7 Signs of Affective Codependency
Generosity, kindness, empathy…without these qualities no relational growth would be possible. The qualities and traits that often foster healthy and supportive relationships can also move into codependency when they become imbalanced in our life because any excess can quickly turn toxic. Here are some signs that you may be experiencing emotional co-dependency.
1. The other person constantly occupies your mind. What is he/she doing? What is he/she thinking? What is he/she feeling? You feel a desire to fix their problems all the time, provide constant support, and make their life easier. And when you don’t succeed at those tasks, you feel guilty and personalize it as an attack against your intrinsic value.
2. You sacrifice yourself on a regular basis to make him/her happy. Money, support, time, energy, health, friends…you constantly sacrifice some or all of these aspects of your life to keep the other one happy. Maintaining the happiness of your partner (or it can also be a family member) has become your number one priority.
3. You take care of everything and everyone all the time. The tendency to place yourself in the very last place in the ranking of your life often extends to your personal and professional environments. You are the one who is always willing to help out, even to take on an impossible task just to keep others happy and ensure they keep a favorable image of you. The only problem is that the reciprocity of your help is rare. Your willingness to sacrifice yourself has become a template that others have gotten used to and they may have set expectations about your constant willingness to put yourself last.
4. You rarely take care of yourself, if ever. No time, not enough money, not the patience. You may come up with a myriad of valid justifications for your lack of self-care and the reasons why you can’t manage to relax, care for yourself, or give yourself the gift of a pleasurable hobby. And when you actually do something for yourself, you feel guilty right away.
5. You fear rejection, abandonment, and criticism above all in your life.
6. You keep persisting in spite of being mistreated. Whether it be physical, emotional, material, or mental mistreatment, you keep persisting in supporting your partner (or family member) who routinely mistreats you, or neglects you. In fact, you tend to apologize a lot in that relationship. You apologize for having had unfair expectations even when you were mistreated.
7. You are constantly walking on eggshells – especially to avoid disappointing your partner, or to avoid aggravating them. You are constantly appealing to their opinion on everything: what he/she would enjoy, what would appease them. Their desire and preferences have become your compass that informs everything you do in life. To avoid conflicts, you keep silent on issues that would ruffle their feather and even come to agree with them just to keep the peace.
How to transform emotional co-dependency
Next time, I will share several steps to understand and transform emotional co-dependency. For now, I invite you to explore the first relationship that rendered you affectively codependent. Most of the time, we find that a parent-to-child relationship was the basis for co-dependency. While my baseline belief is that everyone does the best that they can with the circumstances they have been given. While blaming our parents can take away our power to heal, and I prefer to look at contributions rather than “blame”, studies have shown that an insecure bond with a parental figure can engender future emotional co-dependency.
Reference:
Carson, A. T., & Baker, R. C. (1994). Psychological correlates of codependency in women. International Journal of the Addictions, 29(3), 395–407. https://doi.org/10.3109/10826089409047388
