What does being codependent feel like?

[Intro] Hello, and welcome to my podcast, Empowered to Thrive. I'm your host, Corinne Powell, and I'm the owner of Change Radically.

In this space, we'll talk all things inner wellness, and parenting will certainly come up too, because I'm a mom to four kids, so parenting is a huge part of my life. This space is designed for safety. Your inner child is welcome. Your past self is invited to listen as well.

And no matter what type of day you're having, I want you to know I'm glad to be with you. I live out of vulnerability and transparency, so come and be. Be yourself. Be messy. Invite a friend, and please stay a while. Keep coming back. I want you around. Now, let's jump into today's episode.

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Corinne Powell: It's story time. I'm happy to have you here with me. And I don't know if you caught last week's episode, but I shared a little bit about my life story last week and how compounded grief showed up. Today, I'm gonna share a little bit more about my life and talk about how codependency looked and sounded and felt like in my shoes.

And I know you have many choices for podcasts and what you listen to. So thank you for being here and listening to Empowered to Thrive. I'm honored to have you. Codependency showed up in my life in these sort of ways. I felt like I was not able to be okay unless the person next to me was also okay. It also meant I would come into a room. I might be feeling pretty happy, but I noticed someone else was really sad, maybe even depressed. And so I would turn down my joy. I would suppress it to match the sadness of someone else.

I was strongly empathetic, so I noticed how they were doing. And I felt like it was rude and disrespectful to disregard how they were doing and continue in my emotional state. I didn't know that we are allowed to each have our own emotional states and that empathy is noticing and understanding and touching in with someone else's emotions but not manipulating your own to match theirs. Perhaps that person needed some of my joy in the middle of their sadness. Maybe they were hoping for some of the sunshine to come in when they were underneath the storm cloud. Who knows?

Codependency showed up in my relationship with my husband in these ways. I used to make his lunches because if I didn't make his lunches, I was afraid he wouldn't take a lunch because I observed that he didn't always take a lunch and I didn't want him to be hungry in the middle of his work day. I didn't want his body to not have what it needed. So instead of allowing him to be responsible for his grown adult self, I took on responsibility that wasn't mine. He didn't ask me to make his lunches. And I started doing that every day. I was unaware of what I was doing. I thought I was just being a nice wife, a kind partner.

I actually thought that was the right thing to do, the appropriate thing to do. And codependency was all over my relationships, but you see, I wasn't even aware that it was codependency. I wasn't aware that there was anything toxic about how I was living because it was my normal. I would go to a friend's house. I would see they had a need. I would try to meet that need. While I was there, I would hear about another need and I would say, what can I do? I would think in my mind, what can I do to help them meet that need?

And while I was there, I was cleaning up messes and I was planning ways I could support them as I left. And I wasn't just doing this for one friend. I was doing this in all of my relationships. I was living for everybody else, disregarding my own needs, minimizing my lack of energy and not taking care of myself. And folks, you can only do that for so long before it catches up with you. And consider I had been doing that since I was a little girl. Now it looked and sounded and showed up differently, but some of it was the same across the board. Noticing other people's emotional states, trying to predict what they needed and trying to take care of their needs without them asking, before they even could ask just so that I could predict the outcome, so that I would feel a sense of security within myself.

We think that taking things into our own hands, we think that controlling will be a means of feeling safer, will be a means of getting the end result we want, but we really don't have control over any part of our life. It's a facade. It's a mind game. And as I realized what I was deserving of, and as I realized what I was doing, and the ways I didn't have to do all that, I slowly started to make changes, ever so gradually. And I needed to make changes in a lot of areas within a lot of relationships. Actually, I started to make changes in the relationship with my husband, not even realizing that I was living codependently with my friends.

Again, remember, whatever is our normal isn't gonna feel abnormal to us. It's not gonna feel toxic oftentimes. I knew I grew up in a dysfunctional home. My family would use that term, but I didn't know what the opposite of that might be. Until we experience something different, something new, perhaps something healthy, we will not know how it could be, what it should be, and what we deserve.

So sometimes I just like to bring up and offer the comparison of how it was and how it can be so that others on the outside know what's possible if they want it. And I love hearing when other people talk about what's possible, what they've achieved, where they've come from, because then I do the same. I say, ooh, if they experienced that, I could too. And if I want what they have, then I run hard after it.

So I hope my story and my sharing ignites something in you because it is so much easier, it's so much more satisfying and enjoyable to live interdependently. Where I have needs that I ask for help with, I have needs that other people meet, and they have needs that I sometimes help out with, I sometimes meet, and sometimes I don't. Just thinking about a conversation I had today with a friend, she shared some of her needs, I still had the thought in the back of my mind, maybe in the forefront of my mind. What could I do to help? But I also recognized the answer wasn't figuring out a solution. It was okay to let her express her need and for me to not go right ahead and try to meet it.

Sometimes we're the answer and sometimes we're not. Sometimes we're a part of the solution. And sometimes the point is to allow somebody to express themselves and to hear them and to be a safe space for them, not to fix it, not to make everything okay. To be comfortable with discomfort. Because it feels uncomfortable to see someone I care about hurting or in need. But I've learned to embrace that more so. I've come to recognize that it is a part of the human condition to have needs and to not always be able to meet those needs.

