Codependence is a particularly insidious condition because it masquerades as being “super nice.” It’s a disease that tricks you into thinking that caretaking and people pleasing is kind, when it’s actually condescending toward the other person and ends up making you resentful of the people you’re “helping.” Real quick, I know the word disease may sound harsh and icky, but I’m comfortable with calling it a disease because it’s progressive and habitual and there’s no panacea for it. From what I can gather about codependence, it’s not something you can cure per se, but if you build up your self-awareness and self-esteem, it is something you can curb and manage. Calling it a disease also helps me to take it more seriously, since before my therapy for codependence I tended to see my behavior as “being a good person” or “doing the right thing” instead of how I routinely neglected myself while focusing on others, hurt myself with my expectations of reciprocal treatment, and auditioned for people’s approval. That said, I now know that none of this information should be on my online dating profile.
Codependence can be tricky to diagnose because it’s so socially acceptable and even rewarded in our culture. Buying gifts, lending someone money, driving a friend to the airport—these are all filed under being selfless or having good manners. But as a very wise friend of mine once said, “People pleasing is a form of assholery” because our seemingly benevolent behaviors often have sticky motives. These could include needing someone to like us, fear of abandonment, setting ourselves up for disappointment, victimizing ourselves, and trying to maintain a perfect reputation to give us an identity, since we tend not to have one without feedback or validation from others.
The motives part was very confusing to me at first because I had a hard time delineating what was and wasn’t a clean motive. My brain commingled so many dynamics from my childhood that I truly always thought I was doing the right thing, but a lot of my behavior benefited nobody. For example, I now know that it’s “nice” for me to drive you to the airport, but not so much if a week later I text you, and when I don’t hear back in an hour, I think, “How dare she! After I drove her to the airport on a weekday!” followed by stewing in my self-righteousness and resentment, making myself the victim. See how this “nice” gesture is not at all nice given that there are strings attached in the form of impossible expectations? Doing kind things for people and then being angry when they don’t reciprocate by behaving the way we need them to in our heads is how we re-create feelings of being a victim, which is a very easy comfort zone to get cozy in. This batshittery is often described as “taking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Before I started working on overcoming my codependence, I used to pound that metaphorical poison with a metaphorical beer bong.
Before I rewired my brain on the codependence front, I was always micromanaging someone else’s experience: I was always making sure everyone was eating, the right music was playing, the AC was at the right temperature. I would tiptoe around everyone else’s needs (real or imaginary) and limitations, yet martyr myself by tolerating an endless amount of discomfort and stress. For example, I lived with giant cockroaches in my apartment for years because I didn’t have the courage to stand up to my landlord. I ate food I was allergic to because I was afraid of offending a dinner-party host. In college, I answered to the name Wendy for years because I was too afraid to correct someone in my building who had misheard my name when we first met.
Now, for those of you who relate, welcome! Let’s become besties and make a big mess! And for those of you who are baffled about why I’d engage in this kind of emotional cutting, the long and short of it is that being disappointed by people was my safe place, so when people didn’t disappoint me, instead of enduring the anxiety of waiting for it, I’d jerry-rig the situation so that it would happen right away on my terms. From what I gather from the gaggle of experts I’ve overpaid to explain these emotional gymnastics to me, as adults we tend to re-create whatever happened to us as kids so our minds can maintain the chemical equilibrium that we’ve acclimated to. Being disappointed was my comfort zone so my brain would choose familiar insanity over unfamiliar sanity every time.
Okay, so you’re getting the gist of what codependence is, but you’re probably wondering how one becomes codependent in the first place. I’ll tell you, because if you consult WebMD you’ll just end up deducing that you have leprosy, so allow me to save you a bit of panic. There are a myriad of ways someone can end up being codependent, but in my case it was a couple of specific things. First, I believe some of my family members may have been codependent, which they got from their parents, who got it from their parents and into the matrix we go. I’m sure the generations before us had good intentions and did the best they could—in fact, most of them were probably straight-up heroes—but our grandparents and their grandparents were alive at a time when therapy and self-awareness weren’t really a thing. There wasn’t much time back then for self-help, given they had to spend most of their time dodging scurvy and cannonballs.
Codependence thrives in alcoholic households. And let me just throw out that when I say alcoholic, I understand that word as describing a dynamic of continually doing something despite negative consequences. I’m not an addiction specialist, but smart ones have told me that alcoholism doesn’t just apply to cartoon bums pounding bourbon from brown paper bags, it can be used to describe overusing anything to anesthetize discomfort: eating, drinking, fighting, cheating, gambling, worrying, shopping, or in my case, controlling. And by controlling, I mean micromanaging circumstances so everyone is comfortable so there’s no conflict. Why? So I can feel safe, ya silly goose. This behavior kept me safe as a child, but made me annoying as an adult.
Our parents and grandparents came by their alcoholic behavior honestly. Up until the early 1900s, even water contained alcohol in it as an antiseptic. If you didn’t put alcohol in your water, you were at risk for dysentery, so everyone was pretty much shit-faced, which actually explains a lot about why men were so comfortable wearing white curly wigs. Until pretty recently, people were either wasted or taking care of someone who was, breeding a generation of caretakers who created a blueprint for future generations to emulate and, voilà, the insidious vortex that is present-day codependence.
