Codependency

Are All Your Relationships Codependent?

One of the greatest benefits of having close friendships is that our friends can support and help us when things get rough in our lives. In exchange for the support our friends give us during a crisis, most of us also help our friends when they need it.In a relationship between two emotionally healthy adults, the roles of giving and receiving help are balanced. Both people offer help and receive help from each other in approximately equal amounts.

However, there are some people who always take on the role of being the helper, no matter what relationship they are in. These people have friendships that focus exclusively on trying to solve the problems of their friends. We sometimes call this quality “co-dependency”, and we may label people who are obsessed with helping others “co-dependent”.

A person who is co-dependent will tend to have relationships with people who have a lot of problems – emotional, social, familial and financial. The co-dependent person may spend much of their own time, money, and energy helping other people who have problems, while ignoring the problems in their own life.

Why would somebody be co-dependent?

A person who is co-dependent often suffers from a deep sense of worthlessness and anxiety, and tries to derive a sense of self-worth by helping or rescuing others. A person who is co-dependent may not know how to relax and feel comfortable in a friendship where both people are equals and the relationship is based on enjoying each others company.

Co-dependent people may even feel anxious if someone they have been helping gets their life in order and no longer wants their help. The co-dependent person may immediately look around for someone else they can “save”. If you frequently take on the role of helping the people who are your friends, how can you tell if you are acting out of genuine kindness and concern, or whether your behavior is in fact co-dependency? There aren’t really any hard and fast lines between the two.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to see whether your “helping” behavior may actually be co-dependency:

  • Do you have a hard time saying no to others, even when you are very busy, financially broke, or completely exhausted?
  • Are you always sacrificing your own needs for everyone else?
  • Do you feel more worthy as a human being because you have taken on a helping role?
  • If you stopped helping your friends, would you feel guilty or worthless?
  • Would you know how to be in a friendship that doesn’t revolve around you being the “helper”?
  • If your friends eventually didn’t need your help, would you still be friends with them? Or would you look around for someone else to help?
  • Do you feel resentful when others are not grateful enough to you for your efforts at rescuing them or fixing their lives?
  • Do you sometimes feel like more of a social worker than a friend in your relationships?
  • Do you feel uncomfortable receiving help from other people? Is the role of helping others a much more natural role for you to play in your relationships?
  • Does it seem as if many of your friends have particularly chaotic lives, with one crisis after another?
  • Did you grow up in a family that had a lot of emotional chaos or addiction problems?
  • Are many of your friends addicts, or do they have serious emotional and social problems?
  • As you were growing up, did you think it was up to you to keep the family functioning?
  • As an adult, is it important for you to be thought of as the “dependable one”?

If you answered “yes” to a lot of these questions, you may indeed have a problem with co-dependency. This does not mean that you are a flawed person. It means that you are spending a lot of energy on other people and very little on yourself.If it seems that a lot of your friendships are based on co-dependent rescuing behaviors, rather than on mutual liking and respect between equals, you may wish to step back and rethink your role in relationships.

If you suspect that your helping behavior is a form of co-dependency, a good therapist or counselor can help you gain perspective on your actions and learn a more balanced way of relating to others.

There are many excellent books available on the subject of co-dependency. Support groups such as Al-Anon can also help.

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Codependence in Relationships

Codependency in relationships is an interesting concept. I remember when I began to hear about codependency, about 30 years ago, and the first book I remember reading was by Sharon Wegschieder-Cruse called Hope and Health for the Alcoholic Family, and what struck me about her work was the roles that the children took on, including family hero, out of sight, out of mind, and the scapegoat.

It was like she had been in my house and was writing about my family, and I probably read her entire book in an hour or so, I was so enthralled.

Wegschieder-Cruse was writing about the family system, and if you approach the codependency in relationship issue from an addictions stand point, the codependent is the one who over the course of time, tries to fix the addict, or covers for the addict, at the expense of their own life.

No matter which of the two perspectives come into play, and both probably will be present to some degree in any relationship where there is an addiction issue, codependency is a tough nut to tease out.

How do you tell what is codependency and what is cooperation, for example?

