Codependency Fantasy: When It's Time To Grow Up And Let Go

Are you codependent? Do you lack self-worth, and focus more on others' happiness, needs, and expectations than you do on your own happiness, desires, or wants? When you are codependent, it implies that you have been raised to be detached from the self. In this case, you are hypervigilant but might not even know it. You may spend your entire life trying to please people, only to discover that in time, you feel drained, not good enough, and disillusioned.

It's not your fault if you are codependent, lack boundaries,s and don't feel good enough. As a child, you may have had to abandon your true self just to survive. Remember, that the most important thing for a child is to attach to their mother and when this connection goes awry, a child's sense of safety suffers and that is not their fault.

Transcript

Welcome to Breakdown to Breakthrough,

The podcast that empowers you to transform your life by awakening to your true,

Authentic self.

I'm Lisa A.

Romano,

Your host.

As an award-winning author and certified life coach,

I've dedicated my life to helping others understand the incredible power of an organized mind.

I believe that true empowerment begins with awakening to our false self.

My mission is to support you on your journey toward mental and emotional regeneration through conscious and deliberate awakening.

In this podcast,

I'll share insights,

Tools,

And transformative stories that illuminate the path to healing and self-discovery.

Namaste,

Everybody.

So today,

We're going to be talking about some of the fantasies that a codependent person has to learn to release as they grow up.

So when we are codependent,

That basically means that we have a lack of selfhood,

That we are walking through life without really knowing who we are.

But to me,

The real tragedy is that we don't know it.

When I was a young girl,

When I was dating,

When I got engaged to my ex-husband,

When I married him,

When I walked down the aisle and I knew I was making the biggest mistake of my life,

I just didn't have the data or the life skills to face my feelings.

I think our intuition is always telling us when something is wrong,

And I think because of childhood trauma and because of childhood emotional neglect,

We have learned to distrust those inner instincts,

And that is a tragedy.

But the good news is that we can learn how to take this spiritual and emotional and cognitive U-turn and come back home to the self,

And we can learn to honor our intuition and get back in touch with our authentic feelings so that we can operate from the most authentic aspects of ourselves.

When we are codependent,

We don't know that we're codependent most of the time.

We don't know that we have a loss of selfhood.

We are so wrapped up and we are so hypervigilant.

Much of the time we have CPTSD,

Which is complex post-traumatic stress disorder,

Which basically means that as a child,

You could not escape your trauma.

When you have a traumatic experience as it is with post-traumatic stress disorder,

It's usually related to one event,

So one tragic event that you could not process emotionally at that time.

Imagine a circuit breaker and you only have a couple of breakers or a fuse box and you only have a couple of fuses,

But yet your being,

Your psyche,

Your emotions get overwhelmed with this tragic experience.

All this energy floods your system because it's so terrifying.

The amygdala gets activated,

Cortisol is flowing,

But you don't have enough fuses to process this experience.

That's considered a traumatic event and you can have post-traumatic stress disorder from that one event.

When you have CPTSD as it is with most codependents,

In my humble opinion,

It basically means that you were marinating in trauma as a child that you could not escape.

I always talk about my own life because it's the best way that I know how to explain this.

As a child,

My mother was very detached.

She was very cold.

She was very aggressive.

I would go as far as to say she was mean to me.

There was a lack in her.

She was the unrecovered adult child of an alcoholic and super,

Super detached,

Unable to connect with me.

By the time I was seven,

She was only,

My mom was only 27 at the time,

But the time I was seven,

Because she had me so young,

Her excuse for not being able to connect to me from pushing me away and abandoning me was that we had a personality conflict.

I remember listening to her tell the neighbors the story that,

Oh,

I don't get along with Lisa because we have a personality conflict,

And feeling like I must be bad,

There's something wrong with me.

That in addition to her telling me that I was bad,

Her telling me that I was a liar,

Her telling me that I was selfish because I wanted the last potato in a dish on the dinner table,

Just really bizarre stuff.

It just felt like every opportunity my mom could take to make me feel angst,

She took it.

Growing up with that,

I couldn't escape that.

Then we had,

On the other side of it,

We had my father who was an enabler,

Who never stepped in on my behalf,

And who didn't want to have a problem with my mother,

Who didn't want to rock the boat.

Not that he was afraid of her,

He just didn't want to be aggravated by her.

I was the casualty.

I had no parent step in and say,

This is enough.

To me,

That's like a double whammy.

