Women recovering from addiction, mental illness and trauma almost always need support with codependency recovery too. At Villa Kali Ma, we see every day how women who have been very hurt, violated and neglected in their early lives struggle with healthy boundaries. Most women have strong people-pleasing patterns, and it can take some work to learn to put themselves – and their mental health – first, over the needs of others. That’s because relational trauma, attachment trauma, and complex trauma from having grown up in a dysfunctional family are all interrelated.
In this post, your friends here at Villa Kali Ma tackle the topic of codependency, including its origination in trauma.
Understanding Codependency and Its Roots in Trauma
Codependency is a complicated type of suffering having to do with our relationships with others. It is characterized by psychological fusion with another person and reversal of psychological roles. Who is responsible for what in a codependent relationship is out of order, with each party feeling guilty, angry, and responsible for the other person’s emotions, thoughts, and even behaviors, rather than for themselves. In a codependent relationship, managing how I feel is your job and managing how you feel is my job.
Codependency interferes with our ability to have a healthy balance and exchange of mutual love, affection, and acts of service with others. Ideally, we women would feel fully free to take care of ourselves first, checking in with what we sense we need, then behaving proactively and self-responsibly to get what we need. We would feel no shame at all about acting to meet our needs, making transparent requests, and also saying no to the requests of others. Feeling that we are in charge of ourselves primarily, we would recognize it is up to us to be responsible for what we allow to influence our well-being.
In healthy relationships, each party feels responsible for themselves, for taking positive action to change how they feel, and for communicating constructively. Empathy, compassion, and even help for the other person are nevertheless frequently freely exchanged, with the understanding that each person is mainly responsible for caring for themselves. Rather than a complex network of obligations, relationships operate on principles of consent and voluntariness.
If you’re like us over here at Villa Kali Ma, all of this might sound like the very opposite of what you grew up with. Can you imagine running every request another person makes by our inner sense of what we need and what we are available for? Can you imagine feeling free to say no and yes only when you want to? Can you imagine putting your own needs first, without undue guilt or feeling of over-responsibility for another?
If your answer is fat chance, you’re not alone. The skills needed to operate in a healthy relationship – skills like noticing our own feelings and understanding the needs behind those feelings – are nearly impossible to learn when we grew up surrounded by codependent dynamics. In codependent relationships, everyone is responsible for each other, and no one is responsible for themselves. Feelings, desires, moods, attitudes, and behaviors are frequently blamed and projected as being the fault of another. As a result, we live with an excess of fear, guilt, shame, anger, and confusion all day, every day.
Codependency is a trauma symptom. Codependent dynamics exist and are maintained unconsciously between people who are deeply relationally traumatized to begin with. Codependency can be detected wherever people don’t know that they have a right to love and care for themselves, that they are allowed to both receive what they need without guilt and be protected from harm, without being abandoned or punished. In codependent relationships, people behave less positively and morally than they really would prefer, because it feels necessary to meet needs through roundabout ways.
People-pleasing is a facet of codependency. People-pleasing means that we allow the focus of our behavior to be pleasing another person, rather than meeting our own needs. When my behavior is shaped by not wanting someone to get mad at me, that’s people-pleasing. When I feel the need to lie or hide what I’m doing, the reason is probably a form of people-pleasing. Whenever what another person will think, say, feel, or do has undue influence on my ability to pursue what would be good for me, it’s most likely a people-pleasing issue.
Codependent relationships exist wherever there is a history of trauma, abuse, and addiction. When bonds of connection are created and maintained in such a way that neither of us can take real responsibility for healing ourselves as individuals, codependency is at play. Codependent relationships keep us psychologically immature, protecting us from consequences that would otherwise help us grow and change in healthy ways.
On the positive side, codependency, including people-pleasing, can be healed, along with our trauma.
Recognizing People-Pleasing Patterns and Their Cost
The following identifiers may indicate the presence of codependent patterning, including people-pleasing:
- You take on meeting physical and emotional needs that a person could and should do for themselves, or learn to do for themselves.
- Your help may, in some lights, be interpreted as interfering with someone’s growth, by taking away pain, motivation, or difficulty, that might otherwise lead people to take positive action for themselves
- Your dynamic with your partner could be described as “motherly”
- You meet needs that haven’t been expressed, that you can just sense
- You like it when you sense that people need you or are even dependent on you
- You have a pattern of sacrificing your own well-being to meet the needs of another
- You avoid behaviors that you actually would like to do, if you know it will upset another
- You feel safer when meeting needs for people, than having your own needs met by people
- You feel overly tuned in to how others are sensing you
- When you sense someone has a need, you feel it is your job to meet that need before attending to yourself
- You attempt to manage, control or fix other people’s feelings or problems, at times without being explicitly asked for your help
- You struggle with validating your own needs, though you are very aware of the thoughts, feelings, and needs of your loved ones
- You struggle to feel that you deserve to have your own needs met, or may try to live without basic needs being met
- You are loving to people who are not as loving to you as you are to them, or who do not put the same amount of energy into the relationship that you do
- You’re drawn to people who you sense are wounded or misunderstood, and enjoy being the one person who will love them in the way they always needed
- You too easily set aside your own wants and needs if someone else wants something from you
- You secretly resent it that your own needs go unmet and unnoticed
- You feel a lot of guilt, shame, and fear, especially if you have a boundary or a need
- Boundaries are hard for you in general
- You apologize too much, and may accommodate in most arguments
- You struggle to feel safe and loved if someone is taking psychological or physical space from you
- You struggle to get the time you need to care for yourself, whenever anyone else might need your attention and care
If you resonate with any of the above, please know, this isn’t a judgment, just a set of conditions – a legacy of relational trauma.
Healing from codependency begins with acceptance of the situation, together with great gentleness. Recognizing codependency in yourself, rather than being a death sentence, is an invitation to see that you could be living in a healthier, freer way, with a little bit of work on your relational and attachment trauma.
The cost of codependency is low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and quite frequently, a sense of emptiness. We don’t know who we are, because we’re only good for meeting the needs of others. We don’t feel loved as we are, because we believe (and sometimes we are right about that), that the people who rely on us are more interested in the ways we meet their needs, than in who we actually are. When we carry on in codependent patterning, the inner child in us suffers just as we really did in our codependent childhoods. Feeling unseen, unloved, and that we do not really matter, we may feel that we have very little value. Sadly, we reinforce with our daily actions what we knew to be true in our childhoods – that no one really cares how we really feel.
The list of benefits of healing codependency is long, on the other hand. It includes many lovely wonders, like discovering our true preferences and sources of joy, having boundaries, high self-esteem, positive feelings on the daily, better manifestation powers, and taking proactive action in our own interest, towards outcomes we long to see realized in our lives. By healing codependency we realize that there is, after all, someone who really does love and care about us – and that someone is us.