If my wife needs help paying her bills this month, am I being codependent if I help her out?

What if my wife has a habit of quitting jobs when they get routine, and then cannot pay her bills?

Is she some kind of excitement addict, and jeopardizing her family with her addiction to excitement?

Speaking for myself, I think I am being codependent when I begin to operate from a victim internal dialogue, and I turn the other person into a persecutor. (Usually the feeling I have is resentment.)

I am being codependent when I do not allow the other individual to suffer the natural consequences of their behavior.

I am being codependent when I find that my internal dialogue is filled with words like you, you should, you ought, you must, and when I am ruminating about some other persons poor behavior and how much trouble it has made for me.

Codependency in Relationships

Whatever codependency in relationships is, it is not about offering choice.

When I offer choice and even if I have a preference, if that is not the other persons choice, accepting their choice is the essence of a relationship between equals.

Codependents are not equals. The family hero has to be right, the out of sight person will do little to rock the boat, the scape goat is always wrong, and a true codependent must have an addict to fix.

Relationships between equals have little of those dynamics.

How do I get to a place where I am OK with accepting my partner’s choices?

Learning how to listen, learning assertive communication, reminding myself frequently about why I am in this relationship.

I think that reminding myself of what I like about my partner is a must do exercise many times every day.

In any intimate relationship, the folks involved do some bothersome things, and both the people involved must choose to focus on what they like or what they do not like, the solution or the problem, if you will.

I am reminded of the promises of AA, which state that if you focus on the solution, you get more of that, if you focus on the problem, you get more of that.

I enjoy focusing on gratitude, gratitude that I have been chosen by this person in spite of all the things I do that are less than attractive to her.

If I am focused on gratitude, then I cannot be focused on anything codependent.

Choosing Happens Fast

Reading the words above makes this mental process sound pretty easy, but I can change my thoughts as fast as every 1/18th second.

Paul Ekman, Ph.D. says we respond subconsciously to facial expressions in 1/25th second.

Michael Merzenich,Ph.D., one of the worlds leading researchers in the newly discovered field of neuroplasticity, says we need to train senior drivers visual perception to 1/45th second.

I blink my eyes in 1/10th second, so I could become codependent twice as fast as I blink my eyes, which is 1/10th second.

What tools will train me to move quickly into and out of codependency in relationships?

The first tool I would recommend is HeartMath, based on discoveries in a new field called neurocardiology, which is the study of the nervous system in the heart.

That nervous system is affiliative and cooperative, and when I am in that physiology, it is really hard to be codependent, because heart intelligence feels much different than the resentment or fear that comes with codependency.

HeartMath helps me learn to pay attention to my body heart beat by heart beat, which is much more frequent than what our culture usually teaches us to do.

There are tremendous perceptual advantages to developing the ability to pay attention to the inside of my body that often.

I actually open up my brain’s higher perceptual centers which help me to rapidly respond cooperatively rather than codependently.

Once you have finished your HeartMath and have those higher perceptual centers open, you will be ready to work on your brain fitness using computerized brain fitness programs, and as you practice them, and miss a point or two, you will quickly become aware of how fast you can lose your focus, or switch out of gratitude to resentment.

The nice thing about practicing these tools is that you will be enhancing two very important capacities of the human brain, neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.

A fit brain is less likely to waste time on codependency in relationships.

More Codependency Recovery Articles

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Learn How to Know If You Are Codependent

Talk shows spend many hours discussing codependency, book stores have shelves lined with books about codependency. But what is codependency and how do we recognize if we are codependent. Codependency is a term used to describe people involved with addicts.

It describes behavior where buy a codependent partner enables, make excuses, and allows an addict to continue with their hurtful behavior. In many case the codependent person may be an addict themselves. They usually make excuses for their partner’s behavior, minimize or rationalize this behavior. They are also in most cases afraid to address the situation. Hopefully this article will give you some insight into whether you have codependent tendencies.

First, You tend to minimize your partners erratic and irrational behavior. You use phrases like other people act the same way and it isn’t so bad. You allow them to emotional abuse you and try to justify why they do it.

