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Better understanding codependency, and how to start recovering from it
Let the trees teach us.
Happy Sunday, Soothers. I remember when it first clicked for me that I was codependent, and what that truly meant. I had thought codependency was all about couples who were overly reliant on each other, and as somebody who had struggled with dating for years, I thought surely the term couldn’t apply to me.
But at some point something clicked: codependency was, as I now define it, a behavior that is based on sourcing our self-worth, self-acceptance, identity and safety on something external to us. And in fact, you can be codependent with people, certainly, but also, I believe, with any number of things: jobs. Job TITLES. Salary. Money. People’s approval and validation. Time. Productivity levels. And so on, and so forth.
Oh. Huh. Yup. I can see that.
As I’ve continued my recovery from codependency over the last few years, it’s become something that is a pillar in my teaching and coaching work. In fact, I’ve dedicated the month of April to it in my mastermind for highly sensitive women, Soothe, and there was one woman in there who had a breakthrough around codependency that I wanted to share (with permission).
She had been struggling with the concept that co-dependency means learning to source your…
