Do you ever feel personally responsible when someone in your life is experiencing difficult emotions?

Do you ever watch your mood tank in the presence of someone else’s anxiety or negativity? Or maybe struggle to draw the line between caring about someone and feeling you have to “save,” “rescue,” or “fix” them?  Do you feel like you lose touch with your own voice when somebody else expresses a strong opinion or need? 

Leaning on each other is natural, and being responsive to each other’s feelings is important and healthy… but sometimes our responsiveness and caring can tip toward care-taking, people-pleasing, and ultimately codependency.

Codependency—perceiving other people’s experiences as our responsibility and letting them determine our mood, outlook, purpose, identity or worth—is a very common habit.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy one.

While our codependency often comes from a place of seeking connection and trying to demonstrate care, unfortunately it rarely brings us genuine wellbeing and almost never truly supports or empowers those around us.

In fact, counter to what we might feel, it often does a lot more harm than good!

Here are some of the unfortunate side effects of codependency:

• Being heavily influenced by others’ moods, judgments, and beliefs, and feeling ungrounded and disconnected from yourself as a result

• Feeling responsible for other people’s feelings and choices, and spending a lot of time and energy obsessing over how to help them manage or navigate their issues

• Hypervigilance, social anxiety, and compulsive attempts at mind reading others and predicting their responses to you

• Over-reliance on external validation leading to a fragile sense of self-worth

• Perfectionism and control; curating your self-image and personality around exclusively positive traits

• Insincerity in relationships—pretending and people-pleasing to keep things copacetic

• Mood swings and misdirected rage as a result of self-silencing and self-sacrificing behaviors

• Chronically compromising, ignoring, or denying your needs, then feeling resentment or blame when others don’t intuitively meet them

• Harsh self-criticism and self-loathing when others don’t approve of or appreciate you

• Trouble differentiating between someone else’s experience and your own, especially when emotional intensity is involved

• Relying exclusively on others for your inner balance, happiness, and self-esteem

• Taking on the “rescuer” or “fixer” role in relationships; often feeling you give more than you receive in your connections

• Difficulty self-soothing or emotionally self-regulating when others are in discomfort or seem upset with you

• Having surface-level relationships that struggle to withstand disagreement or conflict, and lack authenticity and true emotional intimacy

If you resonated with this list, chances are that you and codependency have a long history together—maybe even as long as you can remember.

Maybe you have some deeply ingrained codependent tendencies that are sapping your energy and driving you crazy, but that you somehow just can’t seem to overcome.

And I bet you’re really tired of it.

Here’s the good news:

Codependency is not an illness or a personality flaw, it’s a set of unconscious coping skills we can compassionately unlearn and outgrow.

Having codependent patterns is frustrating, there’s no doubt. But it’s not your fault. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. And it’s certainly not a life sentence!

Overcoming codependency is absolutely possible.

It’s is a vulnerable and brave journey—and it’s guaranteed to change your life forever, for the better.

If you feel called to take this journey, I’ve designed an experience just for you…