by Bruce Tift
UNDERSTANDING CODEPENDENT DYNAMICS
As we enter adulthood, we begin to discover how powerfully conditioned most of our experiencing actually is. This conditioning arises from our social and cultural experience, our gender training, our family of origin, unexpected life events, and so on. For example, traditionally women have been taught that their worth as persons comes from relationship, from their ability to be sensitive to the needs of others. While in some ways this is changing, on the whole, if a woman stands up as separate and independent—perhaps choosing not to have children, but instead to focus on career—she’s often criticized as cold and not really feminine. Men, on the other hand, are taught that their worth comes from their ability to stand up as separate people. They’re taught to go out into the world, take their hits, not complain, and not be dependent. If a man shows too much dependency or emotional sensitivity, he’s often criticized as not being manly enough. As discussed, most of us also strongly shape our relationship styles in response to our parents’ energy and behavior. As an accommodation to these many complex influences, we almost always seem to grow up learning to be identified with either a connecting or a separating style, with a disconnection from the other energy.
The complexity of our styles and the strength of the disconnection appear to operate along a continuum. In my experience as a therapist, it’s extremely rare for somebody to come into adulthood without such a stylistic imbalance. I’m using the word “imbalance,” because usually we’re unconsciously disconnected from the opposite energy and don’t really experience choice in how we relate. We tend to have a “one size fits all” approach, which, given the complexity of life and of relationships, works well about half the time and not very well about half the time.
Looking back at my own childhood, I believe that it was intelligent for me to disconnect from my feelings of dependence. As far back as I can remember, there’s evidence that self-sufficiency and independence were more likely to get me the love and approval I wanted. I would guess that every time I showed a willingness and ability to take care of myself, I was rewarded. As a result, I entered adulthood with a conscious belief that I was self-sufficient and independent and didn’t really need others. In fact, I put a fair amount of energy into making sure that was the case. I learned to cook, to take care of myself, and to handle my life skillfully. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I started to feel safe enough to realize how incredibly dependent I am as a person.
One of the first clues had to do with my relationship with my wife. It dawned on me one day that if I were truly independent, she wouldn’t bug me so much. I wouldn’t be so disturbed by her tone of voice, her behavior, or how she related to me. I wouldn’t feel so warm and relaxed when she was kind to me. She had an incredible impact on my feelings; apparently, I was so dependent that my state of mind was profoundly affected by her mood and behavior. When I’m working with clients, it’s often pretty obvious, pretty quickly, what style they have. If clients have a very self-sufficient style, like I do, I encourage them to say out loud, “Perhaps, secretly, I’m an incredibly needy, dependent person.” The responses I get are very interesting! Often there’s a type of disbelief or revulsion at the thought. If, on the other hand, someone specializes in always trying to connect, soothe, and accommodate others, I might suggest that they say out loud, “Perhaps, secretly, I’m an incredibly selfish, angry person.” The response in this case is usually something like, “But that’s so horrible! I don’t want to be that way. That’s a bad way to be.” As we start looking into these organizations, we usually find that we’ve not only been suppressing half of the story—the half that didn’t work as young children—but we’ve also often had to attack or abandon that part of ourselves to make sure it never comes up. We’ve had to sacrifice part of ourselves for the sake of our larger well-being. Because of this, many of us enter adulthood with a lot of judgment and even aggression toward that disowned half of who we are.
Another important dynamic to consider is that we all have been trained into the experience of relationship in which we, as children, are immature, deeply dependent, and without power. The “other” is the parent, not an equal. Mutuality is not even a possibility. We must learn to cue off the other’s reality, compromise our integrity to purchase security and love, and remain private in much of our vulnerability. If we’re able, we learn to read our parents’ moods, anticipate their behavior, and try our best to be who we think they want us to be. Also, the younger we are, the more our experience of relationship is, appropriately, one of emotional fusion. Our most formative training in intimacy is that of learning how to relate within the energy of being merged with the other.
If we are fortunate, our experience as a powerless child is positive. If unfortunate, our experience is negative. But in all cases, we learn how to relate to the other from a subordinate, reactive position. Imagine, then, two adults coming together—each from this probably inescapable training in relationship as an experience of powerlessness, of needing to look to the other to have one’s needs met. Although we look like adults and have adult capacities in other parts of our lives, in the arena of intimacy, we’re like a child trying to have a relationship with another child. It’s no surprise that most of us operate in our intimate relationships in a much less mature way than we operate in the world. We often treat our partners, and allow ourselves to be treated, in ways we would never accept with friends or colleagues.