You're getting abused by one parent,

And you have the other parent who's witnessing it,

But no one's stepping in to stop this.

Little children feel so alone,

And they feel so powerless.

The depth of trauma is in direct relation to how powerless and dependent you were on the people who raised you.

It's really important that you consider that.

Sometimes we grow up and we think,

What's wrong with us?

Why can't I just get over this?

I didn't go through the type of trauma Sally went through.

Why can't I just let this go?

Because you can't let it go,

Because it's tied to these experiences that happened when you were so dependent,

And that's not your fault,

And so powerless.

When you needed someone to be there for you,

You needed that witness to say,

I see you.

I love this.

I think it was Virginia Woolf who said,

It's not the trauma that happens to the child,

It's the inability to express the trauma.

Here again,

We're talking about,

Wow,

I have all of this emotional energy caused by this trigger,

The amygdala,

The hippocampus,

Cortisol.

My nervous system has been completely activated,

But I don't have enough channels,

Or I don't have enough circuits to handle it,

Which is why inner child recovery work,

And in my opinion,

Really,

Really true,

Tried and true codependency recovery work,

Where you know you have to bring it back to yourself.

You know that there's no rescue boat coming.

You know that you have to figure out how to let go with grace and surrender.

It's all about you taking the power back.

That's why I think this is so profound,

Because on the inner child healing journey,

And on the codependency recovery journey,

That's what you're going to find.

You're going to find the ability to reconnect,

And to take accountability for what you can,

And to move your life forward.

When you're a codependent,

You don't realize it,

But as a child,

You live through fantasy.

Lots of times,

And I'm going to generalize here,

But lots of times,

Little girls who are codependent,

They have a fantasy of being rescued.

They have a fantasy of Prince Charming coming,

And taking them away from this crazy house,

Taking them away from their abusive mother,

Or their abusive stepdad.

Someone's going to see me,

And rescue me,

And take me away.

This was very,

Very alive in my being.

It was so alive,

That as a little girl,

I remember back in the day,

I was in love with Sean Cassidy.

I'm giving my age away.

I was in love with Sean Cassidy,

And there was this television show called The Hardy Boys,

And I actually wrote an entire play,

Or an entire script,

And I couldn't have been more than 10 years old maybe,

If I had to guess,

10,

11,

Or 12,

And I wrote an entire script in which Sean Cassidy was going to see this wounded chick,

Me,

And he was going to see this crazy house that I came from,

And he was going to rescue me.

Men also have these fantasies,

But however,

Generalizing again,

Lots of men have the fantasy of actually being the rescuer,

Being the firefighter that rescues the damsel in distress.

We have to release this fantasy that someday our knight in shining armor is going to come up and take us away from this drama.

It's not going to happen.

There is no rescue boat coming.

If we are codependent,

There is a lack in us.

That is not our fault.

It comes from childhood emotional neglect,

But this is not something that we cannot learn to give ourselves.

These are all built to help you learn how to redirect,

Take that U-turn,

And learn how to nurture yourself the way your mother and father should have nurtured you,

But not only nurture you,

But protect you,

Because codependents aren't very good at protecting themselves.

That's why we end up in promiscuous relationships.

Please see me.

Please see me.

We don't know how to set a boundary.

We have issues with our fathers,

And if our fathers were rejecting of us or conditionally loving or we only got our father's approval when we looked a certain way,

That messes with our picker.

Our father is the first man that we loved,

And so we have these ideas which are all corrupt,

Which they have to be challenged.

You have to challenge these beliefs.

First you have to find them,

Identify them,

Challenge them,

Break them,

And create new beliefs that will govern your life moving forward.

When you have a father who objectifies you,

Let's say as a little girl,

And he only praises you when you look a certain way or when you dress a certain way,

You have to understand that becomes part of your subconscious pattern.

It becomes part of your neural network,

Which holds all the data for what you should be striving for in a relationship with a man or with a significant other.

If you didn't feel loved by your father for who you were,

No matter if you gained 10 pounds,

20 pounds,

Lost 30 pounds,

Irrelevant,

Whether you did good in school or you didn't do good in school,

If you didn't have unconditional love from your father,

It's not uncommon that you attract men who love you conditionally if you look a certain way and you know it.

The problem is if you don't know that you're doing that,

Then you attract men on that scale.