It's actually okay to hear of somebody else in distress and not be the one to rescue them. Now I hope you hear my heart in this. Obviously there are situations where we are supposed to take care of someone, bring relief, take them out of their distress. But I'm speaking to the person that always thinks it's their responsibility, to the person who can't handle reading the news and hearing the news because all we are consumed by is the heartache of what's going on for someone else and trying to figure out what we can practically do to meet their needs.

One person cannot take care of the whole world. One person cannot meet the needs of everyone else. There will always be needs. And this is not me saying we shouldn't be heartfelt, that we shouldn't be empathetic, that as a community we shouldn't come together and support. I believe in all that. But to what degree? And are you taking care of yourself alongside of everyone else or are you only taking care of everyone else? Because I can tell you, I've learned how to take care of myself alongside of everyone else.

Previously, I was just taking care of everyone else. Now, did I shower? Did I wash my hair? Did I make sure I put food inside of my stomach? I did. You might question, did I do it enough? Because I certainly went hungry a lot of times because I was so busy. I was so preoccupied. I was so disconnected from myself. I didn't even notice I needed to eat. I didn't get a haircut often, once a year. I remember my hairdresser saying, could you try to come in twice a year?

There are ways I was barely taking care of myself, but I was super skilled. I was very good at taking care of everyone else. Now the contrast is I know how to take care of everyone else well, and I also know how to take care of myself well. That is a much more satisfying, much healthier, much more sustainable place to live. Sustainability is the only way I'm going to be able to help people in the future. If I burn out, which I have, if my health takes the toll because of what I'm putting out, I have to slow down. I no longer can actually help people in the ways that I think they need. Because my body basically says, sorry, you've done it for too long. Now, because I've experienced all that, I recognize the wisdom in slowing down, in taking care of ourself. And I do believe sustainability is the sooner we learn how to take care of ourselves, the better off we'll be the more effective we'll actually be for the people around us who do need our help and our support. The goal in this is not to become self -consumed.

Remember, the goal in this is to actually consider ourselves as much as we're considering everyone else. Because when we keep ourselves outside of the circle and we only notice the needs of everyone inside of the circle, we've done ourselves a disservice. If we put ourselves in the circle and we notice the needs of ourself alongside of the needs of everyone else, now we can start to take care of everyone else alongside of ourself or ourself alongside of everyone else. You are always deserving of care. You are always deserving of the same support, the same compassion, the same love and attunement that everyone else deserves.

How come you're not giving yourself it as much? How come you're not treating yourself as well as you're treating other people?

Reflect on that. Get curious about that. See what comes up subconsciously. See what ideas surface. What reasons present themselves. Oftentimes what we experience in our earliest years in childhood impacts us in adulthood. And until we start looking at our experiences, until we start considering the underlying subconscious beliefs and consider what was modeled to us, what coping mechanisms did we adapt to in childhood to simply survive, to create a sense of safety for us.

It all makes sense. We don't need to make sense of it, but let me tell you, in hindsight, you will look back and it usually makes a lot of clear sense why you adapted to your environment in the way you did. For example, myself, I grew up with parental figures who were not emotionally stable or emotionally intelligent. They didn't know how to support me emotionally. And they weren't even sure how to support themselves. There was a lot of chaos, a lot of dysfunction, a lot of arguing and fighting and stress in my home. I was just a little kid. I wanted to feel happy. I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to feel like there was a place I could land, a safe place to be when I was afraid, when I was in pain, when I was sad. When I didn't find that, I had to figure out how can I create a sense of safety and security within and without. And I figured if I could keep my parental figures happier, there would be more peace in the home. By default, I would feel safer. The environment would be more predictable.

Unfortunately this is what I started to do. This is how I patterned my life when it was never my responsibility to make sure my parents were happy. It's not your job to take care of your parental figures when you're a child. But when we start that pattern when we're young. It only gets stronger as we grow up. And so in adulthood, we have the opportunity to change that pattern, to create a new way of living. That's what's satisfactory. That's what's more sustainable. To recognize, no, I'm not responsible to make sure someone else is doing all right. I can focus and take care of me.

So what is it for you? In what way do you need to show up for yourself? In what ways do you need to take care of you alongside of everybody else? And for a little while, it might feel lopsided. You might feel like you're taking care of yourself more than you're taking care of other people. But eventually it'll balance out more and you'll be able to take care of both other people and yourself. I hope that my story is illuminating something for you, that you're able to take action in. Just remember, we're all in this together. We're on the healing journey together and you are not alone.

If there's a way I can practically support you in this area, please reach out. You can always discover more through a discovery call. And you can find out if I'd be a good fit to support you. And you can go to my website, changeradically.com to start that process. I hope to see you back here next week. Same place, same time. Until then.

I'm wishing you wellness, joy, and all things good.

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[Ending] Here we are. We've come to the end of another episode. Sit back and reflect on what you heard. What's the one thing that resonates with you that you can take away and do something with? Let's not just listen. Let's listen and take action. Now action may look very different for us. But it's not. But it's doing something with what we hear.

I hope that you'll share today's episode with a friend that you think would also enjoy it. And please come back next week. I hope that you have a fabulous week and that you remember when you pillow your head at night, when you're going through your days, that who you are is good. And I'm glad that you're alive.