I Struggle With Codependency. How Do I Raise My Kids Differently?

You're listening to good inside with Dr. Becky. I have so many ideas, strategies and scripts to share with you right after a word from our sponsor. Hi, I'm Dr. Becky and this is Good Inside. I'm a clinical psychologist and mom of three on a mission to rethink the way we raise our children. I love translating deep thoughts about parenting into practical, actionable strategies that you can use in your home right away. One of my core beliefs is that we are all doing the best we can with the resources we have available to us in that moment. So even as we struggle and even as we are having a hard time on the outside, we remain Good inside. Today we'll be talking about codependence, what it is, how to rewire it in ourselves, and how to help our kids develop a strong sense of self. I've received so many voicemails on this topic, which tells me that this is a community of parents who are reflective, thoughtful and brave people who are willing to look at and work on themselves as they parent their kids. This also tells me that you all recognize the importance of raising kids who are in touch with their inner wants, needs, attributes and feelings. In short, you're all amazing. I'm so glad you're here. And let's jump in. Lets listen to a question from our first caller, Ann.

Hi, my name is Anne from Indianapolis and my kids are ages 7, 10 and 12. And I have a question related to codependency. I definitely did things like you're not supposed to do in terms of that makes mommy feel sad when they were younger. But now that my kids are a little bit older, I'm sure that I'm doing things that might foster codependency in different ways, and I don't really know what those are. So what are some typical ways that parents of older kids unintentionally foster codependency? Thank you.

Hi Ann. This is such an amazing, even such a brave question that you're willing to reflect and think about things from a different perspective. So the first thing that comes to mind for me is really thinking together about codependency. That word is used so much. So let me share what I think about when I think about that word. To me, codependency is a way of determining your wants, your needs, your feelings based on another person as opposed to based on your sense of yourself. So as opposed to knowing what do I want, what do I need? What am I thinking right now? How am I feeling now? To be clear, we don't always get what we Want or need. But I'm talking about knowing it as opposed to knowing it. You look to others for what they seem to want to give you or what feelings they recognize as valid, and then you kind of back into your own feelings and wants and needs from others. What's important also is I think we don't have to label people as codependent or not codependent. To me, that just creates this binary that feels very filled with shame. So I think we should think about what kind of ways of interacting with our kids would lead to more versus fewer codependent traits. One of the things we have to really pay attention to when our kids are young and their bodies are getting wired for how they see the world and how they see see themselves is whether we're focused on what's happening for them inside that's leading to their behavior, or whether we look at their behavior for the impact it has on us when our kids are young. And even as our kids get older, like you mentioned both times, we want to help our kids look in not because we want them to be selfish. This actually doesn't make them selfish. But the more they're able to reflect about what is going on for me, how was I feeling, what want came up for me that maybe surfaced in this way? The more they actually have more control over their