Unveiling the Effects of Codependency | Codependency Recovery Week 2

Foreign. Hey there everybody. Welcome back to week two of the Codependency series. Today we're talking about the impact of codependent behavior. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Last week we went through the different symptoms of codependent behavior and why you may have developed them, how they may be helping you feel safe. And I asked you to think about how you actually demonstrate those symptoms, how you express hyper vigilance or control issues. So you start becoming aware of your behaviors and the functions they're serving. But today we're going to talk about how these behaviors impact you and your entire life. And I call this the PACER impact and that stands for physical impact affective which is your emotional impact, cognitive, environmental and relationship. So how do each of these symptoms impact you as a whole person? Low self esteem and a need for external validation. How does that affect you physically? A lot of people with low self esteem fear abandonment. They have a high level of anxiety which causes them to have an exaggerated stress response. It can cause a lot of stress related illnesses. It may make it harder to sleep at night affectively or emotionally. When you have low self esteem again, you may have a lot of anxiety, you may have a lot of depression, you may feel hopeless and helpless and unlovable. Cognitively, low self esteem may regularly tell you you can't do this. It is very disempowering. It tells you that you're not smart enough, that you can't be trusted. Relationally. If you have low self esteem and a need for external validation, you may get into any relationship just to be in a relationship, just to feel like you deserve to exist. You get into any relationship that will provide you that external validation and tell you you know what, you're okay. A lack of a sense of self is also going to impact you physically. If you have no idea what's going on inside you, you're focused on everybody else. You're going to miss things like you're hungry, you're sleep deprived, you're burned out, you are getting sick, you're in pain. Where you could initially intervene early, you don't notice it until it's a crisis. Affectively, if you have a lack of an awareness of how you're feeling, what your emotions are, you're just on autopilot trying to make everybody else happy. Guess what? You start numbing, you start feeling unfulfilled, you start feeling like you're being taken for granted. You start there's a lot of feelings that may go there when you are not noticing. You Know, how does this make me feel and what can I do to improve the way I feel? Or what can I do to continue feeling happy? Cognitively, if you don't know what your thoughts and opinions and wants are, then it's going to be hard to assert those to other people, which means they're not going to be able to effectively meet your needs. They can't read your mind. When you don't know what you need or want, you often feel unfulfilled, but you don't know why, which can lead to problems in relationships because you may get frustrated at other people for not meeting your needs, but they don't know what your needs are. Or you may not know what your needs are and be frustrated with yourself. Difficulty setting and maintaining boundaries physically, that leaves you feeling unsafe. If you set boundaries, boundaries that are too strong and you keep everybody out, you may feel abandoned and isolated and alone and vulnerable. If you have weak boundaries and people you know walk all over them and tell you what to think and what to feel and how to be, which is very common in codependency, because that's all that a lot of people with codependency have ever known. Then again, you start feeling like you don't matter, like nobody cares about your opinion and it can lead you to feel unhappy and powerless. Hypervigilance. Oh, going back to co. Cognitively, if you have difficulty setting and maintaining boundaries, then people are often going to tell you what to think and you're not checking in and going, is this really what I believe? And you may start getting led down a path that isn't really in line with your values. Hyper vigilance, physically, again, it's going to ramp up that stress response system. It's going to cause problems with relaxing enough to sleep. It's going to cause stress related illnesses, digestive upset, autoimmune flare ups. You know, stress is toxic. We, I mean we need a little bit of it. But, but ongoing constant stress is toxic. Affectively, when you're hypervigilant, you're constantly scanning. You're kind of like that little squirrel that's in the middle of the road going which way do I go? And it's looking for nuts to eat, but it's also trying to not get run over by a car and it can't focus. It's stressed out all of the time. And can you imagine feeling that way? There's a lot of. I always feel like squirrels are really anxious creatures, which, I mean they're pretty low on the bottom of the food chain. So I guess they have a reason to. But recognizing how being hypervigilant, being on guard all the time impacts your ability to feel things like happiness and contentment and relaxation. Cognitively, when you're hypervigilant, you are more prone to notice the threats in the environment that than the good things. You're more likely to notice the cars and the tigers than the cache of nuts that's on the other side of the road. If you want to stick with the squirrel metaphor because your body wants you to survive, unfortunately, that leads you to start believing that the world is far more dangerous and scary than maybe it really is. Because you're not noticing the good, you're only noticing the bad. And that's going to impair your ability to concentrate when you're stressed out. When you're hyper vigilant, you're in fight or flight mode. You're not in let's think and solve problems and concentrate mode. You're in movement mode. And so hyper vigilance is going to impact your ability to think clearly, to remember things. You're going to have brain fog. And relationally, when you're hypervigilant, you may be looking for little micro expressions that indicate that somebody is going to be mad or abandon you. So you may make assumptions that really don't need to be made. They're not accurate in this context with this person. When you're hyper vigilant, it also drains your energy because you're constantly scanning. It's hard to focus on this person in this context and hear what they're saying and their needs. People pleasing. When you're people pleasing at your expense, you know, taking it to that extreme, you're going to get run down, you're going to start getting sicker, you're going to have stress related illnesses. Affectively, you may actually start resenting people if they aren't showing you sufficient gratitude for what you've done. You are giving literally till it hurts and they are not recognizing that and giving you that external validation that you so crave. Cognitively, if you're people pleasing a lot, you may be telling yourself that you should do this or you have to do this to be a good person. So it's important to look at how people pleasing changes