Codependency:
Reclaiming Your Selfhood
When Caring Becomes Self-Abandonment
You pride yourself on being thoughtful, caring, attuned to others' needs. You're the friend people call in crisis. The partner who always understands. The daughter who never complains. The one who makes sure everyone else is okay.
But somewhere along the way, caring for others became the only way you knew how to exist. Your worth became contingent on what you could give, how useful you could be, whether you could anticipate and meet needs before they were even spoken.
You don't know where you end and others begin. You feel responsible for their feelings, their happiness, their choices. When they hurt, you hurt—but more than that, you feel it's your job to fix it. And when you can't, when they're still unhappy despite everything you've done, you feel like a failure.
You've lost yourself in the process of trying to save everyone else. And now you're exhausted. Resentful. Empty. You've given so much that there's nothing left for you.
This is codependency. And it's not about loving too much—it's about abandoning yourself in the name of love.
What Is Codependency?
Codependency is a pattern of relating where your sense of self, worth, and wellbeing becomes contingent on another person or on being needed.
It's characterized by:
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Enmeshed Boundaries
Difficulty distinguishing your feelings, needs, and responsibilities from others'. What they feel, you feel. Their problems become your problems. Their pain becomes your emergency.
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External Validation
Your worth is determined by others' approval, happiness, or need for you. When they're pleased with you, you're okay. When they're disappointed, you're devastated.
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Caretaking and Fixing
You feel responsible for others' emotions and experiences. You believe it's your job to make them happy, solve their problems, or rescue them from consequences.
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Neglecting Your Own Needs
You prioritize others' needs so consistently that you've lost touch with your own. You might not even know what you want anymore, only what others want from you.
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Fear of Abandonment
Deep terror of being left, rejected, or no longer needed. You'll sacrifice yourself to maintain connection, even when that connection is harmful.
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Difficulty Saying No
Saying no feels dangerous—it might upset them, disappoint them, or cause them to leave. So you say yes even when you don't want to, even when it costs you.
Codependency isn't about being a caring person.
It's about having learned that your value is found only in what you provide for others—and that your own needs, feelings, and boundaries are somehow selfish, wrong, or less important.
The Roots of Codependency
Codependency typically forms in childhood, often in environments where:
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Your Needs Were Neglected
You learned early that your emotional needs wouldn't be met, so you stopped having them. Or you learned to meet others' needs in hopes they'd eventually notice yours.
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You Were Parentified
You had to take care of a parent's emotional needs, manage their moods, or care for siblings. You learned that your role was caretaker, not child.
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Love Was Conditional
Affection, attention, and approval came only when you performed, pleased, or achieved. You learned that you had to earn love through what you did, not for who you were.
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Chaos Required Management
In an unstable, unpredictable, or addictive household, you learned that managing others' emotions and behaviors gave you some semblance of control in an uncontrollable environment.
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Your Boundaries Were Violated
Your "no" wasn't respected. Your privacy wasn't honored. Your autonomy wasn't supported. You learned that your boundaries didn't matter, or worse, that having them was selfish.
These experiences taught your nervous system that connection requires self-abandonment.
That love means sacrifice. That being "good" means never having needs. And that your worth is measured by how much you can give while asking for nothing in return.
Codependency in Adult Relationships
Codependency shows up in adult relationships through:
Attracting Takers: You consistently end up with partners, friends, or colleagues who take advantage of your giving nature. People who need you but don't reciprocate. People who drain you while offering little in return.
The Savior Complex: You're drawn to "projects"—people you believe you can help, fix, or save. Their potential becomes more important than their actual behavior. You stay because of who they could be, not who they are.
Losing Yourself: In relationships, you morph into who they need you to be. You adopt their interests, values, opinions. You become so focused on their life that your own fades into the background.
Tolerating Mistreatment: Because you're terrified of abandonment and believe you don't deserve better, you tolerate behavior that violates your boundaries, diminishes you, or causes harm.
Resentment and Martyrdom: You give and give, hoping they'll notice, appreciate, reciprocate. When they don't, you feel resentful—but you don't speak up. Instead, you continue giving while building internal bitterness.
Enabling: In trying to help, you actually prevent them from facing natural consequences of their choices. You clean up their messes, make excuses for them, or shield them from reality—keeping them dependent on you.
