Codependency. What To Do?

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

Codependency. What to do?

There was such a request on the forum about what to do when the fear of loss, the fear of loneliness covers? We are talking about codependency, codependent relationships and all the "charms" associated with this problem … Users asked questions: how to overcome this? What exactly to do in order to stop suffering from panic fear of losing a loved one, fear that is experienced at the bodily level as withdrawal, panic horror, the feeling that if I do not see the object of love again or die, or a part of my body will die. Symptoms of this state are terrible: the body shakes, it is difficult to breathe, often codependent clients complain of coldness in the chest or the feeling of a "cold stone" in the heart, emptiness in the soul, it seems the soil is leaving underfoot and the person is left without support. The state is experienced as the fear of impending death and from this state a person is ready to do anything to return the object of love with strong codependency - he begs not to leave it, humiliates himself, can crawl on his knees, while others, out of pride, do not do such things, but stoically endure the pain of loss, tremble, suffer, suffer without pretending that they are unbearably painful and wait, patiently wait for him to call … And in fact, they can wait for a call for years, although they mentally understand that everything is over long ago. Still others endure humiliation in relationships, lose their dignity, being manipulated, serving and hating at the same time, but cannot get out of toxic relationships, because the fear of losing these relationships - as a source of symbiotic nutrition - is much more terrible for them than enduring destructive relationships.

How many codependent couples came to me for family therapy on the verge of divorce. And what do you think? As soon as they say: "That's it! We need to get a divorce! It can't go on like this!" And with renewed vigor they seemed to be "glued" into each other, sticking together in fear of loss into a single organism. Then I worked with this phenomenon of fear of loss. They say about codependent relationships: "It is impossible to live together and impossible to leave." So many couples live the rest of their days, mired in the frenzy of codependent relationships. Actually, it's like drug addiction or alcoholism, but instead of a drug or a bottle - a partner. And with the mind, a person understands that something is wrong with him, but he can not do anything, he remains helpless in the face of the power of horror of the loss of one or the other.

I saw couples in which one of the codependents made an unconscious decision to leave the relationship through a serious fatal illness because it was scary just to leave.. My own death, sometimes in the face of the pain caused by the loss of an object, turns out to be a scarlet flower.

I know this topic quite well and not only from my psychotherapeutic practice. I know this state of panic and fear of loss from my own personal experience, because I myself am from a codependent family. I walked my path of healing, a long, painful one, but I went forward, realizing that this is how I do not want to suffer until the end of my days from what no one needs, to be constantly abandoned, abandoned, to experience this wild fear of loss and in this fear to allow violence against oneself and to produce violence against oneself, and as a result, against others. It was necessary to quickly move from one relationship to another and in no case should there be a pause between the relationship, in which I can find myself, my loneliness and universal fear. As a matter of fact, it was all the same with whom to be, if only not one. But fate does not allow us to get away from the unlearned lesson and again and again gives a blow to the same upper right corner. I realized that I was not holding this blow and deliberately after one terrible breakup entered the phase of loneliness in order to get to know him, master it and stop being afraid, learn to live independently. I realized that without this experience of loneliness, I can be easily controlled, manipulated on this fear. I decided to stop running and decided to live alone for a whole year and go through the heartache. For me it was like looking death in the eye.

This article is rather an attempt to share my experience of overcoming codependency. It is clear that my whole experience may not suit you, because we are all different, but if you can take at least something for yourself from this article and this something will become your find on the path to healing, I will be immensely happy with you. But about how I went step-by-step a little later.

