I Am Only Okay If You Are Okay - Help For Codependency

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Best-selling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

Today we're going to be talking about why codependents only feel okay if you're okay.

So today we're going to be discussing codependency,

What it is,

And hopefully we'll get a little bit clearer about where the line is.

What we're trying to do is figure out what is codependent and what is not codependent.

What is healthy?

Aren't we supposed to be affirmed by our partners?

Aren't we supposed to feel seen by our partners?

Aren't we supposed to feel connected to our partners?

Aren't we supposed to need our partners?

Where is the line?

The issue with codependency is that codependency is rooted in a fear of not feeling good enough.

When we are codependent,

We don't have a healthy sense of self.

We were robbed of a sense of self in childhood.

How did that happen?

Every child needs to be regulated emotionally by their mother and or their father or their caregivers.

Children are supposed to experience the feeling of being seen by their caretakers.

Children are supposed to be given a sense that who they are,

What they are on the inside is enough.

Children are not supposed to be offered conditional love.

Mothers and fathers are not supposed to use love as a weapon.

Mothers and fathers are not supposed to control and coerce a child.

Mothers and fathers are not supposed to gaslight their children and make them doubt the reality.

When you come from a home that is emotionally neglectful,

When you come from a home where denial is the cornerstone of your family system,

What I mean by that is when there is addiction present and mom is pretending that dad is not an alcoholic or when dad is pretending that mom is not being verbally abusive.

When we live in homes in which there are obviously things that are wrong going on around us and yet the adults in our homes are pretending that they're not existing,

What happens is it forces the children of this home to deny what they feel.

So you're denying your internal reality.

And in time,

You will actually develop a warped way of looking at reality.

And so when you meet someone who you think might have a drinking issue,

You'll talk yourself out of it.

You'll use the same type of backward rationalization to justify what you're experiencing.

A real problem with this is that when you come from a home like this,

The ability to feel your feelings is lost.

You can't connect to how you really,

Really feel.

We experience emotional blocks in our system.

Our bellies get all messed up because we can't trust this gut instinct and that's where the term gut instinct comes from.

A brain that sits right behind our belly that sends information to the brain that tells us we're really experiencing these feelings.

And if you're someone who's interested in the law of attraction,

You might want to look at that and recognize that you cannot manifest what you want unless you are connected to what you feel and what you think.

And when you come from a dysfunctional home,

You've been taught that what you think and what you feel can't be trusted.

And so you look outside of yourself for that which you need.

So you don't know how to validate yourself.

You don't know how to say and feel rooted in,

I am worthy.

I have self-worth.

Even if other people don't validate me,

I am of myself,

As myself.

I am a worthy human being.

I am worthy of respect.

You don't know how to respect yourself.

You don't know how to check in with yourself and ask yourself,

What do I think?

What do I feel?

And what do I need?

And so you very oftentimes,

If you're codependent,

You're looking for all of your emotional needs outside of you because that's what you've been patterned and programmed to do.

That's why my tagline is,

It's not you,

Dear one,

It's your programming.

You have literally been programmed to feel abandoned.

You have been programmed to think and believe that all of your needs should be met by someone outside of you.

And so you develop behaviors like people pleasing.

You have a hard time setting boundaries.

You end up finding and attracting people into your life that seem very confident and assertive.

And that makes you feel secure.

And then you become a passenger in their life.

So you tend to their needs.

On the surface,

A codependent can look very,

Very capable and actually looks as if they have no needs at all,

Which is very confusing.

You can be a highly successful business owner and at home still feel and act and believe and think as a codependent person.

So in the family system,

You are the one that looks like you have no needs.

Maybe you grew up in an alcoholic home and you were the sibling who took care of the other siblings.

You were the one that went to work at 14 and 15 years old to keep the family afloat.

Or you were the one that quit high school so that you could get a full-time job to help the family stay afloat.

You are the person who has learned that you were put on this earth to take care of everyone else but yourself.

The problem is that we get tied to this identity.

And when you don't feel good about yourself and you're tied to this idea that it's your job to take care of everyone else,

That's where you tie your identity.

So I am good because I rescue.

I am good because I don't hold my mother responsible.

