Healing Your Relationships: True Caring Or Codependence?

In the last episode we talked about why codependency runs so deep,

How it's not just a set of behaviors but survival responses that live in our nervous system.

And I spoke a lot to how these responses are often developed in childhood.

But I also want to say this,

Codependent patterns can start at any time in our lives.

While sometimes we do learn these patterns growing up inside of our family of origin,

Society of origin,

Religion of origin,

A lot of these behaviors can and may be in your life were developed later,

Especially if you were experiencing a traumatic event,

An abusive relationship,

Or deeply triggering situations as adults.

And sometimes that can even feel more confusing or more crazy making when you go back to your origin story and you're like,

Gosh,

I really grew up in a wonderful environment or I don't,

I'm not really resonating for that with those things as a child.

But then at 18 years old,

I was in an abusive relationship,

Or when I entered into junior high school or high school or college,

I had a teacher that was very emotionally abusive.

So these pieces can develop later in life.

And when we don't understand trauma,

When we don't understand the way our nervous system works,

It's very easy to fall into new patterns of self abandonment in adulthood.

It's very easy to begin to develop patterns where we start prioritizing other people's needs,

Walking on eggshells or losing ourselves inside of relationships,

Especially relationships that feel unsafe or unpredictable.

And if you think about it,

The older we're getting,

The more we're developing a sense of self,

The more we experience life in the world around us.

A lot of times that's how we are attuning or coming into understanding a standing of who we are,

Believing who we are.

So I really just wanted to name for you that this can and will and might be still happening in your life.

And so that is why awareness is so powerful and important,

Because the moment you become aware of how codependency is created,

The moment you become aware of your physical body,

The moment you become aware of trauma responses is the moment that you are interrupting the pattern of codependency.

It is going,

Wow,

In this moment,

I could completely see how this could cause me to shape shift,

Not only in this relationship,

But maybe from here on out,

Because it feels so scary and it feels so painful.

And this is why awareness is so powerful.

So holding on to your awareness,

Holding on to what you have learned so far from me and about yourself,

As you've been on this journey of exploration,

I want to move into this question,

A question that I hear from so many people doing this work and a question that I had for myself.

And that question is,

How do I know if what I'm doing is loving or codependent?

Because healing from codependency can leave you wondering,

Is caring for others codependent,

Is helping wrong?

If I set a boundary,

Am I being selfish?

I'm going to do an entire episode on the word selfish and breaking that down.

So I'm looking forward to that.

I get a little heated because I hear this a lot.

If I'm setting a boundary,

I feel selfish.

If I do something for myself,

I feel selfish.

Especially with women and especially with mothers.

So today we're going to talk about the difference between codependency and true caring because caring really isn't the problem,

Right?

Caring and loving,

That's not a problem.

That's amazing,

But it's where it comes from.

It's the intent and motivation that matters.

It's the intent and motivation that is going to be your guide,

That is going to be an anchor point for you.

But let's start out as to why it is confusing.

I think it's because most of us were taught either directly or indirectly that love means sacrifice,

Right?

So those who were praised for being the good one,

The helper,

The caretaker,

So many people were taught that putting themselves first was selfish.

And many of us grew up in homes where maybe the only way to feel safe or loved was being who others needed us to be.

We broke that down in the last episode,

How that can play out.

So when we start healing codependency,

It's very common to swing hard to the extreme.

And we're going to talk about this in the episode where I talk about boundaries because it's uncomfortable and we might not know the gauge or the level,

Or we might not clearly even know or understand or feel our intent or motivation.

So when you start healing this work,

You might ask yourself a lot,

Am I being codependent?

Am I being codependent?

Is this unhealthy?

And that's where I was also sharing that when a lot of women start doing this work with me,

They feel like they're thinking a lot more and it can feel a little bit overwhelming in the beginning because awareness now is there.

They're almost unable to shut down their awareness once they start doing the work.

And so it can feel almost a little bit more confusing in the beginning.

So just know that that's part of this work.

This is why I said you need to have patience for yourself.

So if I care about someone,

Am I being codependent?

No,

Not necessarily.

If I help,

Is that unhealthy?

No,

Not necessarily.

But these are some of the questions that you can ask yourself.

This is how you're going to help get yourself to your motivation and your intent.

So one is,

Am I coming from a place of love or from fear?

Are you coming from a place of love or from fear?

Is this coming from a place of freedom or from obligation?

Is this,

Yes,

I'm about to say coming from a place of freedom,

I want to do this.

Or is it coming from a place of obligation,

Which is often linked to guilt and shame?

