Love and codependency can look very much the same. You can’t always easily spot the differences. Which is why it took me two years of focused heart work and growth to see how codependency was insidiously destroying my relationships.

If you find it hard to understand what codependency looks like, read on. For me, codependency took these forms:

1. Over-responsibility of others, and
2. Irresponsibility of self

Codependency destroyed one of my closest friendships. Everything seemed perfectly normal in the beginning. I thought it was a healthy friendship that would remain strong and unbreakable.

But years into the friendship, our communication suddenly started to break down. Our conversations became defensive and unhealthy. It became very toxic. I could not pinpoint why we were unable to find mutual understanding any longer. It all led to the end of our friendship, and we had to part ways.

It took me around 2 years of focused heart work and growth to understand what happened.
I learned how codependency was slowly killing our friendship from the start. We had misunderstood codependency as love. This looked like a lot of over-responsibility for each other’s feelings and moods. It looked like poor communication of our needs, wants, and boundaries. It looked like expectations that were never communicated directly. It looked like a lot of unnecessary disappointment in one another. Bottom line, it was an unhealthy need for and dependency on each other, not a mutual love and respect.

Codependency is about control, not real love.

Over-responsibility of other people is about control and will require you to abandon yourself, in subtle or even extreme ways. This is NOT love, because real love does not come at the expense of your mental and emotional well-being.

I have seen women walk away from decades of marriage where they truly believed it was ‘love’ to stay with their alcoholic and/or abusive husbands. They were fooled by the notion that if they ‘loved’ them enough, then the addictions and abuse would stop. They believed this kind of care for them was love, when it was really enablement.

We MUST understand the BIG difference between…

Healthy Self-Sacrifice in Relationships VERSUS Unhealthy Self-Abandonment/Neglect

Don’t get me wrong: sacrifice in relationships will be selfless, and involves putting your partner first. But that sacrifice should not come at the expense of your emotional or mental well-being. And it should never come at the expense of your values, boundaries, or self-respect. If those things are being neglected, then it’s codependency.

My theory is that we all carry a bit of codependency on a spectrum in our relationships. I don’t know if we necessarily arrive at a place where we are completely void of it. Every relationship is a learning opportunity to choose love over codependency. We are always growing, and it’s all about the journey within yourself to health that creates quality relationships and connections around you. The point is to do the work to learn the tools necessary that help you spot toxic patterns so you can learn how to stay out of them.
I know for me, I saw massive changes in the quality of my connections when I found healing.

BEFORE HEALING:
-Emotionally messy
-Volatility in friendships that felt enmeshed
-No sense of self/identity
-Powerless feelings over my own emotional wellbeing
-Emotional needs unmet
-Low-capacity for intimacy

AFTER HEALING:
-Deep sense of satisfaction in relationships
-Attracting healthy safe people
-Great balance in my life, work, and relationships
-Safe places to be vulnerable in difficult seasons
-High capacity for intimacy with people, where I feel really seen and known 

Boundaries are Doors Not Walls