Codependency – When Caring Becomes Too Much
Have you ever completely lost your temper about something while in a shop or a restaurant, only to feel foolish about it afterwards? Perhaps you were in a queue at the checkout, and someone tried to push in, making you angry? Or maybe, while you were driving your car another vehicle cut in front of you and before you knew it, you were ranting like a madman. The red mist descended and reason went out of the window.
Things like that used to happen to me all the time. Thankfully, these days I’ve learned to be a little more restrained when they occur, but I can still get riled at the drop of a hat if I let my emotions get the better of me.
Of course, it’s perfectly reasonable to feel angry or aggrieved if someone does something that’s genuinely wrong, but for addicts it goes much deeper than this. The temper outbursts we experience are often out of all proportion to the events that cause them. If this happens to you regularly, there could be something very complex going on beneath the surface of your emotions.
If you’re the sort of person who has a short fuse and feels embarrassed about it afterwards – or alternatively, if you stay angry and brood about it for a long time – then this could be an important clue that you may have an addictive nature.
Here’s a true story about something that happened to me recently which illustrates what goes on internally when addicts experience these outbursts.
I needed a mobile broadband service for my new laptop, so I visited a glitzy electrical store in London’s Oxford Street. I spent ages in the shop, talking to a helpful young assistant who did his best to explain to me – while I tried to understand – all the various options. There were plenty of providers to choose from, plus short-term contracts, long-term contracts, pay-as-you-go deals.
Forty minutes later I left the store, several pounds poorer and holding a box with a computer dongle inside it. Almost as soon as I got outside, I realized that I’d bought the wrong one. But it had been a long day and I was tired, so I went home. However, the next morning, I returned to the shop as soon as it opened.
‘I’d like to return this please; I’ve bought the wrong one,’ I explained to an assistant.
The young man looked at me for a moment, and then told me that it wouldn’t be possible to exchange the item or get a refund. When I asked him why not, he told me that the forms I’d filled in the previous day were legally binding. He was polite and measured, but unfortunately, that’s not the way I heard it.
The way I interpreted it, he was telling me I was Stupid with a capital ‘S’. I felt I should have thought about it before rushing in and signing away my rights, so I reacted like a lot of alcoholics do in similar situations: with anger.
I wondered whether the assistant would see my point of view a little better if I were to bang his head on the counter! I wasn’t just angry: I was furious. When I looked at the young man I felt as if I wanted to kill him. Luckily, since giving up drinking, I’m now aware that being violent won’t get me anywhere, but if this incident had happened back in the days when I was drinking heavily, it would have ended with the police being called.
Instead, this time around, I just asked the assistant for the address of his head office – albeit through gritted teeth – so that I could write to them and complain. (When I later contacted them, I didn’t get a refund, but neither did I end up in a cell!)
Okay, I was miffed because I couldn’t get what I wanted, but was that the only thing that caused me to feel so much anger? To some extent you might think it was reasonable for me to feel annoyed – but to the point where I felt angry enough to kill?
Well, the answer is very interesting. My behaviour was rooted in something called codependency, which is a condition that’s likely to touch all of us from time to time. But for addicts it can be fatal.
As human beings, we depend on each other for our needs. In fact, it would be impossible for individual members of the human race to survive without cooperating with others. This applies not just to our physical needs – such as food and shelter – but also to our emotional wellbeing.
It’s natural for us to want to feel valued and loved by others, and also to be capable of giving love and warmth in return. The opposite of this is loneliness and solitude, which most people would agree is a negative thing. We are social beings and in this respect we’re happiest when we’re in a flock or a herd, or a human tribe.
So, being interdependent and caring about others is a good thing. But what if we care too much about what other people think of us?
Caring can become an obsession – and that’s when things start to get problematic, because it can cause us to behave in ways that have negative consequences for ourselves and other people.
Our interdependency becomes codependency, and we become completely reliant on others for our sense of self-worth. Caring about what other people think isn’t a problem, but caring to the degree that we cause distress or harm to either ourselves or others, is.
Codependency is closely linked to addiction, and it usually develops due to the experiences we have during childhood. This is an idea that’s brilliantly explained by the American therapist Pia Mellody (see the list of her works in Appendix 1 of this book).
The story I told you earlier about my experience in the electrical store is an example of codependency at work. Without my realizing it, the shop assistant was stirring up subconscious memories within me. When I was a child, I was told constantly that I was stupid, and that I always acted without thinking. That is what I felt my parents and my teacher had drummed into me: I was impulsive and I didn’t listen, and this made me a bad little boy.
The knock-on effect of this is that, many years later, I’m now sensitive to any hint of criticism. If I perceive that someone is putting me down I immediately feel less than equal. The way I adapt to these feelings of low self-worth is through anger, which is a defence mechanism with the power to make me feel more than equal.
These feelings of ‘Less Than’ and ‘More Than’ are very important. They help to explain why addicts behave the way they do – and they are the defining characteristics of codependency. If this all sounds a little abstract, then a simpler way to think of it is like this: if you’ve been through a shit time as a kid, it’s no surprise if you’re hyper-touchy in later life. The problem is that most of the time we have no idea it’s happening.
We have two different types of memory. There are ‘explicit memories’, which are our normal recollections of events and experiences that we can consciously re-create in our minds. These are what we normally mean when we talk about our memories. But we also possess ‘implicit memories’, which are far more complex. They exist in our limbic system, but we may not actually be aware of them.
If we suffer emotional trauma as a child, the implicit memories of this can become locked in our limbic system. The result can be low self-esteem to the point where we become codependent on other people in order to validate our own self-worth. We can only feel good about ourselves through the affirmation of others, and it can cause us to behave in ways that are very manipulative and controlling in order to get what we want.
