Tim Arrigo, a mental-health counselor, explains why people fear change in relationships: codependency. When a partner sets boundaries and grows, the codependent person loses their sense of purpose and identity. Many mistake this loss for proof their partner hasn't changed, refusing to see their own role in the dysfunction.
In working in and outside the clinical setting, in mental health and substance abuse for over 10 years, working in men's ministry inside the church, I can tell you in helping, you know, families who have loved ones who struggle with addiction, right? And working and helping people heal from marital issues, marital crisis, divorce, I can tell you there is one common pattern that's the primary blind spot that people have, and it's codependency. See, codependency is when you take all your energy and resources and you siphon and funnel it in to helping somebody else while you simultaneously neglect yourself in the process. And codependent people, they find a sense of purpose in trying to fix somebody else. And oftentimes as a result, they scapegoat the other person, point at them and make them the primary problem as a way to dissociate and avoid the issues within themselves that they need to face and that are unresolved. See, codependent people don't recognize that neglecting themselves, not asserting themselves, right, is something that they've learned. They've learned to put people's needs before their own. Codependency is, "I feel about me how you feel about me." Codependency is about taking your energy, your resources, your time, your efforts, and about connecting your worth and value to somebody else. People have learned to not express themselves, learned that they didn't have needs. That's why often codependent people don't set boundaries. That's why when you are a codependent person, you automatically become an enabler because you will tolerate dysfunction at the expense of your own well-being. But see, the problem with this is codependent people don't want to recognize that. They want to recognize their part. See, in any dysfunctional relationship, to be inside that relationship, you've got to be dysfunctional. But see, codependent individuals don't want to recognize this. When I was codependent, when I was in full, full codependency and I was dependent upon a lot of things, right? If you look at the word codependency, and you take off the word— if you take off the co- and you add chemical, what do you get? Chemical dependency. It's a dependency issue. It's going outside of yourself to look or seek or find something that you're not connected to within yourself. That's right, seeking validation. It's enabling somebody, enabling their bad behavior at the expense of your own well-being. And if you're codependent, you're going to naturally neglect, abandon, and betray who you are, right? To do what? To try to attach or connect to an emotionally unavailable person a lot of times, or a person, right, that's self-destructive. And as a result, you stay inside a dynamic that is an exact replica of what you've already experienced prior to that relationship. See, a lot of times we think that we're attracted to somebody when we're not. It's not attraction, it's recognition. We're recognizing their behavior as something familiar, something that we've already experienced. And oftentimes when we've been inside dynamics where we've been neglected, we've been abused, we've been betrayed, We've been taken advantage of, we've been abandoned. We stay inside dynamics that replicate that. That's why oftentimes when the spouse actually starts to change, it makes that codependent person super insecure because their sense of purpose, which comes from being needed in the relationship or having power and control, right? When they're no longer with the broken person that they scapegoat, right? That they hyperfocus on and use as really the reason and justification of why everything in their life is messed up, right? They act like they're handcuffed to this relationship, and then they give you excuses about why they are, right? When this person actually starts to change, what they do is they maintain a confirmation bias. They don't want to recognize the growth in that person. Why? Because the growth in that person forces them to have to grow. See, this is why relationships are so powerful, is that we can lead with influence instead of dominance. So when actually somebody starts to change, they are unintentionally gonna force the other person to make a change as a result, because what works in one relationship, in one dynamic, is not going to work in another. So as the person starts to grow, they set boundaries, they find their autonomy, their individuality, right? They move out of an insecure attachment style like an anxious or avoidant attachment style, and they move into a secure attachment style. That codependent person is going to get highly triggered because their sense of purpose that they found inside the dynamic is no longer needed. They can't enable anymore. They can't be complicit in the person's problem anymore. And to a large degree, they can't scapegoat that person. It's oftentimes why they will continue to tell the person, "You haven't changed. You haven't changed. You haven't changed. You haven't changed." Because the second that they have to recognize and identify that the person actually has changed, that means they do too. They have to too. They have to change as well. And see, that's something that a lot of people aren't willing to face. They're not willing to recognize. They wanna recognize how they're the victim in the relationship, but they don't wanna recognize how they're the perpetrator. 90% of the people I talk to will recognize all day long how they're a victim, how their spouse is a narcissist, how they're such a terrible person, how their life was horrible and terrible. But yet ironically, they won't recognize how they engage in, they engage in abuse, verbal abuse, name-calling. They have contempt, contemptuous behaviors. They're passive-aggressive, that they have an attitude of indifference and apathy towards that person's problems a lot of times when they want to work on them, that they weaponize the past constantly, constantly bringing up the past and weaponizing it. Why? Because they're addicted to the toxicity. They're addicted to the codependent dynamic. They actually don't They are scared and terrified of what it looks like for that person to be healthy, because then they have to look in the mirror and look at themselves.
