The Top 4 Causes of Codependency

What causes codependency? Well, in large part, it is a byproduct of your childhood. Now, I know maybe you didn't want to hear that. I know for a lot of guys it's like, oh, why does it always come back to my childhood? Why do I always have to talk about my past? Why does it always. Why do I always have to talk about my family? You know, my family system? It's like. Well, in this case, your family system is the base operating system for the program of how you do relationships. Okay, I'm going to say that again. Your family system is the base operating system. It is the foundation for the. The programs that you run, AKA the behaviors that you run, the choices that you make, the identity that you show up as in your relationships. So if you think about an operating system, generally there's a base part of the operating system, right? Like if on your iPhone, on this little thing here on your phone, whether you have an iPhone or an Android, those are built off of, right? IOS 17 or whatever the hell version we're on are all built off of the original operating system. The foundation of the original operating system. So you can think of your current relationship with your girlfriend or your wife or whomever, your partner, whoever you're dating. That is an iteration of the primary relationships that you had with your caregivers. And codependency, like I said before, is adaptive strategies and coping mechanisms and behaviors that you learned not in the relationship that you're in, but in your primary relationship in your family system, whether that was with the caregivers of your parents, a mom, a dad, a stepfather, a stepmother, or grandparents, uncles and aunts, et cetera, whoever raised you. It could be a foster parent, an adoptive parent, et cetera. So with all that said, here are the primary causes of codependency. Okay, Number one, you played the role of the peacekeeper in your family system, in your system of origin. Right? Whatever that looked like. So the peacekeeper plays a very important role. Right? Maybe you grew up in a household where there was a lot of volatility, your parents were always fighting, or maybe you had a sibling who was just constantly in trouble. You didn't know what was going on with them, but they were constantly in trouble, and you were trying to. To create peace and harmony in the household. So you were trying to translate for your sibling, you were trying to protect mom or de escalate dad or de escalate mom and protect dad or whatever it was, but you were trying to keep the peace. Now, what happens with peacekeepers that's very important to understand is that peacekeepers do the one thing that all givers will replicate for the rest of their life until they start to break the pattern. And that's deprioritize their own needs and wants for the over prioritization of what others need. And generally peacekeepers will prioritize what the system needs, not necessarily individuals, but generally what they think the system itself needs. And so it's very common. If you were a young man or a boy who played the role of peacekeeping in your family system, you're always trying to create order in your system, you know, between mom and dad or whatever it was, siblings, et cetera. It's probably the case that when you are in a relationship with somebody that you really care about, you are very conscientious of putting the needs of the relationship itself above the needs of you, not necessarily the needs of the other person. That might be the case. But generally speaking, what I've seen in working with a lot of guys, especially nice guys, because oftentimes peacekeepers turn into nice guys. A lot of guys will put the needs of the relationship first over themselves. So that's the peacekeeper deprioritizing needs for the security, the harmony, et cetera, of the system that they inhabit. Next is you were abused in some way. So if you were a young boy or a young man who was in an abusive environment, whether that's verbal abuse or emotional abuse or physical or sexual abuse, you will have adopted an over prioritization of trying to stay very, very close to other people's needs and wants and a hyper vigilance to catering to other people as a means of a protective strategy. So that's maybe a little bit heavy on the jargon, so I'll break that down into something more specific and simple. Let's say that you grew up in an environment where, where when you talk back to your dad, you got hit. Let's say that you grew up in an environment where your mom was emotionally abusive and was, you know, would go off that, fly off the handle when you were a young boy and call you names, et cetera, et cetera. You will have, as a very young child, responded to that by trying to figure out what's going to keep me safe and out of trouble and what's going to put me in harm's way. And generally speaking, children that have been abused, children that have grown up in abusive environments will try and conform their identity, their behaviors and their choices to match what they think is going to keep them out of abuse out of harm's way, out of being yelled at or verbally demolished and shamed, or physically assaulted or sexually abused, et cetera. So for a lot of people that have grown up in an abusive household, where codependency comes into play is that it can produce you behaviors in you as an adult, as a man in relationship that are very hyper vigilant into. What does she need? What is she thinking? What is she wanting right now? What is she expecting from me? How can I cater to her needs? How can I make sure that she's okay above and beyond me so that I'm safe? And for men in this situation, and it's, I think in some ways for a lot of guys, this is the sort of like, hidden killer. For a lot of men that have experienced trauma, have experienced abuse growing up, and have never really talked about it, this will be the. This sort of the skeleton in the closet that is actually fueling the codependency in their relationship. And so if you are somebody, I'm just going to create this little caveat here. If you are somebody that has come to realize that you're in a codependent relationship, but you've never really actually dealt with some of the abuse or trauma that you experienced growing up, the codependency is very unlikely, almost, I don't want to say impossible, but it's very unlikely that you will be able to shift out of that codependent behavior until you address the abuse and maybe the trauma that you experienced. Because those two things are interconnected. They are unequivocally interconnected. And so we have to actually deal with the abuse that we experienced in order to start to let go of and unwind some of the codependent behaviors that are showing up because of that abuse. Because again, if you were abused as a boy, as a young man.