let's let's look at this problem from the biological point of view to start. As we know, in the animal kingdom, many animals immediately separate from their parents after birth and are able to live without them. Take a shark, for example. Having been born, the shark without even looking into the eyes of its mother, immediately embarks on its free swimming. But man is the most dependent being of all living things. He, being born, is not able to survive without a mother for a long time. Until adolescence, or even more, he is addicted. Having just been born, the child does not even understand that now he has his own body, he will discover the boundaries of his body much later. Until then, addiction. The child does not know any other love, except dependence, he is afraid to die, having lost his mother's love. And he becomes very sensitive to manipulation on this fear of loss. He experiences the first fear of death when his mother lingered for a couple of minutes in the kitchen, and he screams hungry. In these moments, when there is hunger, but the mother is not, the child experiences as a threat of death. Hunger for him is death. This is the first contact with the fear of loss. Further, if the mother herself is from a codependent family, she begins to control the child with the help of manipulations. Mom knows that he will not survive, cannot cope without her, and even a simple silence of the mother (ignoring, punishment by silence) can become a signal for the child: I am deprived of love, and without my mother's love I will not survive. And then the child does everything to survive, he becomes codependent. And the greater the degree of codependency, the stronger the emotional and physical violence against him by his parents. So the child loses himself and becomes a hostage of love.

Later, a person grows up and his memory is arranged in such a way that he forgets how his parents frightened him with the loss, how they reproached him, accused him, rejected him, ignored him. But then, in an adult relationship with a partner, this experience of fear of loss resurrects like a terrible ghost. We seem to cease to depend on our mother, we even leave for another city or rarely communicate with her, but we stick to our partner with our codependency and everything that did not end then becomes a full-length problem now. And the more we stick, the more the partner moves away. In this sticking out of fear of losing, being alone, we become controlling, distrustful, anxious, we radiate this fear and the partner begins to either get angry or withdraw. This is how we attract losses - what we are most afraid of, imperceptibly by our actions, we attract. For what? To overcome what we fear. There is a lot of energy in trauma and we ourselves form partly the events of our life in order to master the energy of our trauma.

So, your partner has already "evaporated" and you are sitting at home and wringing your hands or monitoring his appearance on social networks, conducting your own investigation of what is wrong with you and for whom he exchanged you. You have a feeling of a bottomless emptiness, a funnel, a hole that formed inside you after the loss. And it's good if you don't chase the fugitive, but go to a psychologist to figure it out. And he, heartfelt, says to you: "take care of yourself, love yourself, pay attention to yourself" … You are furious: "Tell me how to pay attention to yourself, love yourself? What exactly needs to be done? Where are the instructions? In what books? written how to get rid of this codependent withdrawal? " The therapist is silent! There are no such books! There are no such instructions. You're furious with the therapist and all this psychotherapy. You cannot know how to love yourself if you did not get the experience of high-quality motherly love in early childhood. You continue to break, your legs are taken away when you think that you will come home, but it’s empty and your soul is empty. And in fact, you want to howl, and not take care of yourself.

The thing is (I'll write this for therapists now) that all these interventions: "take responsibility for your life", "take care of yourself", "love yourself" - they do not work with such a client, since they are addressed to his adult part of the personality, which at the moment is "turned off" by that the reason that childhood trauma was actualized. Before you now is a small child who was lost without a mother in a big city and his lips are trembling, tears are flowing and his knees give way from fear that he will never see his mother (partner) anymore. And you tell him: "pull yourself together", "take care of yourself", appeal to reason, logic, responsibility … And he, perhaps, will pretend that he heard you, will come home and again horror-horror, panic, trembling in the body and the feeling of an abyss in the soul.

Before I describe my client experience with codependency, I will say a little about my therapeutic experience: The first thing I do in such a situation is to pause the client so that he does not run away from his pain, but enters it, honestly and boldly. I give him my hand and say: "I am near, I am with you, you are not alone (alone)." If I see that the client needs bodily contact in order to feel protected, I hug, sit on my knees, stroke my head, let me cry on my shoulder … A client in this withdrawal state is not able to take the therapist's support that appeals to adulthood client. He cries, he is in despair, he mourns the loss, grieves and I, together with him, allow him to survive this loss and discover that in the end he did not die himself, but could, coped, did not run away from fear of loss, but lived it. At the first stage of work, the client describes that he is experiencing fear of loss or already fear of loneliness in waves, they roll over him. The peculiarity of working with such a client is to give him a sense of his availability (as a mother's object) at any moment when he becomes afraid of being lost and abandoned. I allow such clients, for example, to write in my vibe everything that they feel at the moment when the panic rolled over. But I warn them in advance that I may not answer right away, but at the end of the day I will still write at least one sentence. For example, I receive a "sheet" from a client in a vibeer and after work, in response to her revelation, I can write a short phrase like: "All suffering has its limits. Hold on!" Remember, the codependent client needs to make sure you are there, you don't leave them. Of course, he has the temptation to "stick" to the therapist, but you warmly, gently keep the boundaries. And at first I work with such clients 3 times a week, then after a while 2 times a week and smoothly move to once a week. In general, this is a kind of mother's work on "raising" the child, and sometimes on "bearing and raising".

