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Myths About CodependencyExcerpted from: Coping with Codependency by Kay Marie Porterfield"I must have been born this way."
Codependents are made not born. Hiding from ourselves and depending on things outside for our self-esteem were lessons taught in childhood. Because our codependency is something we learned one lesson at a time, we can unlearn it one lesson at a time.
All teenagers experience some of the symptoms of codependency some of the time. Rather than moving through the sometimes hard lessons of the teen years, codependents stay stuck. If your adolesence seems far more painful than that of teenagers you know, if you feel unhappy with yourself most of the time, you can take a chance on letting your codependency cure itself, or you can take charge and do something about it now. Codependency is not just another growing pain.
The word codependency sounds pretty serious, as though it were a fatal curse or an incurable disease. It is not. Because codependency is a survival skill, a set of relationship patterns and attitudes that you learned, you can unlearn them. Codependency is a set of coping habits that no longer work for you. Breaking bad habits takes effort, but it can be done.
Since codependents blame themselves for everything that goes wrong in the world, you may feel that just being labeled a codependent is another way of finger pointing. It isn't. You didn't ask to be raised in a family that taught you to be codependent, so becoming codependent was not your fault. Chosing to remain stuck in codependency is a conscious choice for which you are responsible
Absolutely not. As a codependent you may do things that make no sense to people outside of your dysfunctional family but make perfect sense to its members. As you move toward independence and leaving home, as you form relationships with friends, classmates, teachers, bosses, co-workers, and boyfriends and girlfriends, it becomes painfully obvious that codependency is not working. It no longer meets your needs, and it is making you miserable. Feeling bad isn't the same as being crazy. Calling codependency craziness is a way of giving into it and getting out of doing something about it. |
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