Seek healthy solutions to halt codependency

Are you someone who enjoys helping others? Have you ever found yourself in a position of caring more about a person’s life and outcomes than they do? Do you ever feel like you’re carrying the relationship? Do you feel overly attached to a person as if you’ve built your life and meaning around them? If so, you may be experiencing codependency.

Codependency often originates with goodness in your heart and nobility in your character. It can quickly spiral out of control and harm all parties involved. Codependent relationships occur in families, friendships and beyond.

Often a codependent person wants to help and be a part of someone else’s life in an intimate way. This dynamic can become a bit obsessive and controlling, serving no one in the end. A codependent person, sometimes unbeknownst to themselves, ends up enabling the person they care so much about. Some examples of this include allowing your adult child to take advantage of your finances. It could also look like a parent being overly involved in their adult child’s relationship decisions. Sometimes it emerges between friends when one friend leans into another for advice but never actually takes action toward solutions. It happens between siblings when one person never takes accountability for their actions and the other always comes to their rescue. In these situations, there’s no personal accountability or the opportunity to grow. Sometimes helping can hurt. It can be harmful to you and the other party. If you are in a position of strength trying to help someone you love, you may actually be enabling them. When you enable, you inhibit your loved one’s growth as well as your own. This becomes a symbiotic relationship where no one is thriving.

It’s so difficult to know that a loved one is suffering. It’s tempting to try to rescue the person. Once may be appropriate, but if this is a pattern, the relationship has slipped from positive intentions to a harmful dynamic to all involved.

People in this dynamic with others experience helplessness, resentment and exasperation just to name a few. The feelings that surface are strong indicators about what is transpiring in the relationship. Step back from codependence and enabling, and you will be able to care for your loved ones in a healthier way. Seek resources that address these issues.