Further, when such a client "grows up", I always keep in focus those feelings that dominate the codependent client: in addition to a strong fear of loss of guilt, shame and anger. And I understand how difficult it is for such a client to turn to me with that angry side of him, because he thinks that he will lose my support if he suddenly becomes uncomfortable for me. Therefore, further therapy I build around awareness of these feelings, stretching out boundaries, articulating my needs …

Now let's get to the fun part. To the steps that I had to go through, overcoming the states of withdrawal, panic, horror, healing from codependency and creating in my life a new space filled with peace, tranquility, trust in the world and a sense of the joy of being …

1. I stopped myself from running away and decided to live out my fear and be alone for a year. I deliberately did not seek meetings with anyone and did not even let men into my life.

2. I allowed myself to fall into the deepest depression, sink to the bottom and survive it. True, at that time there were several reliable friends next to me who called, came, held my hand, listened to my roar and my therapist, who worked with me on the phone three times a week for 30 minutes. This gave the feeling that he was the only stable island in my life, albeit a distant island (from another country). In between, I scribbled to him, expensive at that time, sms to my mobile phone and cried for days. And he answered briefly in the evening. It calmed me down.

3. From time to time, the pain of loss helped me survive an exercise that I had invented for myself: I downloaded the howling of a lonely wolf from the Internet and tried to howl with her to help myself get through this suffering of loneliness and psychological death. Then one thing throbbed in the brain: "One, one, one …!"

4. After several months of depression, a friend threatened me with a psychiatrist and it worked: I began to understand that I didn't need a second bottom and began to move a little, especially since the first wave of pain of loss had already been mastered. I walked on. I realized that I was now in the past, experiencing a break, then in the future, which I saw as black without a man. I began to search. Something had to be in between the past and the future. And I found: I began to weave beads with my own hands, roll wool and create flowers, necklaces, earrings … In this moment of weaving, here and now, I began to feel an amazing peace. When I was weaving the beads, I was not thinking about anything.

5. I realized: here it is the key to peace: "here and now" and I focused on it. I literally watched myself: if I ate, then I just ate and was busy with the color, taste, temperature … etc. of my food, if I was lying in bed, then I either listened to my breathing or focused on that sensation the touch of the blanket on the skin, if I walked, I directed my attention to the feet, if I took the bathroom, then I thought only about the contact of water with the skin. By the way, about the bathroom. At the first stage, when body contact was needed, but it was not, lying in the bathroom for several hours helped me very well, as in the womb in the placenta. Not really new, but it worked.

6. As I began to go out into the street, I fixed my attention on the touch of the wind to my face, in the sun, the songs of birds and.. the most amazing people, their smiles.. It was such a joy for me to chat with Natasha's coffee pot, exchange a couple phrases with the concierge, to notice how the passer-by smiled and in response to smile … all these little things were very important then..

7. I bought myself food in the store for a long time, choosing the most delicious and delicious.. so I learned to be my own mother.

8. My most important secret: I, of course, all this time wrote poetry, they also helped me to live through the pain, but in this state I also began to write a book about a little girl who did not receive love from her mother in childhood and she had to do a huge a way to get out of the grip of codependency. Actually, during these 5 years while I was writing, I experienced a lot and was gradually healed. Now I understood how it is to pay attention to myself, take care of myself, fill the void with myself. In my life now, instead of a huge hole, where I constantly fell from fear of loneliness and loss, there is a huge amazing space of my creativity, helping people and homeless animals …