Second, you tend to hide this destructive undesirable behavior from others. You may be ashamed by how your partner is treating you, but at the same time you are concerned about protecting your partner’s reputation.

Third, you make excuses for your partner. You cover up for appointments they didn’t keep or events they didn’t attend. You take responsibility for their actions when they should be responsible themselves.

Fourth, you are willing to allow them to continue with this less than desirable behavior toward you and others, rather than confront the situation for fear of losing them, and your inability to live without them.

Lastly, you have convinced yourself, that your partner can not live without you. You are willing to sacrifice your happiness and well being for the sake of theirs.

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The Three Flavors of Codependency

The Three Flavors of Codependency

The Non-existent codependent

There are three “flavors” or types of codependency identified by professionals in the field of addiction. The first two were identified and described in two earlier posts. These are, in brief, what I called “the codependent in charge,” and the “super-denier.”

The third type of codependent is the most pitiful. This person needs somebody else in the scapegoat-blustering- abusive role in order to be complete. This codependent thinks so little of themselves that they only exist as a reflection of the other person. I call this flavor “the non-existent codependent.

I once heard a counselor refer to this person as the spider on the mirror. If the addict is the spider and the codependent only the reflection of the spider in the mirror, the reflection has opted out of making any life decisions. The reflection just reacts to every move of the spider, never taking the risk involved in making personal choices or decisions. The dependency is so complete here that, should the spider walk off of the mirror, the reflection disappears!

Given those dire consequences, the name of the game for the codependent is doing everything necessary to avoid being abandoned. There is just no limit to which the reflection will go to accommodate the behavior of the addict. Public humiliation at the hands of the sick person, especially when that person is “in his cups” is common.

This role is often favored by Al-Anon women. Women still do not make equal pay for equal responsibility on the job in America. It has been my observation through the decades that a woman is much more likely to stay with an alcoholic husband (or wealthy alcoholic father) for financial and security reasons than is a man. Most men will leave the alcoholic wife (usually to go and find another one that he can dominate), where most codependent women will stay with an addicted man as long as he continues functioning well enough to support the family. This is why her bottom so often comes when he loses his last job. For everyone there is a different bottom…a different “last straw,” be it infidelity, loss of health, domestic violence, incarceration, or bankruptcy, but for the codependent whose very identity depends upon the addict that bottom is likely to be a very low one.

Because these behaviors developed over a long period of time it is not reasonable to expect them to disappear overnight. Detaching from our closest family members is the most difficult detachment of all. We love these people, and they love us. These are the people who cared for us when we were helpless, who loved us when we were not so lovable. They gave birth to us or married us and bore our children. We shared Christmases, birthdays, paychecks and colds with them. We changed their diapers. However, even in the face of all of this history, we can only recover from our sick dependencies upon them when we do the hard work of changing ourselves from the inside out.

Most truths come to us through other people, such as parents, teachers and preachers. Other truths, however, come to us from personal experience, and those are always the most profound. One truth that came to me early in my program is this one; you never harm another person by growing yourself.

Heard at a meeting; “I feel guilty feeling joyful while my alcoholic wife is not.”

Here is an important point; you are half of every relationship, so when you grow you make the sum of the relationship greater. Some will just not go with you. Some are not willing to grow, some do not know where to start, and some never even think that thought because they believe that they have already arrived and that they are perfect!

I have seen multiple means of making the break from family members in order to grow. Some have to sever the relationship altogether for a period of time. Some can continue the relationship on a shallow level and then allow the depth to come another day. Some have to accept the fact that the other person is never going to change. These are hard truths. The good news that comes to us through recovery is that change is possible. Change in thinking, change in behavior, change in attitude…all of this awaits the recovering individual who is willing to put forth the time and energy necessary to effect that change!

If you recognize yourself in this or any other codependent role, PLEASE go for help. Al-Anon is free, it is in your community, and you can find a meeting in a matter of moments through the Al-Anon World Service Office. You can reach Al-Anon at 1-888-4-AL-ANON, or through their excellent web site at www.al-anon.alateen.org.