I’d be remiss to ignore how codependence also could have some roots in our various religions, many of which transmit the message “Take care of people at all costs and put yourself last.” I can’t argue with “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” assuming you aren’t one of those people who likes to pierce his face and hang himself from hooks. In that case, maybe leave others out of it.
I went to some religious schools as a kid and I felt shame and guilt if I took care of myself because selflessness and sacrifice were so glorified there. In church I learned that if I care for others at all costs, I not only get to go to heaven but also got to eat yummy low-cal wafers. It always bummed me out that I had to imagine my tasty snacks as being the body of Christ, but once I was able to block out the image of eating the skin of a dying man from two thousand years ago, those wafers were the highlight of my day and made the emotional martyrdom very worth it.
I was working on the theory that capitalism and the “American way” was inculcated into our brains to do whatever was necessary to impress and get the approval of others, to live the American dream, but when I went to Asia, I felt the vibe over there was deeply codependent as well, so maybe this is more of a global or simply deeply tribal phenomenon. The truth is, it’s deeply codependent of me to feel I need to impress you with how strong a handle I have on the origins of codependence, but I’m hoping you’re gleaning a bit about how deeply the dynamic of people pleasing is rooted in our collective human history. I’m throwing out some educated-ish guesses, but codependence seems to be a dizzying mix of human nature, cultural conditioning, and people posting photos of themselves on social media looking way happier than they actually are.
I think it’s pr
etty obvious that I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m essentially a professional party clown who tries to make drunk people laugh at night, but having grown up around codependence and suffering from it my entire life, I do feel I can say with authority that always needing to be perfect, polite, and generous breeds a toxic culture of shame, guilt, competition, and inauthenticity. I grew up in a fragile ecosystem in which the appearance of being happy eclipsed actually being happy. I learned that to be happy yourself, you must make others happy by dazzling them with humor, compliments, gifts—basically anything material and ephemeral. During Christmas at relatives’ houses, no matter how much I could feel we all resented one another, there was always a giant mountain of gifts under the tree. It was always so confusing to me that people would spend the day arguing and then follow that by exchanging gifts. I learned that presents were a way to pretend everything was fine when it clearly wasn’t, even though many of the presents were obvious regifts. My brain learned at an early age: As long as everything looks fine, everything is fine. Hence me in my twenties spending more money on bronzer and wrinkle cream than on food.
Another element of my codependence is doing things out of a feeling of obligation instead of out of the actual desire to do them. Growing up, I learned that wanting to do something had nothing to do with whether or not you actually did it. The messages I heard were “we have to swing by that holiday party” or “you gotta send that thank-you card.” A lot of what we did felt rooted in obligation, which of course comes from a deep fear of disappointing other people and the desire to make sure everyone thought and spoke highly of us. This of course never worked, because every time I was dragged to an event out of obligation, I ruined our reputation by sulking in the corner and wearing way-too-tight clothes from the dELiA’s catalogue. And if you don’t know what dELiA’s is, first of all, congratulations on being so young, and second, dELiA’s was a catalogue in the nineties where emo girls got their cheap, overpriced tank tops.
We’ve probably all had the experience as kids of having a phone jammed in our faces and being told to “say hi to your aunt Glenda!” even though you’ve never liked, or worse, never even met Aunt Glenda. I don’t have an aunt named Glenda, but the point is that I was often forced to be nice to people and had to learn very early on how to fake enthusiasm. I was never able to develop an organic desire to connect with my metaphorical aunt Glenda. I’m sure she would be lovely if she existed, but how could we ever have a healthy, mutually enjoyable relationship if I wasn’t able to talk to her by choice instead of as a chore? I learned that if someone wants something from you, you don’t get to say no; you have to be inauthentic and force a connection with people instead of letting it develop naturally. I understand our society labels a chat with Fake Aunt Glenda as “polite,” but as a child I found this very confusing. It taught me to put other people’s needs before my own, and when I was an adult, it taught me to fake everything from happiness to interest to orgasms.
Birth order is another ingredient that factored into the development of my codependence. Being the youngest in the family doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be a codependent, but for me, being the last kid out of the tunnel meant I had to squeeze into an already established system, which meant morphing into whatever shape would get me some attention. I tried every antic I could think of: being funny, dramatic, overachieving, or sick. Naturally, as an adult I continued to do these things out of habit. Given we’re basically fancy monkeys, we keep doing what worked as kids. When I was twenty-seven, I realized that I literally yelled during one-on-one conversations with people. As a kid I always had to talk so loudly to be heard that when I grew up, I didn’t even know the appropriate decibel level to hit in a civilized conversation. Back then, every time I spoke it sounded like I was getting murdered.
