Codependency. Difference From Healthy Relationships

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

Love addiction is a relationship with fixation on another person. Such relationships are called co-addictive, or codependent. The most characteristic codependent relationship develops in the love addict with the avoidant addict. In such a relationship, the intensity of emotions and their extremeness, both in positive and negative terms, come to the fore. In principle, codependent relationships can arise between parent and child, husband and wife, friends, professional and client, etc.

Codependent relationships are the basis for stories of unhappy / unrequited love, where people compulsively seek to restore the previous, satisfying level of relationship with the former object of love. Dysfunctional emotional states such as distrust, feelings of rejection, loss of self, ingrained anger, feelings of failure, loss, and a host of other negative emotions and self-destructive behaviors arise in an emotionally wounded love addict.

Signs of love addiction:

• A disproportionate amount of time and attention is spent on the person to whom the addiction is directed. Thoughts about the "loved one" dominate the mind, becoming an overvalued idea. The process carries the features of obsession, combined with violence, from which it is extremely difficult to get rid of.
• The addict is at the mercy of experiencing unrealistic expectations in relation to another person who is in the system of these relations, without criticizing his condition.
• A love addict forgets about himself, ceases to take care of himself and think about his needs outside the dependent relationship. This also applies to the attitude towards family and friends. The addict has serious emotional problems centered on fear, which he tries to suppress. Fear is often subconscious. The fear that is present at the level of consciousness is the fear of being abandoned. By his behavior, he seeks to avoid abandonment. But on a subconscious level, this is the fear of intimacy. Because of this, the addict is unable to tolerate "healthy" intimacy. He is afraid to be in a situation where he will have to be himself. This leads to the fact that the subconscious mind leads the addict into a trap in which he subconsciously chooses a partner for himself who cannot be intimate. This is due to the fact that in childhood, the addict failed, experienced mental trauma while showing intimacy with his parents.

The addiction process allows you to distinguish several stages in it:

• The period during which intense emotional experiences will be with a positive sign. Addicts dating stage: the avoidant makes an impression on the love addict.
• Development of fantasy. There is a connection between previously existing fantasies with a real object, which brings joy and a feeling of liberation from the unpleasant sensations of life as uninteresting and gray. A love addict at the peak of fantasizing shows more and more exactingness to a partner, which contributes to the avoidance of this relationship.
• Developing an awareness that the relationship is not doing well. At some stage, one has to admit that he is being abandoned. Withdrawal phenomena appear, which are characterized by depression and indifference. An analysis of what happened with the aim of bringing everything back begins. Relationships are destroyed, but in the future they can be restored either with the same or with a different partner.

In the relationship between addicts, there are no healthy distinctions, without which intimacy between partners is impossible, it is impossible to recognize the right to their own life. This leads to the fact that they accuse each other of dishonesty, use sarcasm, exaggeration and insults.

At the same time, the love addict and the avoidant addict are drawn to each other due to "familiar" psychological traits. While the traits that attract others may be unpleasant and emotionally painful, they are familiar from childhood and resemble the situation of childhood experiences. Attraction to a friend arises. Both types of addicts are usually not addicted to the independent. They seem boring and unattractive to them; they don't know how to deal with them.

Signs of avoidance addiction:

• Avoiding intensity in a relationship with a significant person (love addict). The avoiding addict spends time in another company, at work, in communication with other people. He strives to give a "smoldering" character to a relationship with a love addict. There is an obvious ambivalence of relations with a love addict - they are important, but he avoids them. He does not reveal himself in this relationship.
• Seeking to avoid intimate contact using psychological distancing techniques. At the level of consciousness, the avoidant addict has a fear of intimacy, the avoidant addict is afraid that when entering into an intimate relationship, he will lose his freedom, will be under control. On a subconscious level, this is the fear of abandonment. It leads to the desire to restore relationships, but to keep them at a distant level.

Exist Factors contributing to the attraction of love addicts to avoidant addicts:

• the attractiveness of what is familiar;
• the attractiveness of the situation, which contains the hope that the "wounds of childhood" can be healed at a new level;
• the attractiveness of the possibility of realizing fantasies created in childhood.

For a healthy person, satisfaction and a sense of psychological comfort are associated with the realization of his perceived needs. This is a series of basic biological needs, psychological needs, intellectual needs, social needs. To fulfill these needs, a healthy person makes efforts, comprehends the strategy and acquires skills. Addiction flight is about giving up the choice that any adult has. Instead of becoming addicted, which means choosing a life full of hopeless suffering and pain, you can always set a goal and strive to achieve it despite incredibly difficult life circumstances.