With these understandings, we can begin to explore the phenomenon of codependency. We could say that pretty much all of us enter adulthood predisposed to codependent dynamics, some obviously more so than others. The basic dynamic of codependency is when one person chooses, or “hires,” a partner to be the location of—to manifest—exactly those energies that the first person has disowned in themselves. The partner, in turn, has hired the first person to be the location of his or her own disowned energies. I’ve seen this dynamic with almost every couple I have known, whether socially or in my work as a therapist. People like myself, who grew up disowning our dependency, will mysteriously be attracted to and attract partners who specialize in connection. If it’s a good fit, that connecting partner will be hiring the independent person to be the location of separateness. Now, this is actually a good division of labor; if it were a conscious decision, it would be fine. But most of us have a compulsive, unconscious relationship to our own style. We don’t choose it, but we unconsciously maintain it, even when there’s evidence that it’s not working well. It feels as if our survival is somehow at risk if we don’t.
A basic theme of codependent dynamics is that one person is the voice of connection, and the other is the voice of separateness. The connecting person will take responsibility for wanting more connection. The separateness person will take responsibility for wanting more space. At first, it seems like a really good fit. It’s like we’ve found our missing half. For example, when I met my wife—who specializes in connection and dependency—at first it was, “Oh, this person is so playful and emotionally expressive and sensitive and nurturing!” After a few years, however, my fundamental aggression toward that energy started to come out. At that point, it was like, “Why doesn’t she get a life of her own? Why is she such a leech? Why is she so dependent? Why can’t she be more like me?” Likewise, at first my wife appreciated me being strong and confident. She liked that I was able to deal with the world competently and be a steady support without getting captured by my emotions. After a few years, however, the complaints began. “You’re unavailable. You’re insensitive. You used to want to be close. Why can’t you be more emotionally engaged?”
This is a predictable theme in my work with couples. Some version of this drama will almost always be present. What we don’t understand is that it’s a setup. Initially we feel like we’ve found our missing halves, but there’s a reason that half is missing: we’ve disowned it. It’s only a matter of time until the fact that we’re aggressive toward that part of ourselves will start to be expre
ssed as aggression toward the very person we’ve hired to hold that energy for us. After a few years, most couples end up with a sense of polarization—even an adversarial attitude toward one another. It may not be there 24/7, but it’s a theme that keeps arising and getting more difficult. Often we take the position that we don’t really understand each other; we don’t “get” each other. What we actually don’t get is that we have hired our partner to manifest what we’re not willing to be responsible for in ourselves. So in therapy, this is a lot of the work I do, addressing this “mutual projection process.” It’s not the whole path of intimacy, but it’s a lot of the work that happens inside my office, because most couples seem to be dealing with it to a greater or lesser degree.
Team Neurosis
Codependency is basically an agreement between two people to ritualize a balance between closeness and separation. It’s an unconscious effort to experience wholeness without having to take conscious ownership of what we don’t want to experience in ourselves. So we look for wholeness in the relationship rather than in ourselves. Each person wants connection, but at the same time, neither wants to feel too vulnerable. So we get close, but then we each protect ourselves from a direct experience of these vulnerabilities by blaming the other for our own internal disturbances. That’s the core of the problem: neither of us is taking responsibility for the never-resolvable tension within ourselves of having profoundly contradictory feelings about intimacy, and we’re projecting the cause of this tension onto our partners. Since we’re not acknowledging the tension inside of ourselves—that we want both closeness and separation with our partner—that tension starts to be experienced as if it were between the two of us. As a result, the relationship itself starts to feel problematic.
Without knowing it, each partner is actually using the relationship to serve a function—the same function that neurotic organization serves within the individual: to attempt to live a life without disturbance. We want to be close to somebody, and yet, at the same time, we don’t want to feel the vulnerabilities that being close to someone reveals. We want to feel fresh and alive while not having to feel powerless, sad, angry, or whatever a spontaneous engagement with life may invite. But of course, it doesn’t work in relationship any better than it works in our own private life. Once again, there’s a dissociative split; a pretending that operates on an unconscious level. We’re pretending that half of our experience is not here—it’s in the other person. It’s not who I am; it’s you. In this way, I like to think of codependency almost like “team neurosis.” It’s serving the same distractive function, but it’s a step more elaborate. We are once again removing ourselves from our immediate embodied experience, because that experience is actually disturbing. It’s disturbing to be alive. It’s especially disturbing to be alive in an intimate relationship.
