20 Signs of CoDependency and Tips to Address Them

Hey there everybody, and welcome to the continuation of the codependency masterclass. Today we are talking about 20 signs of codependency. And of course, I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. In this video, we'll explore the symptoms of codependency, discuss how they make sense in context, what their function actually is, and identify at least one strategy to address each symptom. So let's start out with one of the most basic low self worth. A lot of people with codependency blame themselves for everything that's gone on in their life and they have a lot of guilt and shame as a result. Now this may have developed because as a child they were blamed or guilted for everything that happened, or it may have happened because as a child they thought they had more control than they did. So they took responsibility for things that were not their fault, but they didn't have a caregiver to help them understand the faulty logic that they were using as adults. It's important for people who have codependent traits to start developing their self worth, start separating the things they can control from the things they can't control, start evaluating the things for which they still carry with them, guilt and shame, looking at those things and saying, how do I actually feel about this right now? Was it my fault? Was there anything I could have done? How can I forgive myself and learn from it so I don't do it again and move forward instead of continuing to keep my energy tied up in guilt and shame? Likewise in the present, when they feel the need to blame themselves, when something goes wrong and they go to that automatic reaction of it's my fault, how can they become more aware of that automatic reaction, that automatic self blame and stop, evaluate the facts, figure out what they actually have control over, and then make decisions from there about what blame they may or may not have in a particular situation. The next characteristic is what we call an unstable sense of self. And that is one of those sort of amorphous terms that I think is important that we define. When people have a stable, stable sense of self, they know who they are, they know what they like, they are in touch with themselves, they know their thoughts, wants and needs pretty much in the moment. Now, not everybody is completely connected to themselves, but if they stop, they can look inside and go, okay, this is something that I like, this is something that I value. A person with codependency often does not have that. They look for happiness outside of themselves because they don't know what they like. So they can't look for happiness inside themselves. They just have no clue. And they are so afraid of abandonment. They are so afraid of being alone that they are trying to connect with people in a way that makes them happy. So they are only happy if they are making other people happy. They are unaware or repressing their authentic selves. They've often been taught if they grew up in an addicted household or they lived in an addicted household as an adult for a while, they may have been taught not to talk, not to trust, not to feel, not to think. So they quit checking in with themselves. They don't know who they are anymore or what they want. They've abandoned themselves in order to try to be whatever this other person wants in order to try to be the chameleon. So they've abandoned themselves and they've repressed that. Because ultimately their fear of abandonment is so strong that it's more important to make sure that somebody else doesn't leave them then to make sure they don't abandon themselves and they feel empty or worthless when they're not engaged in a crisis most of the time. People who grew up in codependent households, there was constantly a crisis, There was constantly something going on. So that is the norm for the person with codependency. When they are not in the midst of a crisis, there are two things that happen. Number one, the anxiety goes way up because they start waiting for the other shoe to drop. But number two, when they're not focused on a crisis and they start sitting, sitting with themselves and being with themselves for a minute, they start recognizing that they don't know who they are or what they like if they are not something for somebody. So to address the unstable sense of self, it's going to be important for the person who is codependent to start becoming more mindful of their thoughts, wants, needs, things they enjoy. It's going to be important for them to reconnect with their. With their themselves on an emotional and cognitive level as well as a physical level. Noticing. Remember, not all memories are in the form of pictures or words. But noticing some of those sensations and trying to figure out, okay, I am feeling anxious right now. I'm feeling a gnawing in the pit of my tummy. What does that mean? As they become more connected with themselves, they will start getting a more stable sense of self. However, in order to connect with that sense of self, it's going to be really important for the person with codependency to have a safe connection with someone else who's there. And a lot of times this is the therapist who's there saying, you are awesome for who you are. Tell me who you are so I can learn about you, because I'm curious. And I'm not going to reject you based on your thoughts, wants, and needs because they're yours. I may not agree with every single one of them, but I am going to accept you as a person and not reject you as a person. And that's really important in order to get over that self abandonment in order to. It's important for people not to feel like they're going to be abandoned by the other important person in their life. Which takes us to abandonment fears. When people grow up in a chaotic household, they can't count on their