Author’s qualifications

Ken P.


Ken P. was raised in poverty among what would in AA terminology be referred to as “low-bottom drunks.” He was also married for 19 years to a woman who became a practicing alcoholic.

Ken is a singular man in that he has been active in the Al-Anon recovery program for 30 years, a program usually attended by women. Through the years Ken has sonsored many men, spoken at major Al-Anon and AA conferences, and served as chairman of the board of directors for the Al-Anon Intergroup office, which serves over 200 weekly meetings in the Houston area. The 12-step program has given Ken a totally new life, which he shares with his wife, who will be called Katy in his writings. Next to his relationship with the God of his understanding, Ken values the deep loving relationship he and Katy have formed more than anything else.

Recently, Ken has dedicated himself to his 12-step program, and to tutoring students in the SAT, higher math and science. He began writing about the recovery process for men with addicted family members in June of 2006.

For Ken personally, publication of his thoughts represents the chance to help the families of addicts on an even broader scale, which he is convinced is one of the most important purposes for his life.

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5 Tips To Overcome Being Resigned To Living With An Alcoholic

Alcoholism is a disease that can be devastating for those living with an alcoholic. People with an alcoholic parent or spouse know how stressful it is to constantly worrying that their loved one will drink and drive, sell family valuables and use the money to finance their habit or go on a binge and not come home for days.

For many living with an alcoholic means constantly worrying about paying the bills, having to clean up after their alcoholic loved one, looking out for various signs of alcoholism, dealing with abuse, and even being unable to sleep from fear of what will happen next.

Instead of enabling or becoming resigned to the situation you have to fight back! Follow these top 5 tips to change your situation.

1. Take an honest look at the alcoholic: Identifying the line between social drinking and alcohol abuse is not an easy thing to do. Although an individual who only drinks a few glasses during the weekend might not be considered an alcoholic, anyone who drinks to the point that it affects their regular life can be considered to be abusing alcohol.

Talk to the alcoholic parent or spouse. Sit down and ask them why they drink. Discus worrying symptoms that indicate alcoholism such as drinking to the point of blacking out, needing to drink to feel better about their life and feeling ashamed over their drinking habits.

2. Let the alcoholic accept the consequences: To get out of resignation, let the alcoholic experience the negative consequences of drinking and do not let yourself take on responsibility for their actions. When living with an alcoholic avoid calling in for them if they miss work, do not buy alcohol for them, steer clear of helping them to bed or cleaning up the empty bottles after they binge. To keep them out of debt and get them to realize how bad the situation has become do not purchase alcohol for them or give them money to buy more.

3. Accept the reality: To change your life with an alcoholic parent or spouse, you need to accept the reality. Do not live in denial or make excuses for the signs of alcoholism being displayed. You should also not feel guilty or try to threaten or bribe them into giving up alcohol. Instead, focus on dealing with your own emotions, because these are the only emotions you have the power to control.

4. Do not engage: When living with an alcoholic, you are likely to notice that when heavily drinking they may start arguments, throw items around, or become verbally abusive. Do not be sucked into playing mind games or getting into a fight! Make sure your spouse experiences being loved by you but detach yourself from the situation. If necessary, leave the house for a few hours or go out with some friends. By not accepting the outburst and bad behaviors they will see even faster that they need help.

5. Get Support: The road to recovery will not happen in just a few weeks or months. For some the process can take years! To get the emotional support needed to recognize and treat the signs of alcoholism therapists, support groups, online forums and even eBook systems can be accessed.

These treatment methods are enormously helpful for both the alcoholic and the individuals living with an alcoholic.

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How to Train a Man to Become an Enabler

An Enabler is any person who does for another person what that person could and should be doing for themselves. These twin diseases of addiction and codependency, especially in the later stages, render both sides in the dance less capable as people on all fronts…physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

However, this loss in capacity happens in such a gradual way that those suffering from the diseases cannot recognize the symptoms. To understand, for example, how the codependent is inexorably pulled into the downward spiral of another’s addiction it helps to understand a learning process behavioral biologists call “habituation.”