As a kid I developed many a survival skill that came in handy when things were stressful: being quiet during family conflict as to not make things worse, making jokes when things were tense, or just being a general chameleon in all situations. Complaining or needing things just seemed to exacerbate the stress and push people into making me feel guilty, so I began stuffing down my feelings and resorting to very sexy behavior like passive aggression and dissociation into fantasy worlds to escape. I used to pretend I was Kelly Bundy from Married . . . with Children, which eventually went from fantasy to reality, leading to some unfortunate wardrobe choices, burnt eyeballs from dousing myself with Aqua Net, and at least one rolled ankle.
In my nascent years I learned all sorts of maladaptive skills, one of which was how to anticipate someone else’s needs. I became an expert at walking on literal and figurative eggshells because I also found out that cooking for people made them like you, so I started doing that at an early age. This may sound sad, but if I may find a silver lining, being able to say you can poach an egg really rounds out the ole Match.com profile.
This all coalesced into my becoming an adult (I use that term loosely) who spent a tremendous amount of time taking care of other people and trying to be helpful, then resenting the people I helped. My vocabulary was littered with “I gotta” and “I have to.” Again, I’m sure it seems like the honorable or polite thing to do, to attend someone’s birthday or baby shower or whatever, but the underlying vibe was that of obligation, and often it felt like a chore. I literally looked at most social invitations the same way I looked at a jury duty summons.
As a codependent, I mastered the art of giving my energy away. Before I got a handle on this nasty beast, I was always exhausted. My days were booked solid with work and social obligations, chores, errands, things I thought I “had” to do. Even social events were depleting because I’d go out of obligation and I’d spend most of my time figuring out how to be useful. I was always the chump who would spend the whole party listening to someone else’s problems for two hours while everyone else was doing shots. Mind you, these were problems that no one actually wanted to solve; they just wanted to blather on about them ad nauseam. I call such people “time vampires” because they suck you into their problems and don’t actually want a solution to said problems. Oh, and the “problems” usually involve “drama” with guys named Tad or Jake.
And if I wasn’t in the corner of a party trying to help people figure out if they should get a divorce or giving them phone numbers to doctors, I didn’t really know what to do with myself, so I’d be in the kitchen cleaning up. I truly thought I was being nice, but chances are I came off as annoying and micromanagey. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the only thing worse than asking a woman her age in front of a group of people is going into her kitchen without her very explicitly asking you to do so. If you storm into another woman’s kitchen without her consent, you might as well just have sex with her husband while you’re at it; then after you’re done, ask her how old she is in front of him. Then tweet it.
Aside from all the aforementioned lunacy, my codependence also made me kind of grating. I was the person who was so socially anxious that I’d be hovering over you at a party, offering you water or a drink as if you were terminally ill. I was the one giving you an extravagant gift that frankly you didn’t deserve, which ended up making you feel awkward and guilty for not getting me one. Some of my codependent pals call this being “pathologically thoughtful.” We care about people to the point of smothering them and making them uncomfortable. I was like a crackhead, fiending for connection and purpose so that I could feel useful, helpful, pretty, alive . . . anything but self-aware. I was an addict and being needed was my drug.
My point is that a “fun night out” always ended with me being some stranger’s therapist, doctor, mother, godmother, dermatologist, or janitor. I could never leave a party without three phone numbers of time vampires so we could be “besties.” I’m not a statistician, but I’m almost positive I’ve gotten more phone numbers of kooky girls than Stephen Dorff got at Playboy Mansion parties in the nineties. The problem is that I was literally hoarding friends. Even though I had an abun
dance of amazing friends that I already didn’t have time for, I still continued to add to my contact list anyway, creating an unsustainable number of friendships I could never possibly nurture in a healthy way. Since I’ve been in codependence therapy, it’s clear that today I’m at capacity and have no business taking on new friends. No vacancy, no new friend applications for now. Sorry to disappoint you, but to take on a new pal, I need someone in my circle to either go on a six-month silent retreat, move to a city without Internet, or vape when we’re in public together, which would mean immediate excommunication from said circle.
My codependence drove me to be kind of a compulsive friend-aholic. My codependence told me that I had to be friends with everyone. I needed everyone to be obsessed with me. And if someone didn’t want to be friends with me? Oh, girl, I’m comin’ for ya. You shall be mine. If you didn’t fall in love with me immediately, that just meant I would work even harder for your approval. I’d shape-shift into what you needed me to be: funnier, quieter, shorter. You read that right. I have worn flats around people shorter than me so they didn’t have to feel insecure about their height.
Once I became friends with someone, it wasn’t really about girl talk or having fun, it was about entrenching. We couldn’t just be pals, we had to be intertwined like all the classic duos: Thelma and Louise, Sid and Nancy, Cocaine and Rehab. I realize this may sound very predatory, but when you’re codependent, attaching to needy people comes very naturally because that’s how you derive your self-worth and meaning. I didn’t really know who I was unless I was rescuing someone or helping people with their problems, both real and imagined.
I think my addiction to energy suckers must also have been a way of dissociating so I didn’t have to look inward at myself and my own shortcomings. Focusing on other people’s problems meant I didn’t have to look at myself in the mirror. When you’re so consumed with other people’s issues, you don’t have time to look at your own. I mean, Googling myself is one thing, but looking at my flaws? Pass.
I'm Fine...And Other Lies Page 4