So in order to not feel guilty,

We're going to say yes.

Another question is,

Does this behavior,

Action,

Support,

Does it actually include me?

Or does it erase me?

Let me say that one again,

Because it's really powerful.

Does it include me or does it erase me?

And if you didn't listen to the last couple episodes,

This is what we're talking about when we're talking about shape-shifting.

Do I have to completely abandon my authenticity parts of myself in order to show up for this person in this situation?

That is not true caring.

In fact,

It's also not true caring for yourself.

And remember,

While we're here to heal our relationships,

The most important relationship you are healing inside of codependency work is the relationship to yourself.

So when you engage in actions that erase parts of you,

You're not living in love.

You're not allowing yourself to be in your authenticity,

And you're not allowing someone else to be in theirs.

How can you know if somebody truly deeply loves you and sees you if you're not giving them who you are?

Think about that.

If you're not even giving them exactly who you are,

How does it give them an opportunity to love you and to know you and to see you?

Yes,

Compromise,

Co-creation,

Learning how to be better people,

We're mirrors.

We're mirrors for each other.

We help each other grow when we're in,

When we're doing our inner work anyway,

When two people are doing their inner work,

When two people are stepping into awareness.

But more often than not,

When you open the door and you walk into a new relationship,

There's hope,

There's desire,

There's excitement,

There's possibility.

And we want to be everything.

We want the joy.

We want to make it work.

We want to be loving.

And from this moment out,

Especially if you listen to the last two episodes,

You know now,

You're aware.

You're aware of the difference between codependency and true caring,

Because true caring and true love does not activate a trauma response in your body.

If somebody gets upset with you,

True love and true caring is not changing the way you dress for someone else.

True love,

True caring is not sacrificing everything in your life to take care of someone,

Especially when the other people don't honor see,

Because nobody should be asking that much of us in the way of adults,

Not speaking about your children here.

But what often happens is I have a lot of clients who come to me and their children are not children anymore.

They're 18,

They're 19,

They're 20,

They're 30,

They're older.

And as parents,

They're still doing things from love.

These are my children.

I'm going to do anything for them.

But at sacrifice to themselves,

That is no longer coming from just a place of love.

That might be coming from a place of obligation that if you dig a little bit deep into is not just about being a parent,

But is about fear,

Lack of control,

Loss,

Feeling disconnected,

Or you're not going to be a part of your child's life.

I'm not saying love is not woven into all that.

I know that it is.

But this is where you have to get radically honest with yourself in all relationships.

I'm not talking about just parent and child,

Because there are going to be a lot of stories that you have that are going to support your codependent behavior in the name of love.

And I'm not here to tell you that your stories are true or false or not.

It's up to you to be radically honest with yourself.

It's up to you to dig in and see.

No,

Marisa,

I'm doing my child's laundry at 25 because I freaking love doing it and I don't care.

And I love when they come over and have lunch with me and pick up their laundry.

This is not codependent.

Awesome.

Wonderful.

You decide.

I'm not here to tell you.

I'm here to invite you into an expansive way of thinking about your relationships.

And I know that there are a lot of parents out there that continue to over-serve their children from a place of fear,

Loss,

And codependency.

And family of origin gets passed down generation to generation.

So in my family,

It was the Italian guilt.

And I watched my grandmother do it to my father and my father make decisions out of guilt.

And then I watched myself do that with my father and make decisions out of guilt.

Because I didn't want my parent to be hurt.

I didn't want to not give them the experiences they didn't have.

I wanted to be the child that my dad didn't get to be with his father.

We're passing down generational behaviors,

Thoughts,

Feelings,

And dynamics.

So we're really,

There's a lot of responsibility here inside of our families.

Even if that's family of choice and it's not your family of origin,

Who you live with,

Where you work,

The type of business container that you create.

Every single place in your life where you have relationships,

You're creating dynamics.

You're creating expectations.

You're teaching other people how to be in relationship with you.

So bringing it back,

Some more differences between codependence and true caring.

Codependency will often come from anxiety and fear.

Afterwards,

You might feel exhausted,

Depleted,

Or resentful after you give,

After you show up,

After you say yes,

Or maybe even after you say no.

It often means abandoning your own needs or truths.

And very often it's driven by the need to control how other people feel and respond to you.

And a big red flag is when it feels like your survival depends on keeping people okay.

And from an ego mind level,

You might be like,

Well,

I know my survival doesn't depend on that.

But in the moment,

When your body goes into fight or flight or fix or fawn,

That's your body saying,

Hey,

We need to survive.

Let's shape shift.

Let's manage this.

Let's make sure that person's okay.

