Thank you so much for listening to Take Out Therapy where we are on week two of our codependency series. I'm going back to talk about codependency because it was so popular before and this time we were exploring the reality of codependency. So stick around for this episode.
I just want to say a couple things before the episode begins. One thing I want to say is while I'm talking about codependency and giving examples and kind of what I see, nowhere in there am I incorporating abusive relationships. And so if that comes up for you, just know that I don't incorporate that element because it's too complicated to be covered in a instructional 20-minute podcast on codependency.
And then the other thing that I want to mention is that codependency can oftentimes put us in poor mental health, frankly, and anxiety is one of those problems. So if you resonate with the episode on that level, I'd love to invite you to visit the link in the show notes and take part in my healing anxiety workshop where I basically break down for you the process required in order to heal anxiety and help you to stop making the same old mistakes in your journey towards peace. So with that, I hope you enjoy today's episode and I hope that you get something out of it and take that thing into your life and be empowered, my friend.
Okay, let's get on with it. You're listening to Take Out Therapy with your host, Rebecca Hunter. If you're into personal growth and fascinated by the human condition like I am, stick with me.
In the next few minutes, I'll break down a common personal growth topic and give you some straightforward ideas for change. I'm a private practice therapist and online mental health educator. So I see a lot of popular topics, both in and out of the therapy office that we all struggle with.
I'm here to help with that. This podcast is not a substitute for therapy, but rather the musings of a therapist and an opportunity for information and a little bit of help. Okay, let's get to work.
Hello, my friends. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm looking forward to digging into this episode because I've decided to revisit the topic of codependency.
And I'll just say before I get going today, codependency is kind of a label, right? It's a word that we use to describe a certain kind of relationship dynamic. But what I really want you to know is I'm going to use the word and the label. You know I don't like these labels.
And I want you to know that it's just a word. It's just a word to describe a set of behaviors that I honestly, as a therapist, who spends a lot of time with people talking about relationships and the difficulties inherent in our relationships, we're all kind of codependent. So please take this episode with a grain of salt.
I'm hoping that you walk away from today with some ideas about what you'd like to change in the dynamics of your own friendships, relationships, maybe even your parenting. You know it used to be that codependency was very tied to addiction. And that was true because basically when you lived with an addicted person, it was kind of human nature to revolve life around them.
Which meant that we weren't able to really look out for our own best interests and get what we wanted out of our lives. But rather, yeah, we're like rotating life around somebody who's sick and chaotic and needy. That's not the case anymore with codependency in my opinion.
I see a lot of us with these kind of relationship patterns that are very centered on the other. And so today's episode is really about kind of reclaiming your own place in relationships. Like can we stop living for other people? Can we start to manage our own emotional life? So let's do a deep dive into codependency today.
And I'll start with like my own definition. Working in the realm of human behavior, I've kind of come up with my own idea about what I see as a major piece of codependency. And I would say like when we're very dependent on another person's actions or their emotional state for our own emotional stability, we're getting into some wiggly territory of codependency basically.
It's like, you know, it's basically like when, you know, a child or a husband or a wife is feeling an emotion and we like do everything in our power to sort of get them to feel better because when they don't feel good, we don't feel good. So it's a real lack of like this sort of emotional independence that develops over time in relationships. And so that's kind of like my own definition of codependency and that's kind of what we're going to work with today.
I want to talk about some of the most troublesome and changeable aspects to codependency because here's the thing. We're really dependent on each other. That is kind of a natural part of being a human, being in relationships, right? But we can kind of individuate.
We can separate ourselves out a little bit more. It's healthier. We can, you know, like just because somebody else is feeling negative emotion, we don't have to be there with them.
We can be emotionally independent when we start looking at some of the aspects of codependency in our relationship. I think the number one thing that I really see is this kind of poor me mentality and in my field we use the word victim mentality. I'm not a huge fan of the word victim but like you kind of know what I mean.