I believe that both codependency and addiction need to be understood from a limbic perspective, and that the two conditions go hand in hand. To use my earlier story again, it might be reasonable for an ordinary person to be unhappy about their treatment in a shop, but for me it went deeper. It was personal. The assistant inadvertently triggered my childhood trauma.
While it’s sometimes acceptable to be upset if someone does you a wrong, if you find it goes much deeper, and it eats into your self-esteem, codependency could be at play.
If an addict’s limbic system is more sensitive than most people’s, it follows that we’ll feel anything that happens to us more acutely, especially if it occurs during childhood when we’re at our most impressionable.
Now, in lots of ways that can mean more joy, but it can also mean more fear. The highs are much higher, but the lows can be devastating, even if they are triggered by things that are seemingly minor.
Our limbic system is designed to keep us alive via fight, flight or freeze, so therefore it reacts to threats. If something happens to us in our childhood that we perceive as dangerous, it will kick in. It doesn’t matter whether or not the danger is real or imaginary: the effect is the same.
The emotions that this reaction causes can get locked into our implicit memories, and they can remain there until the day we die if we don’t do something about it. Every time the emotions are triggered they have the potential to re-invent themselves. They can also be the reason why alcoholics constantly reach for the bottle, or overeaters indulge in compulsive bingeing.
The addict doesn’t consciously think about their childhood – remember, this behaviour is driven by memories that are implicit rather than explicit. Instead, more often than not, they simply find it harder to cope with the normal emotional ups and downs of everyday life that everyone encounters.
When it comes to understanding addiction, the importance of childhood experiences cannot be overstated. In fact, I would go so far as to say that childhood trauma is a predominant factor in more than 90 per cent of the cases that I’ve encountered during my work as a therapist.
The events that caused this trauma can range from the overt – such as forceful physical or sexual abuse – to things which, at first glance, seem to be much more minor. These can include when a parent is unaffectionate, say, or behaves in some other way that’s upsetting for the child at the time.
Remember, it doesn’t matter if the threat is real or imaginary, the trauma it causes has the same effect. (Pia Mellody explores this in her book Facing Codependence, which I recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the subject.)
Perhaps the most obvious example of childhood trauma occurs when a baby is taken from its mother. A small child is obviously completely dependent on its primary caregiver, so if it’s suddenly separated from that person for whatever reason, it’ll create a huge trauma. The child may go on to be adopted, and will have no conscious memory of the event, but the feelings and emotions will be locked in his or her limbic system.
That person may spend the rest of their life subconsciously trying to ease their own distress. I’ll return to this point later on in the book, in the chapter about childhood trauma, but for now I shall just say that most addicts have experienced childhood issues that provide clues about their behaviour in later life.
If you find yourself worrying about something your boss said in a meeting, that might be normal, to a degree, but if you’re thinking about it over and over again, it can become unhealthy. If you spend a vast amount of time fretting about whether you’ve upset somebody for one reason or another, it can be a classic symptom of codependency.
One of the things you’re likely to be super-sensitive about is what other people think of you, even when it’s not relevant. That’s codependence – the reliance or need for approval from other people.
In all relationships – whether it’s your primary sexual relationships, your family relationships or your business relationships – if you’re codependent, you can only feel okay if you know the other person feels okay about you.
Of course, most people probably have legitimate concerns about what their boss thinks of them from time to time, but for people suffering from codependency it can be a full-time obsession. I’ve encountered lots of functioning addicts who are reliant on their jobs for their self-esteem.
The problem with this is that, just like every other temporary high, the boost it gives is only temporary. Addicts find themselves hanging on their boss’s every word for praise or criticism, and they worry about it for hours afterwards.
Quite often we find that people who are codependent will also go around trying to fix everybody. This is called compulsive helping. Obviously, a willingness to help others is a good thing, but if it becomes controlling or manipulative then it can also become very sinister and negative.
Fundamentally, the compulsive helper is saying: ‘I can only feel wanted and needed if you’re okay, and if you think anything of me other than that I’m perfect, I’m going to be in a bad place.’ If a codependent person can’t get the affirmation they need from you, they’ll be back down there again, like a scared three-year-old.
If their boss doesn’t approve of what they’re doing, or if their partner doesn’t like what they’re thinking, or if their parents question their behaviour, it sends them into free fall. If it leads them to feel ‘Less Than’, they have an urge to fix it.
If you have an addictive nature, you’re likely to go off and start using all sorts of mood-altering substances or processes to take away the distress you feel. If you get praise or approval from your boss, that’s fine, but the moment it’s gone, you’ll be seeking more. But no matter how much you get today, it won’t fix tomorrow.
Most drunkards claim that they don’t give a fuck about what other people think of them, but ask them when they’re sober and it’s a different story. The truth is that they often care very much. In my case, it’s why I went in the pub in the first place. I was afraid of being criticized, and I was just waiting for somebody to tell me that I was a piece of shit. This type of insecurity drives codependency.
So, to sum up, I believe that addictive behaviour is fuelled by a chronic oversensitivity to emotional distress. These feelings exist in our limbic system and are often a direct result of childhood trauma. They can lead us to act in a manner that’s beyond our conscious control, and they can lead to codependency.
In the case of somebody who suffers from an active addiction, he or she will repeatedly indulge in substances and processes in an attempt to alleviate this distress, regardless of the negative consequences. The really terrifying thing is that these influences can control almost every part of our daily lives – and as we shall see in the next few chapters, they can affect all of us to varying degrees.