Welcome to Breakdown to Breakthrough,
The podcast that empowers you to transform your life by awakening to your true authentic self.
I'm Lisa A.
Romano,
Your host.
As an award winning author and certified life coach,
I've dedicated my life to helping others understand the incredible power of an organized mind.
I believe that true empowerment begins with awakening to our false self.
My mission is to support you on your journey toward mental and emotional regeneration through conscious and deliberate Awakening.
In this podcast,
I'll share insights,
Tools and transformative stories that illuminate the path to healing and self-discovery.
So today we're talking about why it takes codependence such a long time to heal.
What if the reason you've been stuck in the same patterns,
The same relationships,
The same emotional exhaustion,
The same loops in your head,
Isn't because you're not trying hard enough,
But because your awareness has been pointed in the wrong direction your entire life?
Dear ones,
Today we're going to talk about why it takes so many of us so long to wake up and the subtle symptoms that most people completely miss.
And this will awaken you.
It's important.
You stick around to the end.
One of the greatest misunderstandings in healing is this.
People believe that if they are self-aware,
They should be able to change.
If they can hear their thoughts,
And think a new thought,
Like,
I don't want to do this anymore,
That should be enough.
But here's the truth.
Codependents are not lacking so-called awareness.
They are often hyper-aware.
But here's the problem.
They don't see it.
The problem is that their awareness has been trained outward and not inward.
So you are out of focus,
Not inner focused.
From a very early age,
And this is not your fault,
Many codependents learn that their value came from how well they could manage the emotional world around them,
How well they could please other people.
They learn to read other people's tones,
To anticipate their needs,
How to prevent conflict.
They learn to fix,
They learn to rescue,
They learn to help.
Now here's the kicker.
This doesn't feel like toxicity or dysfunction.
It feels like love.
It feels like being a good person.
It feels like loyalty.
It felt like survival.
So the child becomes the caretaker,
The peacemaker,
And the one who makes sure that everyone else is okay.
And over time,
This becomes identity.
I am the one who helps.
I am the one who fixes.
I am the one who eats crow.
I am the one who makes things better.
I am the one who takes care of all the family drama,
But here's the hidden cost.
While all of that energy is being directed outward to maintain peace,
Something is happening on the inside.
Yourself,
The authentic you,
Is being abandoned.
You don't do this consciously,
You don't do intentionally,
But you do it repeatedly.
Every time you ignore your feelings,
Every time you suppress a need,
Every time you silence your truth just to keep the peace,
You leave yourself.
And when this pattern begins in childhood,
It becomes automatic.
It becomes subconscious.
It's invisible.
It becomes the way you relate to self.
Or your lack of self,
And to the world.
So it's invisible.
You don't even realize that you're doing it.
And this is why you don't see it.
This is why codependents stay stuck for so long.
Because it doesn't feel like you're doing anything wrong.
You have such a high emotional tolerance for pain.
You think you're loving people well.
You think you're being supportive.
You think the problem is outside of you.
You say things to yourself like,
If they would just change,
If they would just get help,
If they would just listen to me,
If they would just understand me,
If they would just see my point of view.
So your focus stays on fixing them,
On managing them,
On helping them,
On trying to create emotional safety through over giving and controlling them.
And because this is a pattern that's rooted in the subconscious mind,
It doesn't feel like you are abandoning the self.
It doesn't feel like self-avoidance.
It feels like life,
Like this is just my destiny in life.
It feels like you're being a good partner,
A good parent,
A good child,
A good friend.
And that's why it's so hard to see.
You don't know how to honor the self.
Now,
Here are some hidden symptoms that a lot of people miss.
Now,
Here's why I really want you to listen,
Because these are the signs of codependency that most people overlook,
And I've heard it time and time again.
I'm not married to an alcoholic.
I can't be codependent.
Wrong.
These aren't obvious.
These are subtle.
You may be codependent if you feel,
Now check in with your feels,
You feel responsible for other people's emotions.
Check.
You replay conversations in your mind,
Trying to make sure that you didn't upset anyone.