the way you think about other people's ability to do things for themselves. Denial of personal needs. Again, people emotionally, physically, if you don't pay attention to your personal needs, you can't address them relationally. You're not going to have the energy, the desire, the motivation to Engage with others if you are hungry, angry, lonely and tired. Fear of abandonment or that need to be needed, that goes along with being hyper vigilant and feeling unsafe all the time. So again, you've got stress, you've got regular fear of abandonment. Fear is anxiety. You're going to potentially feel anxious a lot of the time. If you are not with your significant other, with your eyeballs on them, you may feel anxious and that can cause a lot of problems. And it's not just fear of abandonment that they'll leave you. It could be fear of abandonment that they're going to make a bad choice because you're not controlling their every move like a marionette, Marionetteer, whatever. Somebody who moves puppets and they're going to go to jail or they're going to die or something. So it's important to recognize how that impacts your willingness to respect their boundaries. And this goes along with control issues too. Your willingness to respect their boundaries and say, you know what, you are an adult, you have the ability and the right to choose. And people with codependency issues, that's often terrifying, giving somebody the ability to make their own choice because somewhere in the back of their head they, quote, know that the person's going to make the wrong choice. And that could be because they've experienced it time and time again with other dysfunctional people. But it's important to recognize this person in this context. Does this apply? The person with codependency may have difficulty expressing emotions or dysregulation. And when people dysregulate, I have used the analogy, it's like a tsunami of stress hormones. Instead of just a little a wave or a trickle, it's a tsunami that is exhausting. It's like running a 600 yard sprint. And I know you don't usually sprint for 600 yards. And there's a reason for that because it takes so much freaking energy. People with who emotionally disregulate, that's exhausting. It burns up a lot of energy that now they can't use to do other things that they wanted to do. It may impact their ability to take good care of themselves and eat right and do things like that because they just don't have the energy in them. Affectively, emotions can start feeling very scary if you're regularly dysregulating because the only emotions you're feeling are those tsunami emotions. Everything else is just kind of gray, kind of blah. And you're not feeling happy, you're not feeling content or curious. Your brain says, we don't have the time or the energy to devote to those, you know, if there's a problem, we'll react. Otherwise, leave us alone. And that can be really problematic for having, for experiencing happiness. When you are in that constant stressed out state, again, you're not in your wise mind, you're in your protection, your action mind. And that can also make it difficult in relationships because you may react with a tsunami to something that deserved a trickle and what you're reacting from. Instead of reacting from solid ground, you're reacting from the place of already being, running from that threat, already being on unsteady ground and feeling unsafe and, and then having something else piled on top. A lot of times, healthy significant others may not understand this dynamic. So it can cause rifts. When they accuse you of overreacting and you, you may feel like they're being insensitive. They may not understand the totality of what's going on and the need for, for recovery time. People who dysregulate because the tsunami is so strong, it takes them longer to recover and get, get back to baseline than somebody who just had a trickle. Guilt. We know that guilt impacts us physically. It impacts our ability to sleep well. It causes us to feel. Remember, guilt is anger at ourselves. So that's a stress response. It may overshadow other emotions. We may feel even feel guilty for feeling happy. Cognitively, guilt tells us that we are bad people. And it's important to address those cognitions and make sure that guilt is specific and changeable. And guilt says, you know what? The choice you made was not a good one, and you may need to make amends for that, but you are a good person. So it's important to look at how guilt is affecting the way you think about yourself as well as other people and in relationships. Oh, guilt. Guilt can be used by a dysfunctional other to manipulate you. Guilt can be used by a functional other to manipulate you. If they realize that it works and that's not okay, that is a boundary violation. But if you're feeling guilty about a lot of things, people who are healthy may also not understand why you feel guilty, understand why you feel the need to do all of these things. And they're like, you know, sit back, relax, take care of yourself. You don't need to. People, please, you don't need to meet my every need. And you're like, yes, I do. Yes, I do. If, if I want to be a good person, I need to do this, because that's what you were taught. And enabling and rescuing behavior this again is putting other people's needs before yours, going above and beyond, making sure that the other person does not experience the consequences of their actions. And everybody needs to experience the consequences of their actions. And if I put my hand on a hot plate and I get burned, I'm probably not going to do that again. If I put my hand on a hot plate and somehow somebody protects me from getting burned, then I'm going to keep doing it. If I am and don't do this, if I am texting and driving and I don't get into an accident, then I'm more likely to do it again as opposed to if I have to experience the consequences of my actions or if going with enabling. If I'm texting and driving and I get into an accident and somebody who's codependent makes that accident go away, it's like, okay, we'll just pretend that didn't exist. I'm not going to learn from my consequences. So it's important that people experience the natural consequences of their behavior. And when you don't do that, it causes a lot of relationship strife. If you feel like you're constantly having to rescue or cover up for somebody, you may start feeling resentful, and they may start feeling resentful because they're like, I never asked you to do that. So it's important to examine how enabling impacts you physically, affectively, cognitively, and how is it impacting your relationships? So go back over the next week and review the impacts of codependent behavior on your life. How are they impacting you physically, affectively, or emotionally, cognitively, and in your relationships? List in order of importance the negative consequences you're experiencing from these behaviors, and then identify at least one way to start addressing each of those negative consequences. So you're starting to problem solve. You're not going to fix it in a day, but you're starting to identify, okay, these are the problems, and these are ways I might start to address it.