A couple things happen. Number one, for many young boys, depending on how old you were when some of the abuse started, it's very common for it to get personalized. Meaning you as a young boy, while it may not have been conscious, will likely have felt or thought at some point that the abuse was happening because there was something inherently wrong with you. Now, why this is important is because at some point in your relationships, later on in life, it is very common for that same individual. So if you were a young boy that experienced those things, to become a man who feels like all of the problems that unfold in the relationship are your fault. And this puts you in the role of constantly being in the wrong and maybe you find yourself even doing things, actively sabotaging, self destructing in the relationship to be in the wronged position, to be the person who is constantly.

Wrecking the intimacy or, you know, damaging the communication or creating disconnection. You find yourself in the position of I'm always the one that is creating problems in the relationship or marriage, or it can feel like you are in that position. So those things are very, very important to understand as we move into identifying the codependency in your relationship and then finally ending it. Next is, you had an emotionally unavailable parent. This is a very interesting one. And some people would say that this is trauma. I don't really. I'm not really going to get into labeling it as such or not living it as such. What I will say is that when you've had an emotionally unavailable parent, what I have seen almost always, almost always with men who have had, who have grown up with an emotionally unavailable parent is that they at some point took it to mean that there was something fundamentally flawed within them. So there's a personalization, because again, when you are a child, when you're five, six, seven years old, and you're wanting your father's attention, you're wanting him to spend time with you, you're wanting him to teach you things, you're wanting your mom to, you know, nurture you and take care of you when you've hurt yourself or whatever it is, and that doesn't happen, and they don't seem to want to do those things or even seem to care about what's happening with you. What begins to bubble up internally is, well, they must not be giving me attention because there's something wrong with me. They must not be spending time with me because there's something that they don't like about me. So it's very, very, very, very common for men who have grown up with emotionally absent parents or just absent parents altogether to chase their partners, right? To chase their partners to find is very common. I see a lot of men who had emotionally avoidant parents or emotionally absent parents who end up in this chasing, pursuing dynamic. So they're constantly chasing women that are like, unavailable or hot and cold or leave them on red. And there's like this. Sometimes there's even a sexual charge that can come along with it, right? For a lot of guys, because in psychology there's this great turn of phrase which I have seen to be true many, many times, which is that we sexualize our pain, we sexualize our trauma, we sexualize our hurt. And so for a Lot of men and the guys that are out there watching this right now. What can happen when we've had an emotionally unavailable parent, whether it was mom or dad, is that that can show up in our relationships where we are trying to prove inadvertently to the women that we are pursuing, that we are worthy of their attention, that we are worthy of their affection. And if I can just get you, it'll disprove the pain that I've been carrying around within me since childhood. So an emotionally unavailable parent is a big one. This is the area of neglect, of avoidance, of abandonment. Right? So this is very common. You know, if adoption has happened or you've, you know, been put through the foster care system, or your parents got divorced and one of your parents, you know, moved cross country or whatever it was, this is a very common thing because the child will almost always over index the parents needs and be constantly trying to figure out, what do you need so that I can get some type of attention and some type of affection from you? And then that boy becomes an adult, becomes a man in relationships who's doing the exact same thing. And so these men are usually hyper vigilant and very problem oriented. And so if you're a man who grew up with that type of parent or caregiver, how that probably looks in your relationship today is you're probably like, what does she need? What is she thinking? What is she feeling right now? And you might be peppering your partner constantly with those types of questions, like, are you okay? Are you? And you find yourself asking her that, you know, two or three times a day, are you okay? What are you thinking right now? What are you feeling right now? Like, is everything all right? Those types of things are the boy in you who was constantly trying to figure out, why won't this parent give me some attention or pay attention to my needs and my wants. Next. You were the caretaker. All right, so again, this is one of the main causes of codependency. You were the caretaker. Maybe