caregivers to be there to meet their needs. They can't count on their caregivers to be there emotionally and sometimes physically. And I say a chaotic household. I didn't say addicted household. Why? Because this can be true in a household where the caregivers have a mental illness or where there's domestic violence. It's important to recognize that when people or children are growing up in a chaotic household, they don't feel safe. And a lot of times in these households, they don't receive comfort, they don't receive love, proactive love. They are just. The only time they receive attention is when there's a problem. So they don't learn that they are lovable for who they are, and they fear rejection. Therefore, as adults, they grow up centering their lives around others. If I do what these people want me to do, then they won't leave me. If I do everything right, then I can control the situation and I can keep people from leaving me. Instead of being able to say, I'm awesome and I'm going to be me and the people who like that will stick around, but I'm not everybody's cup of tea. And that is, you know, way down the line in the recovery process, because that's hard for a lot of people to say, let alone somebody who is terrified of abandonment. And people with codependency are very often terrified of anger in other people because they grew up in a household where sporadically, without warning, they would be the target of a caregiver's anger or rage. They would be observing a caregiver's anger or rage at another caregiver. So they saw anger as a threat instead of anger as a emotional response that tells you, hey, you might want to check and see if there's a threat. Anger itself became the Threat. And when people get angry, that's terrifying. As an adult or an older adolescent who's recovering from codependency issues, it's important to develop an awareness of what anger is, why people feel anger, and the ability to assess in the present context whether they are actually safe. A lot of times people who grew up in dangerous households or households where there was a lot of anger, when someone gets angry in the present, they flash back to the past. So it's really important for them to be able to learn how to stop and say, okay, am I feeling scared because of what's going on right now? Or is this triggering memories from the past and then developing tools to deal with that? People who have codependency issues often are compulsive caretakers and controllers. And, you know, the three Cs can be really challenging because the person with codependency feels like if they put themselves in a position where they're indispensable, they are caretaking for this person. They're doing things for this person that the person can't do for themselves, or they don't think the person can do for themselves. And if they control every single string on that marionette, then that person won't leave and bad things won't happen. And this is a very immature type of reasoning. You know, the child developed this type of reasoning, and they said, okay, if I do A, B, C and D, then things are going to be okay. And they learned from a very early age. There was sort of a recipe for trying to make sure that the dysfunctional other in the family did not become angry, did not abandon them. They may not have specifically figured it out on their own. The enabler in the family, the other caregiver, for example, may have taught them, when your other person is around, when the dysfunctional other is around, these are the things you can do, these are the things that you can't do. And these are the eggshells that we have to walk on. So they started figuring out, okay, we have to maintain rigid control. There are rules, and that keeps us safe in adulthood. The person in recovery needs to evaluate every time they start trying to control something. Number one, is it something that even needs to be controlled? Number two, is it something that is their right to control? You can control your own feelings, you control your own responses, you can control your own thoughts. You can't control other people. You can control the environment. But is it your place to try to control everything in the environment? Or is it everybody's responsibility? And this is a huge Learning curve for a lot of people with codependency to be able to unhook from the dysfunctional other, unhook from their significant other, and say, okay, this is me. These are my thoughts, feelings, wants, needs and responsibilities, and these are yours. And you need to do what you can do for you and that I'll be there to support you as long as you're doing it, but I'm not going to do it for you. I'll give you an example in recovery, in counseling. A lot of times I work with people who need what we call wraparound services. They need to connect with SNAP or they need to connect with Medicaid or something like that. And that can be kind of overwhelming when you haven't done that before. These systems can get really cumbersome to deal with. So sometimes I'll have people make those calls or do their first connections in my office. I'm not going to do it for them. I am not going to call and make the appointment for them. They can make an appointment themselves. They're adults. But I will be there for emotional and moral support. So if for some reason they had a problem, I'm there. But when they do it and they succeed, then they realize, hey, I can do it myself. And a codependent response would be to do it for them, to make the appointment for them to make, to drive them to their appointment, to do all of these things. A healthy response is to say, this is something you can do. You know, I'll cheer you on, but I'm not going to do it for you. I will allow you to experience your own successes and use your own strengths. People who are codependent live in extremes. They are either extremely in control or