When we feel victimized basically it's like other people are running our lives. We feel like I always use this analogy in the therapy office of like are you the bird or are you the feather, right? The bird makes choices about flying from place to place. I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do this, right? And the bird is in control of its own movement. Whereas a feather frankly just blows in the wind. If the wind goes there, the feather goes there.
And if the wind goes over yonder, the feather is yonder. Do you want to be the bird or the feather? I think at some point in my own life I realized I'm a freaking feather. I don't want to be a feather.
I want to be the bird. I want to be emotionally independent. I want to stop trying to control the environment so that other people aren't uncomfortable.
That's something that I've really worked on and in order to do that we have to get out of this poor me mentality, right? Like I'm here. I do everything blah blah blah and like that's kind of the status quo. I'm living for others, right? And so if you notice in your own life that you feel like you're really overextending and you kind of look around you and you're the only person that notices that, you might be sitting in this sort of victimized mentality of like everything has to get done and I'm the only one that does it, right? In the process of raising kids I think this happens a lot with folks, right? Like one person is kind of the quote-unquote primary caretaker and ends up doing like three quarters of all the things that have to do with the kids and it's very easy to get resentful and frustrated and angry within that situation.
You know the other thing that happens is people pleasing. So this is another kind of aspect of codependency that runs really deep into relationships. People pleasing.
It's like I want my people to be happy with me and this comes from a past of needing to sort of not make waves and not talk about difficult things and so people pleasing is really this very kind of avoidant way of behaving in relationships in which you don't really let other people feel bad. It's kind of controlling to be honest and it's kind of rescuing behavior, right? Like well I would have brought that up but I didn't want to make them feel bad, you know? And this is kind of at the root of a lot of our codependencies like this desire to help people, other people, like not us but to help other people have a good experience in their life. Like have a pleasant experience and I'll just tell you this these behaviors they cause anxiety.
They cause depression. It's very very stressful to try to control the experience of another person. Like it's really a lot of work and so we kind of end up shoving our own needs behind us and putting the needs of others in front of us which frankly after a while don't you think it's kind of pisses you off? You know I got to a point in my life because yeah I would totally consider myself as a recovered codependent and got to a in my own life where I'm like what am I doing? Like no one cares if I do this stuff and yet I'm doing it anyway because I feel like it's for the good of others and I meanwhile like I'm not getting what I need from my own life because I'm like really catering to others and when I stopped doing that it was sort of like a non-event which doesn't always happen right? Because you know in my own life it was like no one needed me to be doing all those things for them right? Once I started having boundaries and being a good delegator everything just flowed more smoothly right? But sometimes what happens is we train the people in our life that like I'm going to take care of you and so when we start setting boundaries and we start changing that dynamic yeah the feathers get ruffled and that's okay right? Because at the very root of codependency is like kind of a crappy relationship with ourself right? Like this kind of inability to be emotionally independent.
This inability to see ourselves as ourselves like outside of being a mom or outside of being a wife or outside of being this you know employee or this entrepreneur or whatever you know fabulous things you're doing but we get so wrapped up in all these relationships that we lose ourselves and so I'll just give you like the cliff notes here and tell you that your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship in your life. I know I've told you this before and I'll just I'll just keep hammering at home because when we're not in a good relationship with ourself it causes us issues in all of our other relationships. Coming out of codependency requires us to take a look at our relationship with ourself.
It requires us to stop denying you know there's a big denial involved in being codependent in people pleasing. We're like people need me you know so and so like well one thing I hear a lot is like mom's saying you know that dad can't handle hanging with the kids if I'm not around and that's not true right because what I did was I did absolutely everything and then I had this idea like John's never going to be able to handle these two little fellas if I step out the door and he would say go you know go for a walk or go hang with your friends and I'd be like oh no no no you know because I had this whole facade going that I was the one that was deeply deeply needed in the house and frankly what I learned is like I needed to leave. I needed to preserve myself.
