Codependency is a main issue that keeps relationships from experiencing health. Living codependent keeps us in toxic relationship patterns, while never experience the health and wholeness we were made for.

In this week’s episode, I want to continue providing insight into the deception and stranglehold of codependency. I want to compare codependency with interdependence

Codependency vs Interdependence

Why do we become vulnerable to codependency?

Complex Trauma, Codependency & Narcissism 

Christian Confusion and Codependency

How to Break Free from Codependency

Video Broadcast:

Show Notes and Outline

Understanding Codependency

Codependency creates an unhealthy orbit around each other with unhealthy bonds and patterns. In its simplified form, codependency is an excessive emotional reliance on another person. It often involves an addiction or addictive relationship pattern. There is usually one who is “needed” and the one who is “needy.” Enabling and forms of control are involved. Included in codependent relationships have a dynamic of being one-sided, emotionally destructive and/or abusive. 

Comparison of Codependency and Interdependence

The opposite of codependency is interdependence and here are some the differences. 

Interdependence

Codependency

Love is a Powerful Decision: you choose to be with them. You work on yourself and bring that to the relationship. 

Love is a “High,” reactionary, compelled, rushed, pressured, driven, intense. You “need” the person to be better for you. 

Identity Preserved: you still have an identity of your own

Identity Drowning: identity is lost into the other person

Healthy Reality: personal responsibility for personal growth, growing maturity

Unhealthy Illusion: we cannot live without each other, this relationship is my life, immaturity

Consistent: growing stable and grounded

Melodramatic: constant ups and downs

Trusting Commitment

Possessiveness

Stable Self-Esteem

Self-esteem hinges off other person’s swings

Openness to the Future: new and good things that are good and DIFFERENT from the past can and will open up.

Familiar Repetition: inward drive to repeat and recreate the dysfunctional – yet comfortable past. Bubble life. 

Willingness to Surrender

Need to Control

Trust in God

Trust building Christian Fellowship 

Fear of Abandonment

Why Do We Become Vulnerable to Codependency?

You do not just magically become codependent because a light switch went off in you. There are legitimate factors that influence why you become codependent. 

* Your upbringing and home life. (The brokenness of your home and how you responded to it.)

* Your relationship with your parents.

* Your empty and broken hearts are looking for love, but you lack the references on what true love looks like. 

* You became a caretaker early on.

* Mis-targeted Love Source: You look for a person to be a core source of fulfilling your need for love, a place only God can fill, but you are blind in how to connect to the true love of God. 

* Trauma

Complex Trauma, Codependency & Narcissism

Recommended Resource: Tim Fletcher – YouTube

Codependency often develops from an emotionally abusive environment, with a narcissist being the abusive one, and it develops in an emotionally dishonest environment (the needy ones/enablers never get honest about how things really are).