What is codependency? The signs and where to get help

Codependency is a pattern where your sense of being okay depends on managing someone else: their moods, their choices, their problems. The word came out of addiction recovery, where it described family members whose lives had come to revolve around someone else’s drinking or drug use, and it’s now used for the same pattern in any close relationship.

It’s a useful name for something a lot of people recognize in themselves. It is not a medical diagnosis, and it helps to know where the idea came from before deciding whether it fits you.

Where the term came from

The roots go back to Al-Anon, the support group for friends and families of alcoholics, founded in 1951 by Lois W. and Anne B. Al-Anon is built on the idea that living with someone’s addiction changes you too. You start watching, covering, rescuing and controlling, and your own life shrinks around theirs.

In the late 1970s, treatment programs, most likely in Minnesota, started calling those family members “co-alcoholics”, and then “codependents” once alcohol and other drugs were grouped together as chemical dependency. The term reached the general public with Melody Beattie’s 1986 bestseller Codependent No More, which drew on her own recovery and on interviews with Al-Anon members. Since then the word has been used well beyond addiction, for anyone who loses themselves in looking after another person.

The psychiatrist Timmen Cermak argued in 1986 that codependency should be a diagnosable personality disorder. That argument didn’t win. Codependency has never been included in any edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the American manual of psychiatric diagnoses, and there’s no agreed clinical definition (summary and sources on Wikipedia). So treat it as a description of a pattern. If something here fits, it’s a starting point for looking at yourself, not a label a professional has given you.

Common signs of codependency

Nobody has all of these, and having one or two doesn’t mean much. It’s the overall pattern that matters:

• Your mood rises and falls with another person’s. If they’re having a bad day, so are you.
• You spend a lot of time thinking about someone else’s problems and very little on your own.
• You feel responsible for keeping them happy, sober, on track or out of trouble.
• You cover for them: make excuses, pay their bills, smooth things over with other people.
• You find it hard to say no, and harder to say what you need.
• You stay in situations that hurt you because leaving feels like abandoning them.
• You feel most worthwhile when you’re needed, and a bit lost when you’re not.
• You give advice nobody asked for and feel hurt when it isn’t taken.

Co-Dependents Anonymous publishes a longer list of “patterns and characteristics” for people to check themselves against, on coda.org.

How codependency differs from caring

Caring about people is good, and so is helping them. The line between that and codependency isn’t about how much you do. It’s about why you do it and what happens to you when it doesn’t work. A few questions that help sort it out:

• Did they ask for help, or did you decide they needed it?
• Can you let them make a choice you think is wrong, and live with the result?
• Can you say no to them without being flooded with guilt?
• If they’re struggling, can you still have a good day?
• Is your help making them more able to run their own life, or less?

Caring leaves the other person in charge of their own life. Codependency quietly takes over, usually with the best intentions.

Fixing and rescuing are part of the pattern

Here is the part that’s hard to swallow. The helping is the codependency. The urge to fix, rescue and manage someone else feels like love, and it’s usually also a way of not dealing with yourself.

When another person is your project, you always have somewhere to put your attention that isn’t your own fear, grief or emptiness. You also get to feel needed, which can feel a lot like being worth something. The psychiatrist Stephen Karpman described a “drama triangle” of persecutor, victim and rescuer, and the rescuer is the role codependent people tend to live in. The rescuer needs someone to rescue, and that keeps everyone stuck.

Rescuing also takes something from the other person: the chance to face the results of their choices and to grow from them. Paying off the debt, making the excuse to the boss, calling in sick for them. Each one feels kind in the moment, and each one makes the next one more likely.

We see the spiritual version of this a lot, the idea that your job is to heal other people or “hold space” for them. Most of the time that’s the same pattern with nicer words. We wrote about it in displacement as spiritual bypassing, where compulsive helping becomes a way of skipping your own work.

Turning the attention back to yourself

Getting out of codependency means making yourself the subject again. Some places to start:

• When you catch yourself worrying about someone, ask what you’d be feeling about your own life if you weren’t.
• Before you step in, ask “Is this mine?” If it isn’t, let it stay theirs.
• Let someone you love be uncomfortable without fixing it. Notice how uncomfortable that makes you, and stay with it.
• Find out what you want, starting small: food, plans, how you spend a free evening.
• Practice saying no and letting the guilt pass. Our post on setting boundaries goes into how.

This is ordinary shadow work: looking honestly at what you’ve been avoiding, and owning your reactions instead of managing everyone else’s.

When to get help

Codependency usually has deep roots, often in a childhood home with addiction, mental illness or chaos, and it’s hard to untangle alone. A therapist, ideally one who works with families affected by addiction, is the right help for anything heavy.

There are also free peer support groups run by people who have lived it:

• Co-Dependents Anonymous (CoDA), a twelve-step group for codependency in any relationship. It held its first meeting in Phoenix in 1986 and has in-person, online and phone meetings.
• Al-Anon Family Groups, for people affected by someone else’s drinking. Alateen is its group for teenagers.
• Nar-Anon Family Groups, for people affected by someone else’s drug use.

If the person you’re caught up with is hurting you or scaring you, put your safety first and contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

Our Sunday circle runs on one simple rule that happens to be good practice for recovering fixers: no advice-giving and no fixing. If you’d like to try it, come to Sunday Service, 3 to 6pm in Anna.