If he somehow overcomes all of the stumbling blocks mentioned so far, the codependent man has one more hurdle to overcome, and this one can be the most difficult of all. Through the process of habituation, he has been trained! Put another way, the codependent man has been trained by his addicted loved-ones’ disease to accommodate the addict’s need for the drug in thousands of subtle ways. Here is how this works.

Biologists have distinct classifications of animal behavior, on a continuum from instinct to critical reasoning. Just above instinct is this process called “habituation.” Habituation is a sort of non-behavior. It means that some stimulus in the animal’s environment results in neither reward nor punishment, so it is ignored. As an example, if you take a horse out of the pasture and put it under a police officer in a major city that horse is suddenly exposed to an entirely foreign environment. The first time an irate driver blasts a horn that animal will be startled. However, after a period of habituation, the horse ignores all horn blasts.

Habituation comes into play with a co-dependent married to an addict. The constant angry looks, the general air of depression throughout the home, the smells and sounds of the addiction (i.e., how distinctive is the sound of a beer can opening?)…all of these stimuli eventually become habituated and ignored.

Addiction and respect

A common ploy of the addicted individual is bluster. There are various ways to gain respect. The most difficult is to use the personal discipline to grow first on an individual basis (by maturing in areas such as self control, patience, etc.) and then to go out and lead a fruitful life.

Another way is to intimidate, fight, and bluster at other people. This method makes the incorrect basic assumption that respect and fear are synonymous. Unfortunately, addiction is progressive. That is, it starts at a seemingly innocent level and then slowly grows until it takes the addicted person’s everything, including their body, mind, soul, bank account, relationships, career…and respect.

Psychologists studying the members of families suffering from addiction cannot pinpoint the exact point when true respect is replaced by false bluster, but they know that it eventually happens. The addicted person has to become a bully because he or she senses the loss of their genuine respect from others (and even themselves) in time to their disease.

Unfortunately, the other members of the family, being human beings themselves, respond to the abusive bluster in various predictable ways.

A common response for a man is to answer in kind. How many times have I encountered terribly successful men in their careers who go home and react like irresponsible teenaged boys when forced to interact with an abusive addicted teenaged child or wife?

The children witness the disrespect shown by the addicted wife, for example, and then they begin losing respect for both parents. In order to survive, since loud profane abusive behavior seems to work so well for the parents, the children sometimes join in the fray. At this point, the family members are no longer members of a family. They each devolve into an individual organism trying his or her best to survive in a threatening environment.

If you identified with anything written here, you may well be caught up in the disease of codependency, and you may well be exhibiting behaviors that are enabling somebody you love to continue destroing themselves with alcohol and/or drugs. Please; seek help that is free and easily located

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Codependency Treatment

My favorite codependency treatment self help tools involve biofeedback, brain fitness, sound and light, education, and reading.

Codependency is based on memories. No child is born codependent, so we learn it. Memories are powerful, especially if you experienced or saw violence as a kid.

Attachment must be completed effectively for adult relationships to be effective, and work with a therapist is appropriate for psychological issues.

However memories, no matter how powerful, can be worked with. I know it is possible because I have participated in therapies like psychodrama and holotropic breathwork which can expand your work with your counselor or therapist using cognitive behavioral therapy or existential therapy or psychodynamic therapy, ect.

I also know that great American tradition of self help works, because I am a veteran of almost 30 years of experience, one day at a time, through the grace of the higher power.

So when I first heard about codependence, I took up the ACOA, or adult child of alcoholic process, which is based on the 12 step model.

In the Big Book of AA, there are a few brief paragraphs talking about the Promises of AA, what will result if you are diligent in doing the steps, and those brief paragraphs state that if you pay attention to the solution, you get more solution, and if you pay attention to the problem, you get more problem, which is the essence of what I think is the core of therapy and self help.

Change the thought and change the feeling. If I feel good, then I act positively.

What the codependency treatment and therapy folks do not mention is that we have this brain that is set up to re-orient itself very frequently, and when I re-orient, I may not come back to the effective thought I was just practicing, I may come back to a problem thought, so I need to pay attention to my thinking and keep it more often than not on the solution thoughts.