I needed to have a break to individuate to stop over functioning in my household so that he could have a great parenting role so that he could have a lovely relationship. So we have to come out of our denial of our behavior and the impact of it in order to recover from codependency. We need to be studying healthy relationships like what the hell is a healthy relationship? We have to dig into that and we have to look at our current patterns in relationship and just be willing to say like oh this is something I need to take a look at.
This is something that needs some time and some effort. One of the most important things here is that we always hold space for self-love because we can get really tossed up in this idea of like I'm super messed up and I'm really codependent. I'm this.
I'm codependent. I'm a people pleaser. I'm all these things.
We have to hold space just to be in a graceful and loving relationship with ourself because if we don't have that like it's really hard to do personal growth work and that requires us learning frankly I think a little bit of mindfulness right because we have to see what's happening. That's all mindfulness is. It's like this willingness to see what's up basically like what do what does it feel like in my body when I could fold everybody's laundry but I choose not to.
What does it feel like in my body when I've set a boundary that I'm not it's not my night to cook but like no one else is doing it right. We call that fend for yourself night but like what does it feel like these skills require mindfulness. They require us to get into our bodies show up in our lives and see observe what's actually happening without kind of this denial and continuing on these unhealthy patterns.
So mindfulness is really important because we have to feel the difficulty of the new way of being. This is how we recover from codependency. This is how we stop having these unhealthy relationship patterns that don't get us anywhere.
You know it's funny as a therapist one of the first things that I hear from people when I talk about them doing some recovery work from codependency is like everything feels like I'm being super self-centered. It feels like I'm being selfish. It feels like I'm like you know just only taking care of myself and I'll just tell you I'll be straight up with you and tell you hell yeah it's going to feel that way and that is not true.
The reason that it feels like that is because we've been taking care of other people way too much and so know that when we start kind of getting into the recovery process of codependency and I'll talk about some of the things that we can do next week in order to do that but for now what I'll tell you is like when we start that process it feels really like selfish is the way I'll describe it and I would say if you're feeling like kind of selfish you're on the right track friend because here's the thing about people that experience this this feeling of codependence is like we're nice flipping people. We like to take care of the people in our lives. We have a lot of love to give so like you're not going to just turn into a self-centered asshole all of a sudden I promise you but you will feel like you're being self-centered when you start your process of awareness and mindfulness and recovery in looking at yourself and your own role in your relationships.
You know once we get out of codependency it's kind of awesome because we can live this really authentic life where we say like this is okay with me and this is not okay with me or this is how much time I want to spend taking care of others and this is what I need to do for myself. It's a very empowered relationship that we develop with ourselves and frankly it's an investment in personal growth which you guys know I'm down with. I think we should be growing on the regular okay so we're not going for perfection here.
One famous quote from actually Alcoholics Anonymous that has taken off like wildfire is progress not perfection. When we're trying to fix negative relationship patterns and behaviors just go for progress. Just go for awareness.
No one's asking you to be a perfect snowflake but just come to the table being willing to grow. So hopefully I'm here and I'm helping you with that and hopefully this episode taught you a few things. I'll come back next week and we'll really talk about how to dig in to the recovery from some codependent behaviors and what is absolutely necessary steps in order to take in order to get some change going.
So I'll see you here next week. Thanks for listening. But hey if you like the podcast it really helps this project if you subscribe, send it along to a couple of friends, and keep listening.
We need more mental health education people. That's what I'm doing here. I have a lot of unpaid content that I put out like this podcast but I also have two paid programs.
One for people who want to stop overthinking everything to death and I also have an in-depth program for anxiety recovery. So if you want to dig into some work with me, get in touch. You can find me at RebeccaHunterMSW.com. That's an MSW because I have a master's in social work.
A lot of people ask about that and yes I am a therapist but this show is not meant as therapy but rather education. Thanks for listening.