I am good because I take care of my siblings.

And we don't even realize that through this whole process,

We are abandoning the self.

And it's really sad because codependents who are taking care of everyone else but themselves don't even realize they're blind to the self.

They don't realize that they're living through a false self.

They don't realize that really a banner on their head should be,

I'm OK if you're OK.

If you struggle with codependency,

What you feel like,

You feel like it's your job to make sure everyone else is OK.

The codependent person is the person who arrives first for a party and she or he is the last one to leave.

The person arrives early to help the host set up.

And the codependent person doesn't feel right leaving early.

The codependent person feels guilty that the host wanted this party and feels guilty that the host was on her feet all day.

The codependent person feels like it's their responsibility to lend a hand and to scrub the floor even after everyone else has gone to bed.

Someone with high codependent tendencies is someone that will not feel OK if there are people that she or he knows that are not feeling OK.

If you're a codependent,

You don't know how to leave people alone.

You don't know how to let people squirm.

You are very uncomfortable when other people are uncomfortable.

You become other people's doormats.

You become the person that your friends rely on.

Even if there's no one in your friend group that you can rely on,

What's happened is over time this identity has been built that reinforces this idea that you don't have needs.

So your friends call you.

Now the problem is within yourself,

You end up feeling better about yourself because your friends need you.

These are the people that rely on you.

And because they rely on you,

You feel good about yourself.

What you don't realize is that you are actually abandoning yourself in the entire process.

When you're highly codependent,

You don't know that you're doing this.

You are living below the veil of consciousness.

And you are seeking a sense of self.

And you have been programmed to believe that you can only find that sense of self outside of you.

So it's natural for you to not set boundaries.

It's natural for you to give up your hobbies.

It's natural for you to call on and take care of everyone.

You will feel guilty anytime anything goes wrong in your experience.

Something happens in front of you,

It literally has nothing to do with you.

And you can have a full blown trauma response,

Thinking that the person that this thing happened to is going to be angry.

And as a codependent,

That's a huge trigger.

Because codependents struggle when they think that other people are angry.

And what they do is they want to run right in there and fix it.

Oftentimes,

A codependent will freeze when something negative happens in the experience.

But their internal dialogue is,

What could I have done to change this?

What can I do to fix this?

Oh my God,

This person is upset.

What can I do to make them feel better?

It literally has nothing to do with you.

But the internal dialogue of a codependent person is fear.

And it's tied to feeling guilty for things that you're not even guilty of.

Now this can be very,

Very damaging when you are in a relationship with someone who is going to exploit your need for validation.

Because there are predator type personalities out there that will be able to pick up on this idea and this feeling and this sense that you have that causes them to feel like you need them to be OK.

Now someone who is a predator will abuse that,

And they will exploit you.

And so they might huff and puff just to see your reaction.

They might act angry just to see if you'll jump through a hoop.

So as a codependent person,

We really have to make sure,

And I know this is my daily work,

I have to manage my triggers on the daily.

When my husband gets upset,

I feel the activation starting.

I didn't do anything wrong,

But I immediately feel,

How can I fix it?

And it took some patience,

And it took tremendous mindfulness and lots of meditations and lots of journaling and lots of self-inquiry to recognize when I was triggered by my husband being upset.

And it took me a while before I was able to detach and let it go.

So if there's something happening in my experience today,

And it has nothing to do with me,

I try to keep mindful of this idea.

It has nothing to do with me.

Lisa,

Don't make it about you.

But it's such a visceral trigger,

And quite frankly,

It's very sad.

Because when you are codependent,

Oftentimes you came from a home that was verbally punishing.

You came from a home where you were accused of things that you were not guilty of.

And so there's this natural tendency to feel guilty and to feel ashamed and to feel wrong,

Like nothing you ever did was good enough,

And also that it was your responsibility to fix it.

So becoming a fixer is a coping mechanism.

Certainly if I can fix what upsets you,

Then you calm down.

What I don't realize that as I am trying to navigate your emotions,

I actually want to try to control your emotions so that you can feel calm so that I can control my emotions.

It's all below the veil of consciousness.

And it takes a while to work out,

But it's so worth the journey.