Sound like meditation to you? Or mindfulness? Or Flow? Yes it does, and attention can be trained cognitively or physiologically, using biofeedback or meditation.

The first self-help tool that I am recommending, one I have used since 2000, and taught to hundreds of clients is HeartMath.

I practice on a computer 5 to 10 times, and then I can cue the physiology without the computer, because I have taught the brain in my heart to respond to a breathing pattern and a cue thought.

Can you imagine cuing a coherent heart rate heart beat by heart beat? Sure takes the emotional volatility out of codependence doesn’t it.

Yes, it also very healthy for every cell in my body. I like to call it a walking meditation and the best part is my body gets to like it, and reminds me to practice, so it can stay calm.

When the codependency treatment discovery process began in the early 1980′s, no one knew that the heart had a brain of its own, no one knew that heart intelligence sent more data up than the brain sent down, and no one knew that the brain grew new brain cells (neurogenesis) or was so plastic (neuroplasticity), and no one knew that those particular brain capacities could be trained.

So as part of my 12 step work, I work to keep my brain healthy, using physical exercise, good nutrition including omega 3 fatty acid supplementation (crucial to attention on the solution), good sleep, stress management, and novel learning experiences, including computerized brain fitness programs, which have been shown to actually change the structure of my brain with enough practice.

Why would an old wino with neuropathy in his left hand want a healthy brain as a parent of youngsters, and heading into his Senior years? You know the answer to that.

I want to challenge my brain.

If you want to read a bit about brain fitness, which is the core of self-help, recovery, any change in life, then read Brainfit for Life by Simon Evans,Ph.D. and Paul Burghardt,Ph.D. who are neuroscientists at the University of Michigan.

They go into a great amount of detail about what research reveals in regards to enhancing neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, which is again the crux of any self-help process.

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Family Involvement In Alcohol Treatments

A common fact (and an obvious one) that can be considered reasonable is to find a gap between an alcoholic and his family. It is also common to discover that a lot of reason why someone is abusing alcohol is because of family related issues and problems. This is because of so many things associated to domestic problems that one can look for escape goats or outlets which can lessen the feeling of stress and depressions of an individual.

We all know that alcoholism and addiction can be the cause of so many problems linking to household problems and family relationships. It affects family members and close relatives making them estranged to the alcoholic. Even though, the person doesn’t intend to make such trauma and troubles, he or she can distress all the members of the family separating him or her from them. So, if we want to accomplish a difficult battle against alcoholism, one must realized we need to tackle the most common ground in the subject, the home.

Family involvement in alcoholism treatment programs is a sure necessary components if we want everyone to be successful in beating alcohol addiction. Therapies and programs should be implemented on families of the alcoholic involve so that members of the family can understand the aspects related to drinking problems. This will allow the home environment ready and supportive while the patient is on withdrawal stage. In general, members of the family are not aware of the circumstances and the reasons of alcohol addiction problems. They might see the problems but do not know the roots and the cause of such drinking problems.

A family therapy and program in alcohol addiction treatment can give them the familiarity and understanding so that they can comprehend clearly and will do the necessary actions on the event. A family program can also teach members of the family on how to deal with the person who is quitting alcohol and will support him while he is undergoing alcohol addiction treatment. The learn how to create a home that is sympathetic and make them comfortable and understanding towards recovery.

Therapy involving programs and therapeutic counseling of the family members can be useful in terms of making a supportive and accommodating place for any alcoholic. An alcohol rehabilitation center that provides quit drinking program is a better place to tackle this kind of condition. It is an added advantage as well as additional resources that will help the person get through the situation. The curing and personalized family program can assist a person to the road of recovering from alcoholism. In this place, the family can educate themselves on how to communicate with each others and how to deal with the alcoholic.

After alcohol rehabilitation and detoxification has been fully accomplished and implemented, the recovering alcoholic can maintain his sobriety at home with the help of informed family members and can be his best weapon in continuing his battle against alcohol addiction. It is a very good support group that will eventually help an individual be sober for the rest of his life.

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