You consider yourself a kind, considerate person capable of loving deeply. And yet, in intimate partner relationships and even some friendships, you feel anxious and insecure. This anxious tension that builds up inside is incredibly uncomfortable where you are hypervigilant and always seeking reassurance and validation from the external world. The closer you are to someone in a relationship, the more challenging it is to not feel hurt and scared within it, seemingly for no reason, as you consider your relationships overall, to be healthy ones.

Am I Codependent?

You’ve done the research and have self-determined that you must have anxious attachment. This conclusion has not made anything feel better, and in fact, it seems to have created a negative cycle of reinforcement, and the tension can feel unbearable most of the time. This tension is crossing over to your relationships and you are experiencing people pulling away. You ask yourself – “Am I codependent?”

Understanding Codependency

Codependency is not a personality disorder but rather a set of behavioural coping patterns that were created as a child when you lived in an unstable, unpredictable or abusive environment. Your caregivers may have used or misused substances, demonstrated narcissistic characteristics, or were abusive to you verbally, emotionally, or even physically.

Codependency is the ongoing investment of your self-esteem in the behaviour or emotional states of another person, even in the face of adverse consequences to yourself, and taking responsibility for another’s needs to the exclusion of your own.

How These Behaviour Patterns Develop

As a child experiencing these types of living environments, you become highly focused on your external world in order to feel safe and in control. The unfortunate result is in your childhood, your internal sense of self did not get nurtured or developed, and these patterns are carried forward into adulthood.

Common Behavioural Coping Patterns in Codependency

Here are some of the behavioural coping patterns commonly presented in codependency. Which of these resonate with you?

Caretaking: You are hypervigilant when attending to the needs of others, sometimes even without their consent. Your generosity to others is beyond your ability or capacity and leaves you depleted.
Perfectionism: As a child, you learned that if you did everything perfectly, a caregiver’s volatility on occasion would be diverted from you. You got attention when you only showed positive characteristics and were invalidated when you were struggling.
People-Pleasing: You are conflict-avoidant and adjust your approach to try to control another person’s reaction or choices. You say yes even when you want to say no, and saying no is terrifying for you.
Overthinking: It is difficult to make decisions because your primary focus is other people’s reactions or potential opinions, and you find you are holding yourself back a lot.
Expectations: You have high expectations of yourself and others, especially when others do not respond to you in a way that you had hoped after your careful consideration of their needs. You feel hurt and unseen.

Moving Forward

These coping patterns were developed to keep you safe as a child in environments where you were powerless around your caregivers, and these coping patterns had the best of intentions for you – to protect you and to keep you safe. These same characteristics are now causing you and your healthy relationships harm, but you are unsure how to proceed.

Seek Support

Working with a counsellor who understands firsthand codependent coping patterns can help you reconcile a painful past and move forward in a grounded, solid internal sense of self. Reach out to Christine Ellis (Registered Professional Counsellor, RPC-C) today for your 30-minute complimentary consultation call.

Relationships Are So Painful for Me – Am I Codependent?