Check.
You feel guilty when you rest,
When you say no or when you dare to even think about choosing yourself.
Check.
You struggle to answer simple questions like what do I want and how do I feel.
Check.
You are highly attuned to other people's moods,
But disconnected from your own.
Check.
You overexplain yourself,
Hoping to be understood and not rejected.
Check.
You feel anxious when someone is upset with you,
Even if you've done nothing wrong and you've overextended yourself.
Check.
You give more than you receive and tell yourself that's just who you are.
Check.
You are drawn to people who need help,
Who are struggling,
Who are emotionally unavailable.
You just keep giving.
Check.
And you believe that if you can just love them enough,
Help them enough,
They will finally choose you.
Choose you,
Love you,
And love you the way that you need it.
Check.
You feel exhausted,
But you keep giving.
Check.
Because slung down would mean feeling,
Feeling what you've been avoiding.
Check.
And perhaps the most important one,
You don't even realize you're abandoning yourself.
Check.
Because it feels so normal to be dissociated from the true self and focused on everyone else but yourself.
So here's the paradox of codependency.
It's very deep.
The more you focus on fixing others,
The further you move from seeing yourself.
The more you try to repair what is outside of you,
The more you try to convince people that they need to change,
The more you avoid what is within you.
And because this is subconscious,
You don't experience it as avoidance or codependency.
You experience it as your purpose,
As love,
As your identity.
But here's what happens over time in the latter stages of codependency.
That identity becomes exhausting.
It feels like a straitjacket.
You begin to feel resentment,
Burnout,
And confusion.
And a quiet voice begins to emerge.
Nagging at you,
Nagging at you.
This isn't working.
It's not working.
No matter what I've done,
It hasn't worked for me to feel love.
And for many people Healing will begin with this one question,
Although they don't know how to answer it,
What about me?
That question changes everything because for the first time your awareness has turned inward and you begin to ask What am I feeling?
What do I need?
Where am I abandoning myself?
Why does someone else's approval feel more important than my own?
These questions are absolutely uncomfortable because they rock the bedrock of your world,
But they're also liberating because they reveal something very profound that denial did not let you see.
So it's not that you were never not enough.
It's not that you weren't good enough or broken,
You were patterned.
And those patterns were formed to help you survive.
To help you feel like you belong,
To help you feel safe.
But what once protected you through survival is now actually keeping you stuck.
But this is not the end of the story tier once.
I want you to know that you can escape this.
So if you see yourself in this,
You have to understand there is nothing wrong with you.
You learn to love by abandoning yourself,
And people in your life were comfortable with that.
And now you are being invited to learn something new,
A way that includes you,
Your true self.
A way that honors your needs and your feelings and your truth.
We're creating space for you to show up in a relationship rather than just remain a passenger.
A way that allows you to give without disappearing.
To care without needing to control.
To love without losing yourself.
And when you learn to do this,
Your entire inner paradigm shifts.
You start to see things differently.
And that's when your outer world shifts.
So this doesn't happen overnight,
Because this is a process of rewiring the brain.
It's a process of returning to the self.
So remember that it takes a codependent a very long time to awaken,
Because to survive,
They've been seeing themselves as the fixer,
As the caretaker,
And the one that has no issues.
People who have issues.
And then because of the way that we've been externally focused,
We believe at a subconscious level.
That we are born and created to fix other people.
So we're not the person that has the problem.
The person that we're trying to fix,
They have the problem.
And when we begin to turn that around for ourselves and say,
Wait a minute,
There are patterns of codependency here that I was not aware were actually codependent.
I was groomed and conditioned to believe that codependency was tied to being married to an alcoholic.
And so I really never let what you were saying sink in.
That's an issue.
And that's why I'm all about reframing what codependency is.
Because once you understand that codependency is tied to emotional neglect,
Insecure attachment.
And to childhood trauma.
We're finally talking about childhood trauma.
We're finally at a point where we can say my mother was a narcissist or my father was an alcoholic.