one of your parents was sick, maybe they were incapable of taking care of certain things. But you at a young age identified that your parent was incapable in some way of taking care of themselves. And as a consequence of that, incapable of really taking care of you. And maybe for very legitimate reasons, maybe they were legitimately sick, maybe they, you know, had cancer or some type of leukemia, or they had some physical disability that emerged, or there was an accident, whatever it is. But you were thrust into the role of parenting that parent, caretaking that parent. And what that does is it immediately takes your needs as a child and sets them aside. It takes your needs as an individual and says, these need to be deprioritized. These need to be deprioritized for the sake of this other individual, their illness, the challenges that they're facing, the struggles that they're facing, etc. And it's very, very common. And again, I've worked with a number of men who have become the man of the house at a very young age for one circumstance or another. And that can do a toll on that young boy. It can feel good at first, but what can happen depending on your age, right? If you're 10 years old and you're helping mom file taxes or, you know, you're taking care of everything around the house that can teach you as a boy that your needs need to be set aside. And that will then show up in the relationship in a way where you think that in order for the relationship to survive, in order for it to be okay, in order for the other person to feel loved, you need to set your needs and wants aside, you actually need to deprioritize those things. And so it's very common that if you are or were as a. As a boy, as a child, in the role of the parent or in the role of the caretaker, the. That you not only deprioritize yourself, but there's kind of this heroic attitude that shows up, right? It's like I'm doing a noble thing by constantly caretaking this other person. And the interesting thing about the caretaker is, and I'm just going to give these two pieces because I've found this to be very helpful for a lot of the men that I've worked with, is that most of the time guys that were boys, that were caretakers take two paths. They take the path of repetition where they continue to. They seem to attract partners, right? They seem to attract women who need caretaking or expect caretaking. And in that way, they are repeating what felt safe for them as a child. They're repeating the dynamic of if I take care of you enough, maybe eventually my needs will have a place where. Or they're repeating the pattern of my needs aren't important. And so I'm just going to take care of you 100%, and that's my role as a man. Or they go down the path of opposition. And what can start to happen is that when a woman that they're dating starts to have, you know, larger needs, or they're struggling in some way emotionally, or they're struggling at work, or they're struggling financially, or they have insecurities about their body, and they bring those problems to the man that they're dating. If that man grew up with the caretaker, he can meet that with a kind of, like, disgust and revolt. It's like, I am not dealing with your shit. I'm not taking care of you. And so a lot of guys that were boys who were put in the role of the parent and the caretaker, when their partner, female or male, brings them their challenges and says, I could use help with this, I don't know what to do with this. I'm struggling with whatever my relationship with my mom or this thing that's going on at work or something with my finances. It can be very. It can cause a lot of reactivity within that man because it feels like a threat. It feels like he's going to be put back into that position of having to be that person's parent or that person's caretaker. And that can cause a lot of men to push relationships away. These, generally speaking, if you're in that position, it's likely that you are the taker. All right? And again, these are amoral roles. It's neither good or bad. Sometimes people get caught up of like, oh, I don't want to be the taker. Like, that's such an move. I don't want to be the giver that's so weak and blah, blah, blah. It's like, those things don't matter. The sooner that you can set aside your story about whether you're the giver or the taker, the faster you'll be able to move through it. Because almost always it's either the unwillingness to admit which role you're occupying, or it's the shame that you have about which role that you're occupying that's keeping you in that role. More on that to come soon. Before I talk to you about the signs of codependency, oh, there's two more I'm just going to give you real quick. Number one is trauma. If you had any kind of trauma growing up in your family system, that can lead to codependency for a number of reasons. And then secondly, if you had a parent who is an addict, very, very often when that child addict dynamic happens, you will get into a relationship later on in life where you are in a very similar dynamic. So it just. Because it just creates dependency. Addicts create dependencies. Okay, so those are the main things that cause co. Dependency, right? Those are all the main things that cause codependency.