feelings and wants so that they can be present to be there for other people, to be empathic, and to kind of show up as good citizens in the world. So let me go through a few ways of doing this as our kids get older. Number one, be curious about what led to your child's behavior rather than how a behavior makes you feel. So here's an example. Let's say your, you know, teenage child, you bring him to a family gathering and you're thinking, okay, my kid's older now. They know how to talk to other adults. And someone says to your child, hey, tell me a little about school and your child in your mind. It seems very rude. It's just kind of putting his head down says, mom, I just want to go. I want to get on my phone, and you're overwhelmed. Let me think about two different responses after. One would sound like this, that was so embarrassing. You know, in our family, we value manners, we value communication. I can't believe you did something like that. That was horrible. You totally embarrassed me. Now what am I doing there? I'm looking at the impact my kid has on me rather than what was going on for my child inside my child that led to that moment. And What I'm wiring in my kid is, when there's a difficult moment, does my child look out, or does my child have an ability to look in so they can figure out what led to that moment, so they can take things in a different direction next time? To build that circuit, I might say to my child, hey, something must have fell off at that family gathering. Look, two things are true. In our family, it's really important to talk to other adults and to have kind of some basic manners. And yet I know you know that, and so something about that must have felt really hard for you. Let's figure that out together. I still have a boundary. I'm still able to express what feel important. But I'm not linking my child's behavior to my feelings as much as I'm helping my child reflect on what is going on inside him. Here's another idea. Every time we celebrate our child's differences from us, we are working away from codependency. So what might this look like? Let's say you have a family where you. And if you have a partner and everybody loves soccer, and you have a child who doesn't particularly love soccer, saying something to this child like, hey, you know what's really cool about you? Super cool. You're in a family of people who love to play soccer. And you know yourself. You know, one of your favorite things to do in free time is art is not soccer. You look at a group of people you love, and you see soccer, soccer, soccer. Soccer is their favorite thing. And not you. You. You say, I know myself. I know what I want. I know what I like, and that thing is art. I think that's really awesome about you. I am building my child's interiority. I am building up their sense of what is inside them as opposed to building up their gaze toward others to figure out who they are. You know, I often think about something a former client said to me when. When she was working on building her sense of self. When it's just me, when I'm wandering around and I'm not with anyone, I often feel like I'm an empty white room. And when I'm with people, it feels like I have a ton of color, as if they paint the colors of my room, and then I have vibrancy, and then I kind of feel alive, and then I feel full of worth. And the big project, I think, with our kids is to help them feel like they can really paint their own walls, that they do paint their own walls. And of course, other people, they might add picture frames or they add other elements that feel good. And yet when our kids are on their own, they know that they can really generate their own color. Our next caller is Martha with a question about parenting her three year old.