We can finally say my childhood wasn't as perfect as my narcissistic alcoholic parents or emotionally neglectful parents or emotionally immature parents tried to insinuate.
And pound into my head that it was.
Many of us come from homes where we were told that we're so lucky.
Nobody has it like you.
Do you know how we grew up?
If you had to grow up like we grew up,
You wouldn't survive.
You're so thin-skinned.
If you cried,
You were criticized.
Oh,
Waterworks.
Oh,
You're looking for attention.
Oh,
There's the drama queen again.
Right?
So then you stuff your emotions.
And in stuffing your emotions,
You're taught that the who that you are isn't valuable and so you hide who you are and eventually you abandon the self in the pursuit of trying to connect with another human being which is the most natural and beautiful thing.
That we can do.
As extensions of creator,
Is to find our tribe.
The problem is,
As codependents,
Is that we feel more familiar and comfortable in a group of sick people that need us to take care of them.
And who think that we should.
We feel more comfortable.
Because we don't have data or a program for loving the self,
For honoring the self,
For showing the true self.
We are riddled with a fear of abandonment,
Which cuts us off at the knees.
When we even dare to express ourselves vulnerably.
I've been to this path.
When I met my new husband,
Anthony,
I knew what I had done wrong.
I knew that the first half of my life,
I was living life from below the veil of consciousness,
Showing up as a half-self or a false self,
Performing for love,
And then being angry when I couldn't get people to love me.
And even if I had,
They loved the false me.
That's how crazy making codependency is.
And when I finally saw the puzzle,
And I finally saw the programming,
And I could make the connections to my childhood,
And I understood codependency,
And I was codependent,
And I had been operating as a codependent,
A wounded,
I am not enough codependent,
Thinking that I was the good one,
Rescuing people that needed my help,
Associating love with needing to be needed.
Holy Hannah,
Lions and tigers and bears,
Oh my.
Coming out of that,
Doing all of the inner recovery work,
Which was not an overnight process.
But when I finally had done enough recovery work and I met my husband,
Anthony,
I knew I'm not making the same mistakes.
No.
I'm going to show up as my authentic,
Vulnerable self,
And I'm going to risk him walking away.
Because I'm no longer willing to abandon my inner child.
That is not the way to live.
I want to live a whole life.
And if I never found that authentic life,
That authentic partnership,
I was going to die trying because the old way just wasn't good enough for me anymore.
So it felt so successful and what is success?
I think it was Earl Nightingale that said success,
I hope I'm quoting him correctly,
Success is you moving towards a worthy goal.
It's not about achieving the goal,
If you have a goal.
And you are making strides to achieve that goal every day,
Then you are a success.
And so that was my goal,
Was to honor myself,
Not get the relationship.
Honor myself.
Not secure relationship in which I could trust somebody so that they'd never leave me.
No,
I gave people permission to leave me.
I gave Anthony permission to leave me,
To cheat on me.
I gave him permission to this day,
But I ain't going to be with you,
You know,
Because I'm not abandoning myself.
That is my goal,
And that is my value system.
And so I can't lose when the value or the goal is to not abandon myself,
Which is the transition towards health.
Out of codependency.
So when you're codependent,
You're abandoning the self.
When you are codependent no more,
You're no longer abandoning the self.
You feel whole.
You feel integrated.
You have discovered self-actualization.
You understand what the hero's journey is that Joseph Campbell talks about.
You come out of the cave that Plato talks about,
Plato's allegory of the cave.
You come out of the cave.
You understand the ability to resurrect your own self,
To love yourself,
And what it means to experience integration,
Mind,
Body,
And soul.
You understand what it means to make peace with your past.
So in the first part of your life,
You're below the veil.
You're operating from a program.
The second part of your life,
For however long it lasts,
You're above the veil.
You're operating consciously.
To me,
That's a successful life.
Namaste,
Everybody.
Until next time,
I bow my head to the love and light that is absolutely in you,
Even if you can't feel it,
That light is within you.
I see it,
I feel it,
I honor it.
Until next time,
Bye for now.