Neurosis is organized to make sure that no resolution is found, so that it’s distractive function is not lost. This means that our avoidant strategies must never be seen as out of date and as no longer needed. Codependent dynamics take this a step further. “Not only am I in my own personal state of never-to-be-resolved drama and struggle, but now I’ve involved somebody else—and that person has involved me. The apparent disturbance is not just inside me; it seems to be outside me as well, between myself and my partner.” And just like neurosis, our unconscious investment in the codependent dynamic is to make sure it never is “seen through.” If it were resolved, we would be threatened with having to be responsible for our own difficulties, our own emotional vulnerabilities. As long as we can point the finger at our partner and say, “You’re the cause of my grief, rage, disappointment, and abandonment,” our attention remains elsewhere. The more we behave, think, and feel as if our partner is the problem, the less likely we’ll be forced to see our own deeply contradictory feelings. Most of us would unconsciously prefer to have our partner say “no” to our fantasies and then blame him or her, rather than have to say “no” to ourselves.
THE UNCONSCIOUS EXPRESSION OF OUR “DISOWNED HALF”
When we find a good fit for our codependent dynamics, we enable each other in strengthening our claim that it should be possible to only have our preferred half of the complex reality of relationship. “I want more connection and engagement; you’re the problem because you won’t give it to me.” “I want more separateness and freedom; you’re the problem because you won’t give it to me.” However, because we all must have both energies, what we are disowning must continue to be expressed. When we routinely complain that there’s not enough connection, we’re really saying that we feel separate but that this feeling is a problem. Not appreciating the connection that is always there, because it doesn’t fit our preferences, is actually the disguised activity of separateness. But now the fact that we are withholding relationship, perhaps out of hurt and pain, is expressed unconsciously and indirectly. I find the partners taking this role are often focused on what they’re not getting, their feelings of abandonment or lack of engagement, communicating their disappointment to their partner, or retreating into the self-absorption of blaming themselves. Their behavior is actually reflecting their investment in feeling separate. If they really want to feel more connected, it’s not complicated, because connection is always present. They can just join their partner’s reality. They can focus on moments of engagement and mutuality and bring to mind feelings of being loved and of loving. Of course, they would have to acknowledge the complexity of intimacy—that this isn’t the whole picture, that maybe this isn’t their preferred version of connection.
People who claim they want more separateness are apparently feeling very connected, but they experience this feeling as a problem. Rather than focusing on the separateness, which is always there, always available to be experienced, they complain about demands being made or about how their partner is never satisfied or can’t handle their life and must be taken care of. This is really just a disguised expression of their own dependency feelings; they are maintaining connection in the form of entangled conflict. This unconscious intention is often manifest as ineffective boundaries, allowing them to claim that they’re trying to be separate but are somehow prevented from doing so by their partner. If they really want to feel more separate, it’s not complicated. They must learn not to participate in unproductive conflicts, to have effective boundaries, to stop claiming that their partner is controlling them, and so on. Of course, they would then have to take full responsibility for their own disturbance.
In both styles, the unconscious expression of our disowned half can usually be found in our complaints about our partners. Our complaints are indications of how we are not taking care of ourselves effectively. And not taking care of ourselves in specific ways allows the acting out of that aspect of our experience for which we are not yet ready to take conscious responsibility. Our resentment about not enough connection, our focus on what’s missing, is actually the disguised expression of our separateness. It’s the way we justify withholding ourselves from relationship, because we are not owning this part of ourselves consciously. Our blame about not being given the space we want, about endless demands, is actually the disguised expression of our connection. We justify our dependency by claiming it’s being done to us, thus excusing us from owning this part of ourselves consciously.
“AREN’T I OVER THIS YET?”
Those of us who have done personal work—in therapy or as part of our spiritual path—often have a strong hope or belief that we’ve left the pain and suffering of codependent relationship dynamics behind. However, many of us find that even after this work, there’s still an aspect of our experience with our partners that is indeed codependent. It feels gluey or sticky; there’s still some complaint; we find we’re still withholding ourselves from full engagement. If we find this inquiry disturbing, that probably means there’s something to look at. That’s a good thing. If codependency is there, it’s there. If it’s not, it’s not. If it’s still operating, it’s good to become aware of it, bec
ause then we can work with it. In that way, any disturbance about codependency—or about anything, for that matter—can be understood as indicating exactly what we need to work with. It’s a red flag, a signal that there’s something unresolved that needs to be seen and experienced consciously.
If it’s a good (codependent) fit, both my partner and I will be concurrently blaming each other for our disturbance and our pain. A common theme in relationship is this fantasy: if only our partner would be who we want them to be, then everything would be okay. But the codependent dynamic requires that neither person effectively confront this dynamic. Both of us have to unconsciously be willing to receive the other person’s blame, without setting appropriate boundaries. It’s an unconscious agreement: “I’ll blame you, and you’ll blame me, and both of us will sort of complain about it.” But we won’t do what’s necessary in order to dissolve the pattern—which would be to take care of ourselves.