Is codependency causing your anxiety or is your anxiety causing your codependency?
Let's talk about it.
My name is Barbara Heffernan and I am a psychotherapist, a Buddhist, a mindfulness meditation instructor
and I created this YouTube channel to bring information and tools to more people so they
could live more joyful lives.
If you support the work that I'm doing here, please give me a thumbs up, make a comment
below and subscribe to my channel.
That's all really helpful.
The term codependency is often defined as a behavioral condition wherein one person
engages in dysfunctional behaviors in order to help somebody else who's engaging in even
more extreme, more obvious dysfunctional behaviors.
So for example, somebody who is in a relationship with an alcoholic who begins to try to control
or cure or believes that they might cause the person's alcoholism, which is not true,
but they get very, very, very engaged in all sorts of behaviors that are trying to keep
this person functioning despite that person's best efforts to not function.
So the term codependency really kind of blew up in the United States with regard to the
addiction community and the relationships that were observed to be formed around addiction
because addiction is not just an individual disease.
It actually is fairly well proven that it's a family disease and it affects everybody
in the family.
However, I also want to read you something that is on Wikipedia, so I'm just going to
read it straight from Wikipedia about the possible origin of this concept of codependency.
So Wikipedia writes, the idea of codependency may have its roots in the theories of German
psychoanalyst, Karen Horney in 1941 she proposed that some people adopt what she termed "a
moving toward a personality style to overcome their basic anxiety.
Essentially, these people move toward others by gaining their approval and affection and
subconsciously control them through their dependent style."
I don't know that I agree with this all, but letting you know what this says.
"They are unselfish, virtuous martyr, like faithful and turn the other cheek despite
personal humiliation.
Approval from others is more important than respecting themselves."
So I found that interesting that in 1941 this personality type was observed and was immediately
tied to anxiety.
In my experience, codependency is a fairly widespread phenomenon to varying degrees in
people and also has its origins in childhood.
And I want to give you a very quick explanation of how this works.
So as a child you were very, very, very dependent on your parents.
Obviously.
Your parents or grandparents, whoever your caretakers were, you were dependent on them
for your very survival.
So children find all sorts of coping mechanisms to make sure that they get taken care of and
these survival mechanisms have an urgency to them because the situation is urgent.
So the child of a depressed mother will have an urgency that they want to try to keep that
mother functioning and happy so that they can get their needs taken care of because
they can't do it without her.
A child being raised by an alcoholic grandfather will come up with coping mechanisms to try
to do whatever they can to keep grandpa from drinking too much because their survival depends
on it.
In a household where one person is having an affair and it's causing fights between
the parents and the children know about it and that parent is leaving the home and then
the other parent is collapsing in their grief and they're upset and not functioning to take
care of the kids.
Those children are going to do everything they can to keep the parent from leaving the
home to try to interrupt that pattern of behavior and to keep the parent who is at home functioning
and happy.
So this all makes perfect sense.
But what happens when you grow up in this environment and in particular this happens
to the parentified child, the child who is the one who takes on a parenting role
might parent, the other siblings, probably parents the parents, the child or the children
who take on this role.
They walk into a room and they immediately sort of assess everybody's emotions and they
figure out where do they need to intervene.
And from the outside, when we view this situation, we know of course that that child cannot keep
grandpa from drinking.
That child cannot keep mom from being depressed.
That child cannot keep a parent home who wants to leave the house.
However, there is intermittent rewards for that child and inconsistent rewards are unbelievably
reinforcing.
And let me just explain how this works.
One of the research studies done on inconsistent rewards that sort of stays with me the most
and I think explains it the most, was a study done with dogs and they could hit this bar
and get a treat.
And so the dogs learned that they would hit the bar and they'd get a treat.
So they would do it again, they'd get the treat.
Now they put some of those dogs into a situation where every time they hit the bar, they got
the treat.
They'd put other dogs into a situation where when they hit the bar, they didn't get any
treats.
And then they put some dogs in a situation where when they hit the bar, sometimes they
got a treat and sometimes they didn't.
So it was the dogs who got the treat inconsistently who continued to tap that bar.
The ones who always got food stopped after a while.
The ones who never got food became attuned to the fact that this was not reinforcing
it was not going to work.
But the ones who had inconsistent rewards kept at it all the time.
And of course when I share this research with clients, they all think about slot machines.
And yes, absolutely.
If you like slot machines or you've observed people with slot machines, slot machines utilize
that concept of inconsistent rewards to keep people at that slot machine and keep putting
in more money.
And inconsistent rewards happen in human relationships as well.
So if you're a child with a depressed mom who when she gets depressed and withdraws
from the family, you feel horrible, but once in a while you can engage her and cheer her
up - that positive reward is unbelievably reinforcing and you will continue to try and
try and try and even if only works one out of 10 times, you will keep trying and you
will feel like you have efficacy to change that person's feelings.
Same thing in the other situations that I talked about.
So when these habitual patterns develop as a child, people carry them their entire lives.
And by the time somebody comes to see me on a one-to-one basis, they've been using this
methodology for a long, long time.
And the problem, there's two problems here.
One is that we actually can't change how somebody feels.
Now, my clients will all argue with me about this initially because they'll say, but sometimes
I can and absolutely sometimes you can, but you do exactly the same thing and sometimes
you can't.
So maybe it's not about your behavior, maybe it's about the other person.
So we are all responsible for our own emotions.
We are all responsible for them.
And our society is really not very good on this concept because we will use language
like he made me mad, he made me do it.
She made me upset instead of my response to what that person did is that I got mad.
My response to what that person did is that I got upset and I could give you many more
examples and that will be for a different video on why there really is truth to this.
But we can't control somebody else's emotions.
So if you've grown up with habitually thinking and feeling that it's your job to make other
people happy, it's your job to keep them functioning.
It's your responsibility to keep the flow, the peace in a family, you're going to feel
a lot of anxiety because anxiety is about the things we can't control.
Anxiety is worrying about those things that we are powerless over because if we worry
about something and there's actually something can do about it, we do it and we take care
of it.
And that's wonderful and worry has a productive function in our life.
We worry about something - oh yeah, I gotta do that.
We write it down, put our to do list, we take care of it.
Anxiety kicks in when we start worrying about the things we can't control.
The things that are completely outside of our control.
And so the things that are completely outside of our control include somebody else's addiction,
include somebody else's mental illness includes other people's moods.
So I'm not saying that we don't impact each other's moods because we do.
Of course we impact each other's moods, but we can't control other people's moods and
it's very important to know that distinction.
If it makes you anxious to search your needs, if it makes you anxious to have conflict with
another person, if it makes you anxious when somebody else's in a bad mood.
I would say that you probably have codependency traits developed very early in childhood and
the best method for recovery is to truly learn boundaries, emotional boundaries, kind of
where you end and where someone else begins and really begin to practice with some of
And then I am also going to offer a free workshop the very first week of January on the four
pillars of joy.
One of those pillars is having healthy boundaries for healthy relationships.
So I really look forward to accompanying you on this journey of learning healthy boundaries
so you can have healthy relationships and I really would love to help.
And please leave me any comments, any questions you have.
If you leave them below the video, I will respond and I look forward to the next time.