What Does Codependency Consist Of?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Codependency is a semantic construct that has gained immense popularity over the past ten years, while at the same time being the target of strong professional criticism. Specialists often refuse to seriously use the term "codependency", assigning it rather the role of not a diagnostic category, but a social commentary, too generalized to be used for differential diagnosis and useless for discussing treatment. Research psychologists Marolyn Wells, Cheryl Glickauf-Hughes, and Rebecca Jones have attempted to redefine codependency

What does codependency consist of?

Modern authors believe that the term "codependency" represents a package of predictable character traits originally associated with the partners and children of alcoholics. Many popular authors associate codependency with characteristics such as shame and low self-esteem.

Some researchers directly correlate codependency with an internalized (learned) sense of shame. They explain codependency as the development of a “false self” oriented toward another, overly compliant, and based on shame. Shame is understood as remorse for the "true self", a sense of one's own inferiority and inner inadequacy. This definition of shame should not be confused with guilt, which can be defined as remorse for doing something bad or hurtful. Since shame is a feeling of “badness” that makes a person feel inadequate and hopeless, it is logically associated with low self-esteem.

In addition to the suggested association with low self-esteem and shame, codependency has been associated with over-caring for a partner, and it has been argued that codependency is a nurturing and caring style of relationship with others that is learned during childhood.

How does this happen?

Parents in shame-based families themselves grew up in conditions in which their needs were neglected. Parents who require increased attention to themselves may try to satisfy their needs at the expense of their own children, forcing them to take care of themselves. This intergenerational process is called parentification, or the exchange of roles between parent and child. In families with parentification, the child adapts to the needs of the parent in order to maintain a connection with him, and sacrifices his “true self” in order to create an adaptable, codependent “self” oriented towards others and overly compliant. Parental alcoholics (drug addicts). Also, a disabled or psychopathized parent can establish a parentification relationship. For example, a mother can demand guardianship and special treatment, imitating ailments, but in fact possessing malignant demonstrative or narcissistic traits.

According to the results of quantitative studies, self-esteem negatively correlates with codependency, i.e. the lower the self-esteem, the higher the propensity for codependency. Shame tendencies are positively associated with codependency, but guilt tendencies are negatively associated with codependency.

Thus, the results of this study represent preliminary empirical confirmation of the definition of codependency in the popular literature as a shame-based personality device characterized by low self-esteem. A link has been found between parentification and codependency. Additional confirmation has been obtained that codependency is a shame-based state of the individual.

In other words, people of a codependent nature tended to feel, on the whole, inadequate, flawed, bad people. This apparent sense of their own worthlessness was bolstered by their low self-esteem and inclination to shame. Thus, codependency is a specific vision of one's own self, and not a way to respond to certain behavior.

Codependents were most likely raised in parenting families in which they had to act as parents, and they now exhibit this behavior in their current relationships. Many codependent people continue to be in a strong bond with their parents and play the role of a “caring adult” with them, so it is their parental family that should be the object of psychotherapeutic work. These people can separate from their parental family, literally or figuratively, and enter into more diverse, independent relationships with significant others in their lives.

Findings from a study by Marolyn Wells, Cheryl Glickauf-Hughes, and Rebecca Jones confirm that codependents tend to have low self-esteem and shame at the same time. That is, they not only feel like worthless losers, but also believe that they initially have some kind of flaw. In the process of psychotherapy, such people need to develop a sense of their own worth and worth.

But above all, since empathy is the main cure for shame, codependents must learn to empathize with themselves in situations that provoke toxic feelings of shame and subsequent low self-esteem.

To overcome shame in codependent clients, the therapist must examine the patterns of connection and disconnection between them and others; if possible, correlate these patterns with triggering a feeling of shame (for example, “I feel that you have pulled away now, perhaps you were embarrassed?”); help the client name and speak these processes (for example, “It seems like it often happens that when you feel ashamed, you withdraw from other people”) and help the client develop “endurance in relationships” or the ability to reconnect with yourself and others in a situation, when shame makes them think they are not worthy of empathy or a relationship.

Based on the article "Codependency: a grass roots construct's relationship to shame-proneness, low self-esteem, and childhood parentification" by Marolyn Wells, Cheryl Glickauf-Hughes and Rebecca Jones