codependency
Pia Mellody’s 5 Core Symptoms of Codependence - which Executive Director Kat Zwick very much agrees with - are as follows:
Difficulty experiencing appropriate levels of self-esteem
Difficulty setting functional boundaries
Difficulty owning your own reality
Difficulty owning your own needs and wants
Difficulty experiencing and expressing your reality moderately (i.e. living in extremes)
From Kat Zwick:
Codependency can also be considered a process addiction due to its often compulsive nature and can show up in many different ways.
In some cases, a person becomes addicted to fixing, managing, and controlling others or experiences their own happiness and well-being only if others they love are happy and well.
Codependency can show up as compulsive rescuing or only feeling "worthy" if one is useful to someone else. Codependency shows up also in intense emotional reactivity to others' behaviors and a hypersensitivity to being hurt, rejected, or abandoned. Some codependency shows up as a self-harm or suicidality when someone feels rejected, abandoned, or hurt by someone they love.
"codependency can rob a person of their sense of agency and choices and leave them feeling like a cork being tossed around in someone else's ocean."
Some codependency shows up as compulsive people pleasing and an inability to truly discern one's own opinions, thoughts, and beliefs from what would be - supposedly - pleasing to others. Some experience a "fog of codependency" wherein from one moment to the next they may feel and think radically differently about a situation depending on who they are talking to and hearing from.
Other people's opinions, thoughts, and beliefs may matter to people who are codependent so much that they may become beside themselves if they cannot please another person or are disliked by another person.
Some people with codependency compulsively hear criticism or blame from other people where there is none and find it incredibly painful to hear normative feedback or requests for behavior change from colleagues or loved ones.
These and other codependent patterns of behavior can end up ruling a person's life and can lead to a strong sense of resentment, hopelessness, loss of identity, and directionlessness in addition to romantic relationships with unavailable or addicted people, jobs wherein they do not feel satisfied or fulfilled, and strained or one-sided relationships with peers and family. Codependency can also have serious financial consequences for people who compulsively rescue others from their own financial troubles.
At its worst, codependency can contribute to one's death in a multitude of ways, as codependency may lead to neglect of one's own health or to reactive suicidality when rejected or hurt by a loved one.
Codependency, like the other process addictions mentioned on our other pages, also is compulsively used as a way to soothe or distract from emotional, physical, relational or spiritual distress (and remember joy can be experienced as distressing), in that typically the focus of a person in codependency is the behavior of another person or the well-being of another person or the thoughts and beliefs of another person. By focusing so externally, compulsively, a codependent person may be relieved from having to focus on their own difficulties, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, memories, experiences, and trauma. Codependency can rob a person of their sense of agency and choices and leave them feeling like a cork being tossed around in someone else's ocean.