33 - Codependency, Parenting, & Healing

Episode Highlights:

Codependency is the loss or the sacrifice of: 

• God-created true self. 

• self-trust. 

• self-awareness. 

• self-worth. 

• self… in terms of assertiveness. 

Codependency is not being able to: 

• say what you feel. 

• say what you need. 

• say what you desire. 

• trust that your own feelings have validity or accuracy. 

We are made for love; we are made to be connected.  

In order to be accepted and loved by our significant caregivers, we often end up hiding our own needs. Examples: If I don’t like sports, my dad will not love me. If I don’t make good grades my mother will be so  disappointed. If I have opinions that are different from my teachers, they will reject me. If I’m not artistic like my older brother, I won’t be as loved.

We end up acting a certain way or pretend to be someone we are not in order to be loved. We  eventually begin to “believe” in the pretending rather than being our true selves. We slip into denial. 

We perform for love instead of being ourselves. 

God designed for us to: 

• be who we are made to be; 

• so, we can do what we are made to do; 

• then, we will have what we are made to have. 

In a codependency environment we end up:  

• doing what we’ve got to do;  

• so, that we can have what we’re made to have; 

• and hopefully, if we do enough, we will become somebody. 

Codependency becomes the belief that I can perform enough and do enough so that I can finally rest, trust, be believed, have my worth, and be valued. 

Codependency is a disorder of distrust. You trust the anxiety. You don’t trust listening to your own fear and exposing it.  

Sadly, if a codependent person stays stuck in their past and sOll believes feelings are the enemy, they will,  no matter how much they are loved, never trust the love.  

Codependency is bringing your “bucket of desire” into life, and your caregivers poking holes in the  bottom of it so that in your future, no matter how much love gets poured into it, it goes right through it. 

There’s not enough love; there’s not enough approval, there’s not enough trustworthiness because it all  slips right through the holes in the bucket. 

Codependency recovery is about repairing, or healing, the holes in your bucket (revision). 

Codependents are always trying to find their fulfillment externally by withholding what’s happening in  them internally. 

The Voice of the Heart by Chip Dodd