extremely out of control. So when things start to go out of control, sometimes they're just like, fine, I give up. And then they withdraw. They're extremely responsible. Or when they start getting overwhelmed and exhausted, they may become extremely irresponsible and they may go from love to hate. They love this person with all of their heart, and then the person does something that they don't like, and then they hate the person and they're so angry at them. But they do the same thing for themselves. They may go, maybe not love, but they can deal with being in their own skin, to hating themselves and being filled with guilt and shame and remorse. They may have obsessive anxiety about what will happen next. When they grew up in this chaotic household, they couldn't anticipate, especially as a child, they couldn't anticipate what was going to happen. And as adults, they still hang on to that because they are expecting what has always been to continue to be. They're expecting people to be unpredictable, they're expecting people to be untrustworthy, they're hyper vigilant, trying to catch people doing wrong. And you may be scratching your head going, what sense does that make? Well, if you catch somebody before they fall completely, then you keep them from hurting themselves. Your child's learning to walk and they start to wobble and you catch them, you keep them from falling on their bum. Somebody's in recovery and they start to get weak or wobbly in their recovery and you catch them, then there may not completely relapse. However, if you keep catching them, they're never going to learn how to steady themselves. If you keep catching the child and not letting them fall, you know, not far, but just on their bum, then they don't learn how to balance themselves. They don't learn how to walk effectively as adults or people in recovery. The person needs to become aware of when they're being hypervigilant, when they're being overly suspicious or helicoptering or whatever word that they want to use, and start recognizing the importance of letting people walk on their own. And if they end up falling, okay, well, we can deal with that. But it's important to allow people to take responsibility for their own behaviors and not spend so much time looking for them to do wrong. Because when you're looking for them to do wrong, you're going to find wrong even if it's not there. You're going to start seeing hints and glimpses and assuming when things might be completely benign. People with codependency have difficulty identifying and modulating their own emotions, with which often ends up resulting in inappropriate intense anger either at other people or themselves. Distress tolerance skills are essential here as well as developing emotional intelligence. The ability to identify their feelings, early warning signs of their feelings, triggers for their feelings, and ways to modulate their their feelings is really important. They didn't develop that as children. Children need a secure attachment. They need a caregiver to help them learn how to identify their emotions and figure out, okay, what do I do with this? A lot of people with codependency never had that. So it's important for them to work on developing their emotional intelligence. They often have communication difficulties because they grew up in a house where communication was crappy. They may exhibit multiple communication patterns, being aggressive when they feel like things are starting to get out of control. They may blame, threaten, or guilt in order to try to bring people back into the fold, in order to try to control them, they may be passive aggressive where they say, okay, that's fine, whatever, do what you want, even though you know it's going to break my heart. Or they may be completely passive. They may just say, I will do whatever you want me to do, even if I hate it. And it's important to examine what these mean. And basically, in every situation, it means I'm going to do whatever I can do in order to try to prevent you from abandoning me. If I can blame, threaten, guilt, manipulate, and suck you back in, well, then I'm going to do that, because that helps me feel safe. If I need to be passive aggressive, which again, is going to use guilt to kind of bring you back in, because there's that aggressive point, and that's what I'm going to do. Or if I need to conform, then guess what? That may be what I'm going to do. People with codependency. Well, going back to communication difficulties, it's important for people in recovery to start paying attention to their communication styles, to learn how to communicate assertively, where they say, these are my thoughts and wants and needs, and they are just as important as your thoughts, wants, and needs. This is what I would like to see happen. What would you like to see happen? Instead of telling people what needs to happen all the time, getting input, you know, tell me what your thoughts, wants and needs are at this moment. Paying attention to when they communicate aggressively and use some of these behaviors and exploring how they learned that growing up. You know, maybe that's how their caregivers communicated with each other or with them. Okay, what would you rather do to solve the situation? What is your hope for outcome and what would be a healthier, more productive way of achieving it? Poor boundaries, poor personal boundaries. For the person who's codependent, and this is another one where they are in extremes. They can be extremely rigid in their boundaries. This is the way things have to go. And I've got my thoughts are going to hold steady and I'm actually going to ignore your boundaries and push on through and, you know, assert my boundaries over yours. But their personal boundaries can also be very weak. When their significant others or the dysfunctional others are sad, they take on that feeling