Hi, my name is Martha, I live in Columbia, South Carolina. My daughter is three years old. I have one child. And I'm calling because I saw your amazing post about not teaching codependency to our kids and that struck a chord with me because my husband and I separated two years ago when my daughter was still one. And we're in the process of divorce right now. And in the process of that separation I realized that I am absolutely a codependent. And I think one of the things I struggle with the most is separating my own codependent feelings towards my daughter, especially regarding the separation and feelings of shame and guilt around that and how it might affect her. I'm having trouble with making sure that I'm not, I'm not being codependent with my own child and feeling like if, if I don't do a good job with her, if she's sad, then, then I'm sad. So I'm not so much concerned about bad behavior as I am about acting out because of hard feelings due to our home situation. So how do I, I guess how do I heal a codependent and not raise a codependent at the same time? Thank you for any help, Martha.

Thank you so much for this really thoughtful topic and your awareness that you want to put both kind of heal or develop something in yourself and do something very different for your child that puts you at such a great place because you have such 2020 vision. So to me, one of the best things we can do as adults trying to work away from codependent tendencies is really think about whose feelings are who. Who's that gets really mixed up in childhoods where kids were responsible for their parents emotions. It's almost like is that my feeling? Is that my parents feeling now it's my responsibility. There's no boundary in that way. And I think using a visual to rework that is super helpful because it gives us something to imagine and hold onto. So right now I want you to picture yourself on one side of a tennis court and put your daughter on the other side of the tennis court and we can have that net in between or maybe there's even kind of a glass wall, something where you can see your daughter, but there is this boundary or barrier. Now let's picture your daughter being sad, your daughter sad, going back to whose Feeling is who? This might seem obvious, but say it with me. My daughter is sad. The sadness is, is in my daughter's body. Picture her on that side of the court. Picture that wall and picture you looking. I'll say this to yourself, I'm over here looking at my daughter who is sad. Those are her feelings. I can care about my daughter without making her feelings enter my body and joining in the feeling with her. And even visualize this and see if you notice whether her feeling, her sadness seems to exit her body and come toward that net or come toward that wall and want to enter your body. And one of the jobs as someone who knows they have codependent traits and wants to work away from them, is to use your hands and try to push them back. Not doesn't have to be in a mean way, right? Just lightly give those feelings back. Now here's a really important idea. People who are brought up to take care of their parents feelings were often taught that that is what you do when you have love for someone or you really care about someone. I really believe something that's very different from that. I really believe that as a parent, taking on your kid's feelings as your own, having them kind of exit your kid's body and enter your own, is actually terrifying for a child. It's one of the reasons our own feelings become so scary to us. Because it's if in childhood you watch your feelings come out of your body when they feel overwhelming to you and then enter your parents body, it's as if your feelings are contagious, they're dangerous. This is why kids reason back and think, oh, I can't feel anything. I can't feel that anger, I can't feel that jealousy. I can't feel that sadness. It's gonna not only take over me, it's gonna take over everyone I care about. I'm gonna protect the whole family system by just not having feelings of my own. I'm gonna empty myself out caring about your daughter while trying to give those feelings back to her. This is an act of love. It's the thing our kids need for them to feel like feelings are manageable, that feelings can feel bad, but they don't take over. So let me give some scripts of kind of maybe do's and don'ts to make this a little more concrete. So your daughter is sad. Saying something like, it makes mommy sad when you're sad. In my mind, that's the visual of the sadness coming into my body. I would say that's a no go. When you feel sad, I feel upset. I wish you would feel happier. I would say that's in that no go category. Again, we're joining the sadness versus this. I see you're sad. It's okay to feel sad or I'm here for you when you feel sad. Sweetie. It's okay with me if you feel sad, if you feel happy, if you feel angry, if you feel jealous, if you feel excited. No matter how you're feeling, I'm here for you. There's no linking and there's a boundary. This is my daughter's feeling. I care about her feeling, but it is her feeling, not mine. Martha, I want to add on one more thought. When I think about the feeling that I think so many adults have problems with, or when I think about the feeling that gives us the biggest angst, it's often anger. Anger is one of those feelings that so many adults really, really struggle with. And I think this links back to what we were talking about between you and your daughter in terms of whose feelings are. Whose anger is a very strong feeling because there's no feeling like anger that so connects us to what we need or want and don't have. Anger is so important in that way because it tells us something we want. Now, wanting and not having is an incredibly difficult human experience. So it's no surprise when our kids feel anger that they're totally dysregulated because they can feel the full extent of the anger and they don't yet have skills to regulate that anger. And anger is one of those feelings that so many parents struggle with with their kids because it comes out as tantrums or as nasty words, right? As a meltdown or I hate you or you're the worst parent in the world. And then what ends up happening is so many adults, they shut it down harshly. You can't say something like that. When you say something like that, you make me feel like a horrible parent or you turn me into a witch. Right, there's again that linking. Because anger can come out in such dysregulation, it can get shut down so harshly, which is one of the reasons so many of us have to spend so many years re accessing our needs, our wants, and yes, our healthy amount of anger. The last caller is Ricky with a question about her relationship with her parents.

Hi, Dr. Becky. My name is Ricky. I live in New York and My children are 4 years old. My question on co dependence is as follows. How do adults go about breaking the cycle of codependence with their adult parents? So that we don't pass on that dynamic to our own children. So if we were raised in a way that caused us to have a co dependent dynamic with our parents, what can we do now as adult children to break that cycle and establish healthier patterns with our adult parents?

