Are You Codependent? 10 Signs You Might Be
Jun 18, 2019
If you have landed here, some part of you already suspects the answer.
Maybe you have spent years feeling responsible for everyone else's comfort. Maybe you read the mood of a room before anyone speaks. Maybe you are tired in a way that sleep does not touch.
Before you read the list, Dear One, hear this first. Not one of these signs is a character flaw. Every one of them was once a survival strategy, and it made perfect sense in the place where you learned it.
10 Signs You Might Be Codependent
- You stay in unsatisfying relationships even though you know you should end them.
- You tend to be a people-pleaser and rarely worry about your own needs.
- You overgive, and yet you attract people who under deliver, or who take rather than consider others.
- You find yourself feeling the need to fix or rescue others.
- You worry far too much about what other people think about you.
- You struggle to set boundaries and generally feel pushed around by those with strong personalities.
- Your parents were alcoholics, narcissists, abusive, or emotionally neglectful.
- You do not know what you want or what might make you happy.
- No matter how much you give or do, you never quite feel that you have done enough, or that you are enough.
- Your sense of value comes from doing for others or taking care of other people.
What Is Codependency?
Codependency is not easy to describe, because it is multifaceted and it reaches into nearly every part of a life. We can become codependent on people, on things, and even on ideas.
People without codependency tend to their own needs and are able to set boundaries. Their sense of self does not rest on what others think of them, what they look like, or how much they earn. They are autonomous. They do not need to gather their value from outside themselves.
Those of us who struggle with codependency learned something different. We learned that our value lives outside of us. Below the veil of consciousness, we work to gain other people's approval in a hundred small ways. We fawn. We please. We rescue and we fix, hoping that one day it might add up to being enough. We put ourselves in unhealthy and sometimes dangerous situations for the possibility of approval.
Why These Patterns Formed
None of this began in adulthood. It began in a child who needed connection to survive, in a home where connection felt conditional.
A child who senses that love must be earned learns to monitor others rather than herself. Research suggests the developing nervous system adapts to its environment, wiring itself for whatever kept a child safest. What kept you safe then is what runs you now, quietly, below your awareness.
This is why insight alone rarely creates change. You can understand a pattern completely and still watch yourself repeat it. The pattern does not live in the thinking mind. It lives beneath it.
What Comes Next
If the list above felt like reading your own life back to you, the next step is not to try harder. It is to see the pattern clearly enough to work with it.
Take the free codependency quiz to see where these patterns are showing up for you right now. Over 50,000 people have taken it.
When you are ready to go deeper, the 12 Week Breakthrough Coaching Program is where this work begins. It is Level One of the Above the Veil Method, and it is neuroscience-informed, built to help you work through the subconscious patterns underneath these signs rather than simply naming them.
Dear One, you are not broken. You adapted.
It's not you. It's your programming. And programming can always be rewritten.