Because I can't be okay unless that person's okay.

True caring,

True caring comes from genuine love and choice.

It feels sustainable.

It feels balanced.

It includes your needs.

It includes yourself in the equation.

Your authentic self is included.

It respects your limits and your boundaries.

And this one is so good.

And it's so important,

But it allows other people to be responsible for themselves.

Other people are responsible for their own feelings,

Their own experiences.

And this took me so long to,

I want to say learn,

But I'm going to say unlearn.

And I did a lot of this unlearning around this inside of Don Miguel Ruiz's book,

The Four Agreements.

And I'm going to do an entire episode on how The Four Agreements are a beautiful practice to support you and your codependency recovery.

Because there's a lot of people that would say that we are responsible for other people's feelings and emotions.

Don't tell me not to take something personally.

You did that.

It hurt me.

But the way we affect each other and hurt each other and activate each other is far more nuanced.

And so when we let other people be responsible for themselves,

That doesn't mean that we can't own our shadow,

Own our mistakes,

Own where we've caused harm.

That does not mean that at all.

It doesn't mean that we don't have a part in this dance of life,

But no one can make you feel.

This is another one that you might disagree.

I might get a little email saying,

That's not true.

And that's fine.

In your dream,

In your reality,

You get to choose.

But what I've learned in addiction recovery,

CODA recovery,

And soul spiritual recovery,

Is that someone can activate a feeling in me,

But I get to choose how I feel from that moment on.

I get to tune in and go,

Wow.

I can say,

Gosh,

What that person said really made me feel like shit.

It really made me feel like a horrible person.

What that person said,

What that person did made me feel,

Okay.

That's how I see the world.

It made me feel.

And then I have a choice point,

A response point,

Where I ask myself and I say to myself,

Wow,

That person really activated the part of me that always felt unworthy.

That person really activated that part of me that always felt unsafe.

But I know that I'm worthy and I know that I am safe.

So no,

You don't get to make me feel unsafe now.

You may have activated it,

But that's where it stops.

Okay,

That's some like master's level awareness,

Shift of perception.

And you have to embody that.

You have to know that,

You have to know and understand that.

That took years for me to cultivate.

So for me,

People can't make me feel any way.

I am responsible for my dream,

My reality,

And my perception.

Doesn't mean I can't be harmed.

Doesn't mean horrible things didn't or won't happen to me that are other people's responsibility in the sense that they took that action.

But I'm talking also about,

I want to say the smaller things,

Okay?

I think this is important.

I just want to plug this here because trauma is very real.

And there are people out there that do horrible things to other people.

And if somebody does something horrible to you,

Really horrible,

They have responsibility in part in that.

And it is not your fault.

So in the context of codependency,

In these nuanced ways of shape-shifting,

That's what I'm talking about.

Okay?

That's what I'm really bringing you back to here.

Is if somebody looks at you wrong or comments about something,

And we go into a place of blame and focus all on them and how they make us feel a certain way.

We have the power,

We have the courage,

We have the ability to experience that,

Respond to that,

Ask for a boundary,

Make a request,

Not speak to that person or do whatever we need to do,

And move on with love and reverence for ourself.

That's possible.

So that's what I'm talking about in terms of letting other people be responsible for themselves and that I'm responsible for me.

And no,

Your perception of me isn't going to destroy my reality.

As an adult,

I'm not going to re-engage in creating codependent patterns from pain.

I'm not going to do it.

And I'm inviting you not to do it.

I'm inviting you into a place of allowing other people to be responsible for their experience,

Allowing them to be functional adults.

In codependency,

We lose ourselves.

Okay?

In true caring,

We stay connected to ourselves while showing up for others.

Let me say that to you again.

In codependency,

We lose ourselves,

Even if it's just a part.

A part is too much.

In true caring,

We stay connected to ourselves while showing up for others.

Let me give you some real specific examples.

This is codependency.

Your partner comes home in a bad mood.

So you immediately start problem solving,

Adjust your emotions to keep things calm.

You tell yourself,

It's my job to fix this.

I'm exhausted.

I have things I want to do,

But now I'm managing my partner.

That's codependency.

True caring is when your partner comes home upset and you say,

Hey babe,

Do you want to talk?

I'm here for you.

And they say,

No,

I don't want to talk.

I had a horrible day.

Okay.

Well,

If you need anything,

I'm here.

And then you stay grounded.

You keep moving on with the energy you were feeling before they went home.

You stay in your own energy.

You stay in your own intention.

You stay in your own happiness if you were happy when they walked in.

You don't have to match their levels and go into hypervigilance.

