Codependency

[Intro] Hello, and welcome to my podcast, Empowered to Thrive. I'm so glad you joined me today. I'm your host, Corinne Powell.

I help people find happiness, embrace courage, and experience peace of mind. If you're desperate for change and not sure how to make it happen, I'm here to guide you along the way. In this space, you'll find motivation to live a life full of joy and resilience.

We will talk all things inner wellness with spirituality interwoven at times. Being a mom to three, parenting will definitely be a topic of conversation as well. So happy to have you.

Enjoy today's episode. 

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Hello again, friends. It's so good to be back with you.

Today I want to talk about codependency. I want to give you a fresh perspective on how codependency looks and what it shows up as. It is something that infiltrated my life from childhood all through until my present day.

It is something I'm still working out of, but I'm going to share with you my process and tell you about how codependency can look and what you can do to start becoming interdependent in replace of codependent. I want to begin by sharing a little bit of my story with you. My inner world was a mess.

I didn't even realize how restricted I was by the codependency I was living in. I just couldn't seem to be okay if other people weren't. I intentionally worked on my own self, trying to become who I needed to be, no matter how other people responded.

But it was very hard. If whoever I was with didn't agree with my viewpoint, if I was brave enough to share it, or they didn't like the decisions I made, I would question myself and I would find myself in a toxic shame spiral, questioning my actions, thinking over and over again about how other people interpreted what I did. I needed everyone else to be fine in order for me to feel peaceful, happy, and safe.

So I was subconsciously trying to control everyone else and how they felt. And basically, if I could help someone get to a better spot, then I would put all my energy into it, even if that meant changing who I authentically was so that they could feel more comfortable. How devastating that is when we suppress ourselves and we change who we really are just to make someone else happy or more comfortable to be around us.

Codependency shows up as people pleasing, self-sabotage, neglecting your own self repeatedly to ensure everyone else is okay. It looks heroic at times. Think about the friend who stays in the hospital night after night after night with the person who needs the support.

I've been there. I've done that. But I was putting on myself a responsibility to be there, even at times when I needed to go take a break.

It wasn't that there was no one else who could be there, but I just felt like I needed to. I needed to be the hero. Again, this was all subconscious.

I wasn't aware of what I was doing or why I was doing it. Some people even admire the helpers, the codependents. But the key is to know what drives you to help.

If you are a helper, there's nothing wrong with that. Being a nice, kind-hearted person is fine. It's beautiful.

But when you're acting from a place of codependency, then it becomes toxic. Interdependency is much better for your mind and your body. It's a give and a take between two parties.

It doesn't feel manipulative or controlling. I can be okay even if you're not okay. It's both parties compromising and helping each other out pretty much equally.

Now, again, there's going to be times when you're in a rut, at a low spot, and you need the other party to be more of a support for you and vice versa. That's normal in life. We'll have our moments where we're not able to be everything we normally are.

And the beauty of that is having supports and relationships where people are able to be for us in that moment what we can't be for ourselves. But if that's a norm, say you need everyone else to be for you because you just can't be for yourself, and this is a way you've gotten used to living, then that's going to be something to look into. Or if you're being the support for the person who just isn't able to make it on their own, I'd like you to look into why that is.

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Okay, hold up one second. I might like for you to look into that. But this is all on your terms.

My suggestions and even the information I'm sharing with you, you do whatever you want with it. If you feel like it applies to you and you want to take some of what I've already done and implement into your life, go for it. But the power is in your hands.

What I'm saying are my suggestions. You always get to do what you want with what I suggest. 

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There are legitimate situations.

Where someone physically is not able to go through life without having steady support. Even in that, the caregiver needs to have help come in to relieve them. But I'm really not talking about that situation.

I'm talking about the ones that we can think of where somebody just doesn't get their stuff together, to put it nicely, and everyone else bails them out and picks up the pieces and does what they should be doing for themselves, but they're just not willing to do it. 

