What Is Codependency?
Codependency is just an unhealthy relational style.
It's a condition that is developed, usually as a cause of upsetting childhood ordeals.
It's not a mental disease or "something that you're created with."
And it can be altered.
Where It Comes From
If you grew up in a place where your psychological and mental or physical needs were not attained, you possibly came up with the rationale, "If I'm adequate, then someone will at some point care about me."
Among the most appropriate ways to "be adequate" was to begin caring for other people, most importantly the older people in your life that had significant emotional needs.
Sometimes those adults were addicts. Maybe, these people were emotionally, physically, or even sexually abusive.
While that relational style made sense earlier, that same relational style is starting to back fire at this time.
Instead of gaining the love you hope and require, it's beginning to become uncontrollable.
That's purely because your meaning of looking after others includes controlling their thoughts, feelings, and emotions. It will require you to drop your own needs and is causing you to become resentful and dejected most of the time.
You've never developed how to be liable for yourself, and, more importantly, never learned how to enable some people be responsible for their own decisions and feelings.
The minute you know how to do that, you will refrain from being codependent and embark on living inter-dependently with people.
Additional Descriptions of Codependency
Codependency is the altered belief system wherein you TRULY feel that you are definitely not as good as all others.
Others have worth, but you don't.
Due to the fact of that contorted belief system, you're always placing other people's wishes before your own and tend to ignore or discount your own personal feelings.
Your sense of self-esteem has become exclusively dependent upon your capability to satisfy everyone around you. If you're in a position to look after everyone's needs regardless the cost to you, then you can consider yourself a good person.
Some people call codependency a "relationship addiction."
It is the irresistible impulse to always be thinking about someone else, even though you don't want to.
It's definitely not selflessness. Selflessness is a choice. Selflessness comes out of an overflow of your love and worth for yourself.
With codependency, you're held hostage by your own sense of guilt and shame if you don't give support to other people.
You have faith that you might be better able to look after someone than they are themselves.
Codependency is actually based in pride and self-delusion. It is the deformed belief that your method is always the best and that some people can't be left to make their own personal decisions. After all, that could very well put too much of a burden on them.