The foundation for developing codependency can begin quite early in a person’s life and can start in the first relationship a person has: with their parents. Parents can inadvertently promote codependency in their children in several ways including immaturity and parenting methods.
Parental immaturity affects children when parents are highly critical, have intense mood swings, or are easily emotionally reactive. When a parent is immature, a child learns to be hypervigilant, subconsciously noticing every shift in a parent’s voice, facial expression, and mood. Because an immature person controls the family’s emotional climate, the household focuses on that person instead of each family member experiencing their own emotions. This is confusing since children will then fear the same person they love, and their survival depends on that volatile person.
Children shouldn’t be responsible for knowing how to navigate their parents’ tempers, mood swings, emotions, anxiety, or depression. If you grew up thinking otherwise, this could be a key indicator of why you feel overly responsible for others’ well-being while neglecting your own.
Parents can also encourage codependency in children through parenting methods. For example:
- Discouraging
question asking
- Praising
kids for being easy
- Telling
children how to feel
- Leading
them to believe they must like and be liked by everyone
- Using
guilt to persuade them to comply
- Using
a relationship title to control behaviors like, “I’m the parent,” or “It’s
your sister”
- Leading
them to believe they can’t make decisions without validation or input from
others
- Telling
children to behave before entering public settings, prioritizing
everyone else’s comfort over how the child feels
- Blaming
a child for how they make others feel
- Praising or rewarding a child for pleasing an adult, even if the child did something self-destructive
All these inadvertently stifle a child’s personal experience
while prioritizing compliance and obedience.
Complications
Children in these environments were never allowed to be their true selves- their unique, amazing, beautiful little persons. Instead, they were raised to manage and soothe their parents’ inner turmoil. These children learned the lie of codependency: that they have the power to control and are responsible for others’ emotions. From there, codependency branches into all kinds of other tendencies.
One resulting tendency is perfectionism. Perfectionism is a response that stems from the reinforced belief that a child has to perform or act “correctly” to receive love, which is conditional love. People struggling with perfectionism still subconsciously believe they must behave in certain ways to receive love.
Another tendency children develop is people-pleasing even though people-pleasing isn’t really about pleasing people, it’s about seeking safety in social, emotional, and material senses.
People-pleasing can manifest in a variety of ways including:
- Silencing
your opinions or emotions because you’ve learned it’s easier than dealing
with someone’s emotional outbursts
- Agreeing
with someone’s toxic behavior just to keep the peace and avoid conflict
- Pretending
everything is fine, even when it’s not, because you’re afraid others won’t
understand your feelings
- Giving
in to family pressure to maintain traditions, even when those make you
uncomfortable or unhappy
- Sacrificing
your mental and emotional well-being to ensure others never feel
inconvenienced
- Overextending
yourself to maintain the illusion of being the “good” or “reliable” one in
everyone’s eyes
- Prioritizing others’ comfort over your own to avoid creating tension, even when it leaves you feeling resentful
Moving Forward
Since codependent families condition each other to believe
that independent growth, feelings, and actions are selfish, ungrateful, and
heartless, changing our thinking and beliefs about ourselves is difficult.
However, the work is worth it. Note: working Steps 4-9 helps with all of these.
Recognition
The first step to moving forward is recognizing where patterns of codependency exist. By examining past and current experiences, we can see how and where codependency exists.
Acceptance
Acceptance looks different for everyone. Here are some suggestions for acceptance statements.
- My
parent will never be more emotionally mature than they are right now.
- My
parent does not want to be fixed, even if they are miserable.
- Explaining
myself again and again will not result in my parent changing.
- I am
safe even if my parent is wrong about the person I am.
- I can
accept my parent for who they are.
- I can choose to accept the parental relationship available to me knowing that I am not required to have a relationship with my parent.
Growth
The greatest thing we can do is work on our recovery, healing, and healthy relationships. We can love and respect our parents by accepting them where they are and loving and respecting ourselves enough to know our limits. We can let go of the desire to fix or save our parents by knowing we can’t change them or get them to understand anything.
Growth comes through working our program, whether that involves coming to meetings, getting a sponsor, getting therapy, reading books, daily prayer & meditation, or other methods. Part of the joy of recovery is the independent journey of finding what works for you.
Keep coming back! It works if you work it, so work it,
you’re worth it!
Adapted and adopted from work by-
Instagram: @acceptandact, @thespiritual.aura, @nedratawwab,
@morganpommells, @fittingrightin, @the.holistic.psychologist,
@haileypaigemagee, @nate_postlethwait, @sternasuissa