approval or avoid criticism); an internal command develops to squelch that part of ourselves that might “scare” others away and leave us isolated or abandoned. Unfortunately, that usually means the “authentic” part that has been habitually repressed since those early injuries: the spontaneous, creative self that yearns to breathe and exist freely, without conditions, but is repressed out of the terror of being destroyed by a false need for constant validation and approval – sometimes subtle.

Thus this person desperately searches outside herself for a reflection of herself in the face of another, for permission to exist, in order to breathe freely and feel safe. Of course, this search is destined to fail since true worth is developed on the inside. Validation helps, but it cannot replace a stable, core self.

Who can’t relate to this phenomenon, at least a little. We all want praise (who doesn’t?), validation, a positive reflection of ourselves in the eyes of the world and those around us. But if, in childhood, what we receive is not love and acceptance but rather disappointment, anger, and a shame that says “you are not ok as you are” – because of the other person’s feelings about us, not our own actual self-worth – then this desire becomes a need that feels necessary for survival. Isolation, anger and an impaired capacity for intimacy are often the outcomes.

The good news is, there is a solution. With patience, faith and diligence, a healing can take place. We can educate ourselves on the process and get help from others in developing an internal sense of well-being. We cannot change the past, cannot and could not control anyone else (whose problems are theirs alone to solve), but we can seek out the internal acceptance and self-worth that we deserve, and rediscover our authenticity in the process. Therapy, 12-step participation, peer support, volunteer work, are all good ways to begin to discover the inside by exploring the outside in a more balanced way. We can even begin to forgive those who hurt us, since most often they too were victims of primal injuries that taught them they were “bad”. In doing so, we might begin to perceive that what was done to us was not our fault.

The right to authenticity, to exist as we are, without “revision” imposed on us is, in fact, our birthright. We needn’t create this self, or “reinvent” anything…only remove what covers it up, scrub away the dirt and mud to reveal that diamond in the rough. What never ceases to amaze me is that the true self is always there, without fail, beneath these wounds. It is never too late to heal, to change, to seek and find the authentic core self that urgently awaits our re-discovery within.