The person who needs a couch to sleep on at night or just needs another loan, I'm talking about helping those people and how that can be very toxic for you and for the relationship between both of you. So it's great to love and support friends and family.

I'm not saying that we should be cold and callous. But here's the point I want to drive. It's ultimately the responsibility of each person to take care of themselves.

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You shouldn't ever have to fight for someone's inner wellness or their happiness more than they are. When you are, it means you're taking responsibility for something that isn't yours. It's a misplaced responsibility.

Even in parenting, this can show up. If I am trying to protect my children from their own consequences, the results of their actions, I may be doing them a disservice. Now as their caregiver, there will be times where I need to help them out.

There are other times I'm going to give them two choices and they choose what they want to do. But whatever they choose may result in something they dislike and I can't live my life trying to protect them from everything that's uncomfortable. If I do that, I am really giving them a disservice.

They will grow up with a way of thinking and an outlook on life that won't help them out. If they expect to be bailed out and taken care of every time the going gets tough, I don't feel like I've served them well in parenting them. Now I'm not looking to say that we all need to do relationships perfectly.

Relationships like I said last week, relationships will be messy. They're imperfect. That's okay. I'm wanting us to look deeply within ourselves so that we can evaluate is codependency showing up within our own lives? And if it is, what small steps can we start taking to bring in change? How can we become interdependent with people and not codependent? So for myself, this started when I was a child. You see, people around me weren't doing well. They weren't able to handle their own emotions. They were overwhelmed and stressed out. 

And so it created toxicity, chaos, which resulted in traumatic experiences for me. If I could help out one of my caregivers or someone around me and that made them feel better, then that meant my experience was going to be lighter and easier.

I was actually learning to be codependent, to please people, to help people, to protect people in order to keep myself safe. So it was a way of surviving. It was a protective mechanism that I started to live by.

And because I did it very unaware of what I was doing and on a subconscious level, I started functioning in this way. Then it just translated through my life. It continued on.

It showed up in my friendships. It showed up in my relationship with my husband. It showed up in my relationship with everyone.

And I started to identify it and weed it out of certain relationships. And I started to establish boundaries and make changes. And then I realized a few years ago, it was still very predominant in my relationship with my husband to the degree that I was making his meals for him before he'd go to work.

Because I didn't want him to be hungry on the job. So if he didn't make time to make his own meals, I was putting myself out, getting up earlier when I was exhausted just to ensure that he was safe, that he was fine. He didn't ask me to make his meals. I just did it for him. 

When I realized how deeply this was ingrained in my way of living, I was so determined to root it out. I didn't want to keep living for everyone else and sabotaging myself all along the way.

So it doesn't mean I stopped doing everything to help my husband out, but you can be sure I stopped making those lunches. I'll give myself a little bit of extra sleep. And if you don't make your lunch, then you can be hungry or you can pick up lunch somewhere else.

It sounds harsh, but it only became so abrasive because I was frustrated with myself. I was done with living that way. And so I uprooted it in an abrupt way.

But you might find other ways to uproot codependency out of your life in a more gentle way. Go about it however you need. My encouragement to you is to look within yourself to discover if you identify with anything I've talked about within these last 11 minutes.

And if you do identify, what can you do to start creating a different way of living, to start changing your patterns and ways of thinking and being so that you can be more for yourself and you can be actually benefiting your relationships. You can be doing good for other people by establishing boundaries. That won't always feel comfortable for you or for the other person, but it is definitely for your best and it is for their best.

So go ahead and be free to break out of codependency and to start living interdependent with people. It's going to feel so much lighter. You're going to have so much more support and you're going to be a better support for your own self if you start living this way.

If anything I've said resonates with you, you want to talk about it more fully and you want actual help for you in the situation you're in, please reach out to me, set up a coaching session and I'm sure I can be of help to you. My link to the scheduler is in the show notes so please go check in the show notes for a way to go and set up that coaching appointment. And I hope you have a great week and wishing you the very best until we talk again.

Bye for now.