Quotes About Co-dependency

Sam and Dean Winchester sitting on the top of the Impala sharing their feelings over a beer is a reward worth driving any 'Supernatural' demon away - but in real life, they'd have crippling co-dependency issues.

Everyone sees something different in 'Endgame': a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth - not about the play, but about the person watching it.

The chemically dependent partner numbs the feelings and the nonabuser is doubled over in pain—relieved only by anger and occasional fantasies," wrote Janet Geringer Woititz in an article from the book CoDependency, An Emerging Issue.1

Dysfunctional co-dependent relationships always appeal to me. I don't know exactly how it started. I start writing sketches of characters and little scene-lets, and then it builds.

In an abused child's pure intent to make things right for everyone around him as he is growing up, he finds himself taking care of others at the expense of his own feelings and needs. Consequently, the child has no identity of his own. This is what is known as co-dependency.

Being co-dependent means we consistently put others' needs, wants, and demands before our own—in other words, emotional dependence.

Co-dependency essentially revolves around the sentence: "I am not enough." A co-dependent person will always need another person to validate their worth, their feelings, their ideas and even their existence. This either shows itself as a need to manipulate and control surroundings; or as a need to bend over backwards to make other people feel good, the reason being that "I can't feel good if you don't feel good.

We call an obsession with having someone's approval 'co-dependency;' the Bible's word for it is idolatry. A country can be an idol. A family can be an idol.

When this Child Within is not nurtured or allowed freedom of expression, a false or co-dependent self emerges. We begin to live our lives from a victim stance, and experience difficulties in resolving emotional traumas. The gradual accumulation of unfinished mental and emotional business can lead to chronic anxiety, fear, confusion, emptiness and unhappiness.

When this vital part of each of us is not nurtured and allowed freedom of expression, a false or co-dependent self emerges.

With the help of parents, other authority figures, and institutions (such as education, organized religion, politics, the media, and even some psychotherapy), most of us learn to stifle or deny our Child Within. When this vital part of each of us is not nurtured and allowed freedom of expression, a false or co-dependent self emerges. I further describe these two parts of each of us in Table 1. (See page 10).

In each case one parent is involved with his own dysfunction and the other is co-dependently addicted to him. The children are emotionally abandoned. To make matters worse, they become enmeshed in the covert or overt need to maintain the family's precarious and unhealthy balance. In dysfunctional families, no one gets to be who he is. All are put in service to the needs of the system.

I'm about to get on a plane here, and I'm packing recovery literature. All I know is I'm going to be the guy reading the book on co-dependency. That's what I know about me.

In the late twentieth century we consider solitude our natural condition. Mates divorce, and even friendship is diagnosed as a disorder - co-dependency. So the concept of living a life interlocked with another human is unthinkable