Content Warning for discussion of codependent relationships and the unhealthy habits that create them; non-specific mentions of childhood trauma that makes codependent relationships seem fine; and discussion of the struggles inherent in managing those things while under a great deal of stress and anxiety.

I’ve been thinking about codependency and codependent relationships a lot lately. While this is something that has been on my mind quite frequently for the past four or five years, as I’ve worked to address my codependent relationships and the unhealthy habits that tended to get me pulled into them, it has been on my mind a bit more than usual recently. Probably because of last week’s post about rest and my need for proximity and connection with other people. But also because it’s something I’m still actively working on. Any amount of stress in my life or uncertainty in my relationships can cause me to fall back into old, unhealthy habits as I seek stability and comfort via patterns of behavior that provided it in past (or as close to it as I could get, anyway). Even now, as things seem to be calming down (or, at the very least, returning to the realm of things I can handle as they come up), I don’t think I’ve ever had a period of my life that was this full of stress and uncertainty in my relationships. Despite knowing how unhealthy those relationships were for me, how miserable some of them made me at times, and how thorughly I’ve excised them from my life, there is a part of me that longs for the validation of feeling needed and knows that most of those people would probably accept me back into their lives because that’s how the taking side of codependent relationships works.

I spent the first twenty-five years of my life certain that it was fine and normal to be in relationships, platonic or romantic, in which I gave endlessly of myself and either got little to nothing in return or was occasionally “rewarded” by getting my emotional needs met. A lot of one-sided listening and support, some of it with at least basic concern for my well-being returned in conversation, but all of it with a clear imbalance. While I eventually had one relationship that proved to be textbook codependency, most of the relationships I had were a lot more difficult to define than that one, not to mention I had trouble spotting all of the problematic patterns because they so clearly mirrored my relationships with my family from when I was growing up. It is difficult to point something out as unhealthy when it is all you’ve known for your entire life up to that point. It is also difficult to effectively break that habit, because if the only way you’ve ever known to feel validated as a person is to feel needed and to give of yourself, it can be scary to deny yourself that source of validation.

It took a lot of work, to counteract the things I’d learned as a child and constantly (but inadvertently) reinforced up until the summer shortly before my twenty-fifth birthday. I had to not only fight the habits themselves, but all of the weight I’d put behind defining myself as a largely good person since so much of what I thought made a person “good” involved sustaining those habits and giving of myself in an ultimately unhealthy manner. I am not joking or exaggerating when I say that I’ve been working on this non-stop since then. It took a long time to move from addressing the obviously unhealthy relationships to figuring out how to work on the ones that seemed fine on the surface, but that had troubling patterns of me being unable to actually rely on the other person for emotional support or connection beyond the very tight control they held on it. Mostly because there’s a version of that relationship that reflects the creation and enforcement of healthy boundaries rather than an unhealthy codependency and it wasn’t always apparent which were which at first, or even second, glance. After all, I not only needed to figure out which was happening, but I had to do so while fighting my ingrained inclination to feel like asking for anything from someone made me a burden on them since that made every single instance of a relationship like this seem like the version based around setting healthy boundaries.

If it wasn’t for the healthy relationships I had and the advice I often gave to other anxious people about how to ask to have their needs met by the people who care about them, I might still be stuck trying to figure out which of my relationships involved heathy boundaries and which of them involved someone trying to control me by carefully meting out emotional validation and support. With these models to follow, my own advice to reflect back at myself, the help of my therapist, and all the work I did myself, I was able to slowly figure it out. As I put it in my poem Intentionally Past Tense, really focusing on how well people will treat you when they actually care about you in a healthy manner tends to make it pretty clear on a long-enough time scale, so long as you’re looking for it. It can, of course, be difficult to see if you aren’t actively looking for it, but it’s not impossible to suddenly realize the different between someone trying to manipulate you and the enforcement of healthy boundaries. I know it probably sounds obvious from the outside, but for someone who spent most of their life not creating or enforcing healthy boundaries and believing that denying others whatever they wanted from me was wrong, it took a lot of experience to be able to tell the difference.

Even now, I still struggle. These struggles, normally something I don’t really think about much, have been thrown into harsh relief as I’ve tried to contend with a boundary a close friend set after some prompting from me. I haven’t spoken to her in seven weeks now, since that prompting resulted in a boundary, and there was three weeks of confusing silence prior to that, when she vanished without a word. I’ve done my best to continue to respect this boundary while struggling to accept that I won’t know if she’s upset enough that ghosting and then seven weeks of silence is an appropriate response to what happened (something we didn’t really talk about in detail when I finally asked to be told what was going on following the three weeks of sudden silence, since she said she needed time and space), or if something else is afoot (I hesitate to speculate about what else it could be because I want to hear what she has to say before adding any weight to the anxieties running through my head and I know she at least used to sometimes read my blog). The result of this is that any silence from a friend I am used to speaking with frequently suddenly feels fraught and potentionally disastrous. I was caught off-gaurd when this friend stopped responding and it is difficult not to see that spectre looming behind any other silence that appears before me.

The undercurrent here, that fuels these anxieties and that lends credence to the thought that maybe someone else would want to stop talking to me without warning is the thought that maybe I’m not always the giving person in a codependent relationship. Maybe I’m asking too much and not giving enough, creating an unhealthy dynamic that the other person does not feel capable of addressing due to the needs I’m expressing. I am still struggling with feeling like a burden any time I ask for something or express a need, after all, so maybe I overshot when I was pushing back against that feeling and asked for too much. Maybe I’ve become the problem and am taking too much.

I don’t know that I believe those thoughts, though I will admit it is difficult to entirely dismiss them. I’ve been in an emotionaly rough position for a few years now and the last seven months have been some of the most difficult I’ve ever faced. I’ve had to rely on my support network more than ever, even as I’ve been trimming it to remove people I don’t feel like I could safely rely on anymore after they chose nostalgia that supported one of the worst bigots in the public sphere over solidarity with me and people like me. That has likely put extra pressure on those who remained. I have tried to make sure I wasn’t asking for more than someone was willing to give and that I was giving back as much as I could, but it is difficult to know if I’ve hit or missed the mark. I can’t read other peoples’ minds, after all. I can barely read my own some days. Still, I like to think that the people still in my support network know they can safely draw boundaries with me, if they need to. I don’t know for certain, especially after one of my friends decided ghosting was the thing to do, rather than telling me she needed time and space, but I put a lot of effort toward making sure people around me have the space they need. I just hope it’s enough.

It is difficult to feel comfortable with anything that seems similar to a codependent relationship, or even anything approaching that point, given how much damage I’ve seen them cause in the past. It’s a struggle to find balance between trying to get my own needs met, trying to meet the needs of those I care about, and fighting the inclinations of a lifetime of unhealthy habits. It has gotten easier as time has passed, but these past six months have really shown me that I’m not out of the woods yet. There is still more work to be done and, in all likelihood, there will always be more work to be done. Self-improvement and knowing oneself is a constant journey, from the first moments of self-awareness to the last. This is just one more aspect of it. One more incredibly difficult and potentionally disastrous aspect of it.