Anxiety Without Them: When they're upset, distant, or not needing you, you feel anxious, unmoored, purposeless. Your wellbeing is so tied to theirs that their absence feels like losing yourself.
The Cost of Codependency
Codependency extracts a profound cost:
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Physical Exhaustion
The constant vigilance, emotional labor, and suppression of your own needs depletes you physically. Chronic fatigue, illness, and burnout are common.
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Emotional Depletion
You've given so much that you're empty. You feel numb, disconnected from your own emotions, unable to access joy because you've been focused entirely on managing others.
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Loss of Identity
You don't know who you are outside of your roles. Without someone to care for, you feel purposeless. Your identity has become entirely relational.
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Resentment
Despite all your giving, you feel unseen, unappreciated, taken for granted. The resentment builds—toward them for taking, toward yourself for giving.
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Relationship Dysfunction
Codependent dynamics don't create healthy relationships. They create imbalanced, enmeshed, often toxic patterns where no one is truly happy.
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Spiritual Disconnection
You've lost touch with your deeper self, your purpose beyond caregiving, your connection to something larger. You're so focused outward that you've abandoned your inner world entirely.
Our Approach to Healing Codependency
Understanding the Pattern Through IFS: We work with the parts of you that drive codependent behavior—the manager part that believes controlling others keeps you safe, the exile carrying the wound of not being enough, the caretaker part that learned love means sacrifice. Through IFS, these parts can release their protective roles and allow your Self to lead.
Processing Attachment Wounds Through EMDR: We use Attachment-Focused EMDR to address the early experiences that taught you your needs don't matter, that love is conditional, that your worth comes from what you provide. We help your nervous system release these old patterns.
Challenging Beliefs Through CBT: We examine the cognitive distortions maintaining codependency: "I'm responsible for their feelings," "Saying no is selfish," "If I don't help, something terrible will happen," "I need to be needed to be loved." We develop more balanced, accurate beliefs.
Developing Boundaried Compassion: Through holistic and transpersonal work, we explore what it means to care for others while honoring yourself. To be compassionate without being enmeshed. To support without enabling. To love without losing yourself. Boundaries are love in form.
Reconnecting With Your Needs: We help you identify what you actually want, need, feel—separate from others. We strengthen your connection to your internal experience, your intuition, your authentic desires.
Building Self-Worth: We work on developing intrinsic worth—value that comes from being, not doing. Worth that exists regardless of what you provide for others.
Nervous System Regulation: We teach your nervous system that it's safe to have needs, that relationships can be reciprocal, that you don't need to manage others' emotions to be safe. Through somatic work and mindfulness, we help you ground in your own body and experience.
Practicing Boundaries: We start small—noticing when you want to say no, experimenting with setting limits, learning to tolerate others' disappointment without rescuing. We build your capacity for boundaried relating.
What Recovery Looks Like
Recovery from codependency is reclaiming yourself. It's learning to:
Distinguish your feelings from others' feelings. Know your needs and honor them as valid. Say no without guilt or over-explanation. Allow others to face consequences without rushing to fix. Be in relationship while maintaining selfhood. Tolerate others' disappointment without abandoning yourself. Choose people who reciprocate instead of always taking.
You start to recognize that you are valuable for who you are, not what you do. That love doesn't require self-sacrifice. That being alone is better than being with someone who drains you. That caring for yourself isn't selfish—it's essential.
You develop what we call "boundaried compassion"—the ability to be empathetic and caring while maintaining your sense of self. To support others without taking responsibility for their choices or emotions. To be generous without depleting yourself.
The Sacred Self-Recovery
What feels like selfishness is often just self-preservation. What feels like not caring enough is often appropriate boundaries. What feels like abandoning others is often reclaiming yourself.
You can be soft and powerful. You can care deeply and have limits. You can be generous without being depleted. You can love without losing yourself.
Recovery isn't about becoming hard or closed. It's about learning that real love includes you. That relationships work when both people show up fully. That you deserve to take up space, have needs, and expect reciprocity.
Your alignment is your liberation. And it begins with coming home to yourself—the self you abandoned in the name of keeping others comfortable.
You matter. Not because of what you can do for others. Just because you exist.