Breaking Free From Co-Dependency
CLICK HERE TO WATCH A SUMMARY OF THIS BLOG: BREAKING FREE FROM CO-DEPENDENCY
Here are the basic tenets of co-dependency:
-We are afraid to be alone
-We are afraid to be alone because we don’t feel self-love.
-Because we can’t feel self-love we rely on others to ‘give’ us love.
-This unhealthy habit of relying on others to provide us love establishes that we need to take or get something from someone else in order to feel good about ourselves.
-We have now made ourselves a prisoner to the validation and approval that others might or might not give us.
-Other people now have control over our inner state. And our inner state is EVERYTHING in life because how we feel within is always reflected back to us in the external reality. When we allow someone else to determine our inner state based on if they give us validation or not, we have essentially given them our entire experience of life.
-We feel more and more powerless and helpless to the judgments and whims of others and as a result our self esteem and overall satisfaction with life plummets.
-We become afraid of being authentic because we feel like the people we need approval from in order to feel love will remove their approval if we stop wearing the mask that we think they want to see.
-We find ourselves living an inauthentic and superficial life, ridden with fear, guilt and shame surrounded by people and a world who reflect those feelings back to us.
Awww, Co-Dependency, fun stuff!
Okay so what do we do about it? How do we break free of such an inauthentic and miserable life? Let me share a story with you…
Recently I had an emotional breakdown that could have been featured on a day time soap opera.
I would say that it left me embarrassed and ashamed, but that wasn’t the case. I was more curious about the types of behaviors that I can still embody, even knowing everything that I do about life. I wasn’t aware, and quite frankly, I was shocked that I could still act out in the way that I did.
Even while it was happening, I was observing myself with a mixture of humor and pain. It was all so silly, almost like a cosmic joke, yet it was happening and I was in a lot of pain.
While it was happening, I was stupefied as to why I couldn’t gain clarity about the situation. Where was the witness? How had I become a victim to my negative emotions? Why was I reacting instead of responding? Why was I feeling so helpless and powerless to begin with? What choices had led to me feeling so empty and needy?
As I was submerged in reaction mode, I could sense the parts of me that were conscious enough to witness the parts in me that were in emotional upheaval.
I wasn’t conscious enough to bring clarity to the situation but I was conscious enough to know that what I was doing wasn’t the Truth.
No matter how hard my ego tried to justify my actions, deep down, somewhere barely accessible in the moment, I knew that in order to feel whole again I would have to desire the Truth more than I desired protecting my ego.
My ego desperately wanted to get even, to evoke pain on the person that it was blaming for its own pain.
I was deeply involved in the story of my mind that I couldn’t see that the entire breakdown was the result of believing a story in my mind. The only pain I was feeling was the psychological pain that I was creating. In reality nothing was actually happening that could cause me any pain or suffering.
When we become attached to our story in the mind we will become overly attached to other people and external situations all too easily. As we become too attached, we lose our emotional flexibility and then it becomes hard to avoid slipping into reactivity mode.
I just remember being mired in confusion during the entire breakdown. I kept asking, why am I feeling so much pain and why am I acting out this pain? I wasn’t able to access clarity because that would have meant allowing my ego to ‘lose.’
Working through confusion to come to clarity requires brutal honesty. The type of honesty that isn’t easy to own up to. We have to want the truth more than we want to be right, to be loved, or to be safe. The truth has to be the only priority.
And the Truth about my emotional breakdown is that it was another layer of my co-dependency resurfacing.
In some ways I’m glad it happened because I learned a lot from it and I know that I’ll never behave that way with anyone ever again. My co dependent shadow caught me way off guard.
I constantly hit a wall whenever I can’t seem to live for myself.
I was getting the space to really come into my own and to get into a rhythm of living life for myself and instead of embracing that and anchoring myself in that powerful energetic state, I started creating and believing a negative story in my mind about the situation.
I was so unaware of how deep my shadows of co dependency still are that I unconsciously fell back into my old ways and cut off the infinite flow of love that I feel for myself and others.
And there lies our solution to the unhealthy co-dependency that is making us miserable: learning to generate ‘self-love.’
Once we are able to cultivate love for ourselves from within that isn’t dependent on anyone else ‘giving’ us love than we become free from all of our fears that kept us co-dependent in the first place.
If we really love ourselves, our true selves, with all of our hearts, being alone is no longer a burden or something to fear and dread. Actually, we start really enjoying just being with our ‘self’. Our ‘self’ provides us amazing company and we become much more selective of who gets to enjoy being in our ‘self’s’ presence going forward.
Once we are able to really feel our love within, our relationships become a place where we are more interested in sharing rather than taking. Our cup is already full, in fact it may be overflowing and we are just exuberant to share the overflow with others. We don’t need anyone to fill our cup for us anymore so we are free to be completely authentic with everyone at all times.
Yes, the people in our life who were there for the ‘mask’ may say, “see ya later, I don’t really like the authentic you.”
But the thing about the universe is, is that it doesn’t like open spaces, so given enough time, new people will begin to enter your life who you can be completely authentic with and these people will love you for your authentic self. Do you see how much more energy, integrity and satisfaction that brings to you?!
My soul doesn’t desire others in a controlling and possessive way, yet unfortunately my ego will resort to these base desires and attempt to poison my relationships with others.
When the lower aspects of my ego get ahold of love it turns it into unhealthy attachment which leads to jealously, spite and resentment. My Spirit is like fuck this, nothing is worth this. It tells me to let go of others from an egoic perspective…
An emotional breakdown is beneficial in two ways. First off, an emotional breakdown provides us with the potential to uncover some deeply buried unconscious/subconscious patters.
I was feeling empty and devoid of love. And instead of taking responsibility for my lower state and pouring energy into myself by doing the things I love I mistakenly fell to blame and guilt and could not resist the desire to make it another’s responsibility to make me feel whole.
How is it given my level of consciousness that I could behave in this way? I feel the simple answer is a momentum of resistance. I had been resisting my heart centered path for weeks and not giving my ‘self’’ what is most yearned for (creativity). I had become ensnared in the egoic trap of trying to please and live for others. This put me in a very low state and primed me for allowing sub-conscious patterns to re-emerge.
I find it catch-22. On the one hand my behavior was completely ridiculous and honestly quite embarrassing. On the other hand, I allowed so much of my sub-conscious co-dependent patters to surface and it really pulled the veil back and gave me an immense amount of insight into my unhealed shadows.
The real key on this path isn’t to avoid making mistakes or to think that you are always going to act in an enlightened way.
The essential thing is to bring awareness to your unconscious actions, and to process them without any shame or guilt involved.
The quicker we can forgive ourselves and let go of any negative self talk and feelings regarding our mistakes the quicker we can begin uncovering our other subconscious patters that need to be integrated.
You’ll find that once you begin to get comfortable with the process of surrender and letting go that what once took you weeks or even months to process and work through may only take as little as days or even hours to resolve.
The issue may even resurface again but you’ll have more awareness and another reference experience to draw from so you will be much more likely to respond rather than react. Life is like a helix. We came here to be masters at learning certain lessons. That is why just like a helix we keep encountering the same issues over and over again.