of sadness. When their significant others are scared, they take on that feeling of fear and they try to fix it. So it's important to recognize that boundaries are on roller skates in people with codependency, when it's helpful for the boundaries to be rigid when it protects them, they may keep them up, but a lot of times their boundaries are overpowering other people and not respecting others. It will be important for people to start becoming aware of what boundaries are, and I have a video about that. If you are not aware and to try to start evaluating how weak or how strong are their boundaries with different people, because your boundaries differ with different people. And cognitively or perceptually, people with codependency often have a lot of what we call cognitive distortions. This is not uncommon because people who experienced a chaotic household growing up formed their schema based on early childhood thought processes which are concrete. They make their decisions based on what they can see, hear and feel in the moment. They can't extrapolate what else might have happened or what could happen next week. What they see, hear and feel in the moment, they think dichotomously it's all good or all bad. And they think very personally. Children think they have a lot more control than they actually do, so they take responsibility for things. So the person with codependency often thinks in all or nothing terms. You are either you either love me or you hate me. You're either doing everything right or. Or you're a screw up. It's important to help them start looking at exceptions. And they feel the same way about themselves. They feel like they're good some days or they're complete screw ups other days. And they hold on to those mistakes and they dwell on those. And they have a lot of. They have a lot of difficulty letting go of mistakes, personalization, everything's about them. You did this because you don't care about me. You did this because you hate me. You did this because of me. And it's important for the person with codependency to evaluate other alternatives. Maybe they did it because they were in pain. Maybe they did it because they weren't thinking. It didn't have anything to do with you. It was them being insensitive. What are the other alternatives for why this might have happened? Besides you? Why is it? Could it be? What are some other explanations besides it being your fault? Mind reading. Growing up in a chaotic household, the child learned that it was important to anticipate their caregivers every thought, want and need in order to prevent that anger. So they carried that into adulthood. That is a default way of responding for them. And it's important to encourage them to explore and to communicate more effectively with the people in their lives so they're not assuming that they know what Other people are thinking, feeling wanting, or needing, jumping to conclusions without evidence, it's important to help them get the facts about what's going on. Magnification is another cognitive distortion. And again, this is another fact based error. So it's important to have people examine with what they're feeling. Is this as big of a deal as you are anticipating that it is? Likewise with minimization, if they're saying, oh, this isn't a problem at all, encouraging them to evaluate the facts and identify whether it is not a big deal or they're just trying to avoid it because they don't want to confront something. Codependency often develops in response to a situation in which the person felt unsafe and disempowered, that is traumatized as a result of a loved one's behavior. A lot of times we talk about trauma in terms of reactions to a stranger's behavior or in terms of reactions to victimization. And in this case, the trauma came as a result of a loved one's behavior. They were, maybe they were involved in addictions, maybe they were struggling with depression or anxiety or whatever the case may be. When this happens in childhood, it's interpreted through that dichotomous all or nothing safe or unsafe lens. It's personalized because the child thinks everybody understands it the way I do and it's all my fault. And it's concrete. A always leads to B. If I don't eat my vegetables, then bad things are going to happen. If the person starts to feel unsafe and disempowered in an adult relationship, they may believe the dysfunctional other when they deny, minimize blame, and blame the person with codependency for what's going on. You know, I wouldn't have to drink if you didn't do this, or my problem is not that bad. You're exaggerating, you're making mistakes. Up. The person with codependency may want to believe that, so they tightly cling to their vision of the relationship. When it fails to improve, they must address the cognitive dissonance or the difference between what they want, what they want reality to be, and what reality actually is. When they do that, then a lot of times they start telling themselves these dysfunctional thoughts that have to do with control, such as, I must need to try harder to make this work or it's my fault that this is not working. And those thinking styles start to become more and more extreme as the dysfunctional other's behavior becomes more and more extreme. When the dysfunctional relationship occurs in childhood, it prevents the child from developing secure attachment. So there's a treatment target. Safety in their own skin as well as in their house. Self awareness and self esteem, emotional awareness and emotion management skills, boundaries and communication skills. So understanding the symptoms, how they could have developed to help a child or a person survive a very chaotic, dysfunctional relationship, and then identifying alternative ways to help them cope with life in the present is essentially what we're talking about in the recovery process for codependency.