If you are struggling with codependency,

You do not feel good enough.

You look for people to affirm you.

Relationships are where this stuff will show up.

You text someone and they don't text you right back,

And your abandonment trauma is triggered.

Someone is upset and you ruminate,

What could I have said differently?

What should I have not said?

How did I say it?

Maybe it was my tone.

If someone is upset with you and they are in the wrong,

You get very uncomfortable with the distance.

It triggers your abandonment trauma.

It triggers the rescuer in you.

Oh no,

I have to fix it.

I have to make it better.

And what you'll do is you'll be the first person to get in touch with the person who actually hurt you.

Now this is across the board.

This shows up in our interpersonal relationships.

This shows up in our intimate relationships.

This shows up in our relationships with family.

This shows up in our relationship with our friends.

If you grew up in a codependent home,

You have maybe had a mom who wanted you to acquiesce to your father's rage.

You may have grown up with a mom who modeled codependency,

Who taught you that dad was allowed to feel whatever he felt and you had to tolerate it.

You had no needs in the family system.

There was no value in your emotional experience.

So you had to negate and deny your feelings for the sake of this family system.

You're looking at a mom who devalues you and she doesn't even know she's doing it.

She's drinking the narcissistic Kool-Aid.

She's been taught that if she steps out of line,

There's a negative outcome.

And what a codependent mom will do,

Not even aware of it,

She will teach her children to do the same thing.

So what's really happening?

Mom,

The codependent mom,

Who's not setting boundaries,

Who doesn't have self-worth,

Who hasn't figured out how to show up in the relationship authentically because it's too damn triggering.

It's too scary to do that.

And when you've attracted a partner with high narcissistic traits,

They teach you to be afraid of standing up for yourself.

And so in an attempt to control mom's anxiety,

Mom acquiesces to the narcissistic dad.

And certainly it works.

If you want to manipulate a narcissist,

Just affirm them,

Just validate them,

Tell them everything that they want to hear,

Reinforce their narcissistic self-image,

And they will calm down.

Now,

In that situation,

A codependent has figured out how to manage the emotions of a more narcissistic partner.

So a codependent on the surface looks like she's trying to calm down the narcissist.

But however,

What's really happening is the byproduct is she begins to feel calm.

And then it was she do,

She's trying to control the anxiety in herself.

And when she has children,

Oftentimes a mom will reinforce this whole pattern.

So I will try to control my children's emotions so they don't get too far out of line and they don't upset their father.

So I'll try to control my children.

And in controlling of their children,

Mom is really looking to control her own anxiety about this relationship.

So when we're codependent,

We oftentimes don't feel OK unless everyone else is OK.

But it's so dysfunctional and it's maladaptive.

And until we break the codependency spell,

Until we recognize what codependency really is,

Until we understand how we are enabling bad situations,

Until we take control of our own emotions,

Learn to believe and feel what we think and honor what we think and honor our true self,

Reclaim our true self,

Until we do this,

We remain below the veil of consciousness,

Whether we are someone who is a passive codependent and seems helpless,

Or we are more active codependent where we seem very,

Very,

At least on the surface,

Like we're in control of everything.

We're good.

And we are active.

And we may even be a very controlling codependent where we're expressing how we are upset with people who don't listen to us,

Or we're upset that we're taking care of someone.

We're angry and we're resentful.

But at the same time,

The key,

Key trait of codependency is you don't leave.

You might complain,

You might argue,

You might protest,

But you,

Dear one,

You don't leave.

On the journey to unraveling all this codependency,

What we're trying to do is find the ways in which we do abandon the self and stop doing that.

We have to reclaim the self.

We have to honor the self.

And we have to stop allowing other people to control our moods.

So a codependent is someone who is OK as long as everyone else is OK.

There is a lack of self.

There's a lack of boundaries.

And there is a fear of abandonment.

And there is shame involved.

There's a need to control the emotions of other people.

Because when a codependent senses that someone else is upset,

They have a very difficult time regulating their emotions.

So regulating their emotions comes by way of acquiescing,

Subjugating,

People pleasing,

And being what everybody else needs to be OK.

Know this is not your fault if this is what you experience.

And know that there is help for codependency.