Ricky, what an awesome question. Thank you so much for bringing this up. Because if we really want to do things differently with our kids, we have to work on these codependent patterns or cycles. We continue to be in with our own parents. And so when we make some tweaks there and we experiment with new ways of being, it allows us to show up in a different way for our own kids. I want to talk about two different things we can do with our parents to break these codependent patterns. Number one, I need my parents cooperation, not approval. If you have time now or do this later, go in front of a mirror and actually say that a couple times in a row. And watch your voice strengthen as if you start to believe yourself every time you say it. It might go like this. I need my parents cooperation, not approval. I need my parents cooperation, not approval. I need my parents cooperation, not approval. I hope you all can tell that I've been working on that in my own therapy for a long time. This comes up all the time if we're parenting in a way that's different from how our parents parented us and if they're somewhat vocal about thinking we should do it another way, right? So a parent might say, aren't you going to give him a time out for that? We would have given you a timeout. You don't want him to grow up to be a criminal, right? Something like that. If I'm going for approval, I would say something like this. Oh, you know, there's all this research and I want you to read this article and I wish you would see things the way I see things. Why is that related to codependency? Because there's no boundary, right? Because I'm not so comfortable with the idea that I have my beliefs and they're separate from my parents beliefs that we don't have to merge them. One of the things we have to get more comfortable with with our parents is not merging meaning not having their approval and realizing we need them to cooperate with our decisions, but we don't need them to merge with them. So I might say something like this if I was working against that pattern of codependence. Hey, we don't do timeouts. Now here's the thing. If you're actually curious about why? Meaning you are open minded. You actually want to learn about the way we think. I'm happy to talk about it with you. It's also okay with me if you have a difference of opinion. And if you do, I'm just going to ask you to not negatively speak about the way we do things so it's not confusing to our kids. There is a boundary. I have my beliefs, my parents have their beliefs. This also might sound like this. Oh, you think we should have our kids skip nap, that it doesn't matter. You know what? We really believe he needs naps. It's okay if you disagree. I'm just gonna ask that you're quiet around his bedroom around noon when he takes that nap. I need my parents cooperation, not approval. Second area, we can work on this. Watch for your tendency now as an adult to suppress something that is true for you to push away something that you feel would be good for you to instead take care of your own parents discomfort. So how might this look? Let's say your mom wants to visit at 7pm and that's typically bedtime, right? And you're thinking, oh, if I say no, my mom's going to be so upset and so maybe I'll just keep my kids up late. Oh, I'm catching myself doing that thing Dr. Becky talked about. I am taking care of her at the expense of myself. I'm trying to reason what I can want from what she wants of me rather than starting with me. What do I want? Oh, yeah, no, that's really not a great time to visit. Hmm. Okay, I'm gonna do something new. I'm gonna take a lot of deep breaths. I'm gonna text some of my friends for moral support and I'm gonna tell her no. And it might sound like this. 7pm doesn't work for a visit. Really, the only time that would be good today would be between 4 and 6. If that doesn't work, we can find another time later this week. Right now get ready for the flood of guilt. Because it's important for that not to surprise you and talk to that guilt. Hi, guilt. You're coming from the part of me that learned to push down what I need and to instead always take care of someone else. No wonder you're coming on. I'm reminding you it's no longer, let's say, whatever year it is, it's no longer 1989. Right? I am not a kid. I am an adult. My mom's an adult too. She can have her feelings, I have mine. They're separate. Let's tie it all together with three takeaways. If you're looking to rewire your own codependent patterns, one place to start is by asking yourself this Whose feeling is this? This will often lead you to give back a feeling to its owner. Remember, this doesn't make you cold or insensitive. Rather, it opens up the possibility of actually caring for someone because you won't be as overwhelmed by their feelings as they are. 2. With your kids, focus more on what might have been going on inside a child that led to a behavior, rather than the behavior's impact on you. This helps a child have a sense of their own feelings, rather than experiencing feelings as things that spill out and infect other people. 3. Celebrate the things about your child that are different from you. This helps a child develop a sense of self based on what's inside them rather than what's similar to others. If this episode has you thinking about your own people, pleasing tendencies or patterns of codependence, my reparenting workshop is for you. Thousands of people have told me that this single workshop has done more for their self confidence and self compassion than anything else, that they now have skills and scripts for setting and holding boundaries and for taking care of their own needs. You can find this workshop and Many others@learning.goodinside.com Thanks for listening to Good Inside. Let's stay connected@goodinside.com you can sign up for work Workshops and subscribe to Good Insider, my weekly email with scripts and strategies delivered right to your inbox. And for more ideas and tips, check out my Instagram Dr. Beckyoodinside good inside is produced by Beth Rowe and Brad Gage, an executive produced by Erica Belsky and me, Dr. Becky please rate and review our show. Let us know what you think and what resonated. I actually do read each and every review, so please know that your feedback is meaningful to me. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves. Even as I struggle and even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain Good Inside.