Or what happens is then we take them personally and then our mood changes.

And then we go into a spiral and story and our codependency and need to control somebody else's experience caused us to lose our own happiness and our own light or our own experience of the day.

So here's another one.

This is codependency.

You have a friend who's struggling financially.

You immediately offer to lend them money.

Even though you would strain your own finances or you feel guilty or you feel obligated.

Shoot.

This person knows that I'm doing well right now in my business.

They're coming here and they're sharing with me that they're struggling to pay for groceries.

I immediately don't even think about it.

Don't even really think about where this is coming from or if I can do it.

It's just immediately feel responsible and I feel guilty.

And so I say,

Hey,

I'd love to give you this money.

Okay.

True caring and true caring.

You feel really compassionate.

You understand.

You can empathize,

But you pause and you check in with your own boundaries.

You offer emotional support.

You offer to listen more to ask question to brainstorm resources,

But you don't immediately sacrifice your own stability out of guilt.

If you sit and think on it and you decide I have this abundance and I want to share it.

That's coming from a place of true caring and love.

But if you're doing it out of guilt and responsibility,

It's coming from codependency.

So I hope that you can tap into the difference here that caring is not the problem.

It's the energy underneath the caring.

Is it driven by the fear that you'll lose some sort of connection if you don't help?

I want to say that again.

Are your actions driven by the fear that you'll lose connection if you don't help?

Or is it coming from love?

Coming from a place where you are still connected to yourself.

That level of awareness and intuition and responsiveness is the functional adult.

Instead of reacting,

You're taking a moment.

You have awareness.

And honestly,

It makes the other person's experience more valuable.

Because maybe that friend was not coming to ask you for anything.

Maybe that friend just needed some love and support that needed questions,

That needed resources.

And a lot of times codependency can show up as this hyper vigilance and caretaking and offering unsolicited advice and it can turn people off.

It can make them feel unsafe because in their own codependency,

They don't want people seeing them or experiencing them in a certain way.

And then that's where that codependent dance I was talking about starts.

You know,

I personally believed that fixing everything for the people I cared about was being loving.

And that if somebody was upset,

Especially a romantic partner,

It was automatically my job to make it better.

And I would not only try to fix and fawn,

But when that was rejected or didn't work,

Then I went into a complete resentment anger spiral and then a self-doubt spiral and then a lack of self-trust spiral and then a guilt and shame spiral.

And it was just this dance.

I didn't know how to stay in my authenticity.

I didn't know how to stay in a good mood when somebody was in a bad mood.

I really didn't know how to do that for so long.

It wasn't until I started working,

It wasn't until I started tapping into the courage to stay with myself,

Even when it was uncomfortable,

Did I slowly learn how to do that.

And wow,

It changes everything.

It changes everything when my partner comes home and he's not in a good mood.

And instead of me matching his energy,

I just go,

Okay,

Well,

Let me know if you need anything.

And you know,

I do do things out of love now.

I'll go,

Gosh,

He's not having a great day.

Let me go tidy this up because that's gonna make him feel better.

I'll go cook food because he's outside in the yard working and I know that's helpful.

That energy,

You can hear it in my voice.

That's coming from a place of love and caring.

But when he walks in the door and he was angry or upset,

Had a bad day,

And then I go into fight or flight and hyper-vigilant and I gotta clean everything and I should do this and I'm gonna go to the grocery store and I'm gonna make sure to get everything he wants to eat.

Then I'm gonna make the food.

And the whole time I'm like,

Staring out the corner of my eye.

That's codependency.

And so can you see why this is so confusing,

Right?

It's the energy and the intention and the motivation behind the action that is going to allow you to begin to see the difference between true loving and true caring in your life.

And that's why none of this is meant to sound or be absolute because every person is different.

And this is about you finding your authenticity inside of this work,

Not me telling you who you are and how you need to behave.

That would just be codependent,

Right?

So from a place of love for yourself,

You're doing this work.

Okay,

A couple of reflection questions I'm gonna give you if you wanna write these down in your phone or come back to them later.

What does real care feel like in my body?

Coming back to the body,

Back to somatic awareness.

What does real care feel like in my body?

When I help somebody from a place of fear,

Obligation,

Guilt,

What does that feel like in my body?

Do I know when I am choosing myself or erasing myself?

Do I know when I am choosing myself or erasing myself?

Now this one can be kind of hard because often you come here not even knowing who you are,

Feeling connected to your authenticity.

So let this question just be an opening because we're gonna get there.

Thank you so much for being here.

I love you.

I'm proud of you and I'll see you on the other side.