That's why breaking these patterns,

Observing these patterns,

Understanding codependency,

Understanding emotional neglect,

Understanding how it corrupts you at the subconscious level,

Appreciating that you are more subconscious than conscious,

All dovetails into you living eventually an authentic life.

We have these fantasies about being rescued.

It is a fantasy that we have to let go of.

I can tell you that was one of the biggest challenges of my life because I did that.

I got rescued at 21 years old by my ex-husband.

I'll marry you.

Oh,

School's really hard.

You don't have to finish school.

I want to have babies right away anyway.

Boom.

Okay,

There's my rescuer.

There's my knight in shining armor.

I don't have to do anything but keep a house and have kids.

How hard could that be?

My mother did it.

Oh my God,

It's the hardest thing in the world.

And then to do it,

But to do it unconsciously because you want to be rescued.

And then what happened to me 12 years later,

I'm thinking,

What have I done?

What have I done?

I have no relationship with this man.

In my opinion,

He really doesn't care what I think.

He actually told me he doesn't care what I think or feel.

I feel dismissed all the time.

I want to connect with him,

But he keeps pushing me away.

He doesn't defend me when he should.

It's so obvious,

Like this is a dysfunctional marriage and I'm getting sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker.

So I was playing out the codependent fantasy of being rescued.

But here's the thing,

Below the veil of consciousness,

I didn't know I was doing it.

I thought I was rescuing him.

I'll take care of him.

I'll love him.

I'll make sure that he has no needs and everything will just be fine.

Well,

That's the mentality of a seven year old.

Well,

If I just take care of my mommy,

If I bring her tissues because she has a cold or a cough,

Then she'll love me and everything will be fine.

That's all we had as children.

We look to control what we can.

And the only things we can control are how we respond to other people and whether or not we take care of other people and hope that if we take care of other people,

That when we take care of them,

They'll take care of us.

This is a seven year old mentality.

My seven year old self made all those decisions about marrying my ex-husband and that's not his fault.

And certainly I married a seven year old too.

So when you're codependent,

You marry someone who is equal to you in emotional growth and emotional maturity.

How they display their emotion towards you is very different.

So a codependent is a caretaker,

A codependent is a rescuer,

Codependent generally has high empathy,

A codependent will work themselves to the bone trying to make sure that this other person is comfortable and rescuing them and fixing them,

Hoping that they'll get that pat on the back or they'll get that sense of validation.

They'll get that hit of heroin,

That attention.

You see me,

You love me,

I'm good.

You're never going to leave me,

Which is like crack to a codependent person.

I could see that and when I could see it,

All I wanted to do was distance myself from it.

But I had three children.

What I was learning was there is no rescue boat coming.

Codependency will just make it worse until you croak as a codependent,

Which is what my poor mother did.

My mother croaked as codependent.

I do think that if you're in a codependent narcissistic relationship,

There's a much greater chance the codependent is going to croak before the narcissist,

Because the codependent is the giver and the narcissist is the taker.

I believe Dr.

Gabor Mate's work aligns with my hypothesis as well,

Because he talks about this all the time,

Where it is the people who overgive that get sick and we give to people who take.

And so the rescue fantasy or the part of the fantasy that codependents think,

Oh,

I'll be rescued and that'll save me,

Someday my ship will come in,

My Prince Charming will show up.

It doesn't happen.

The only answer is to recognize there is no rescue boat coming.

This is your inner child who feels so afraid and who is abandoning the self due to a trauma response due to CPTSD and you,

Your higher self,

The divine mother,

Divine father inside of you is the only person that can rescue that inner child.

You're running out of time.

Time is all we have and we are going to croak.

We should all be big people about that and recognize we only have a certain amount of time on planet earth to fix this.

Okay.

Now let's talk about another rescue fantasy.

If you are someone who wants to rescue other people,

Which is very common with men,

Men who could not rescue their mothers,

Men who could not do enough for their mothers,

This relationship between a mother and son is very,

Very strong.

And there is a natural,

I would say,

Tribal,

Instinctive,

Biological component to a man wanting to take care of a female.

It's biological.

And so of course,

Little boys who have mothers who are codependent,

Mothers who are depressed,

Mothers who are narcissistic,

Mothers who have BPD,

Mothers who are married to alcoholics,

Mothers who are suffering from domestic violence.

The rescuer fantasy is so strong,

Especially for little boy,

Although girls can have this fantasy about their most abused parent as well.

We're just trying to make this simple for the sake of this session.

So let's say you're a young man and you see this happening to you.

What will happen is dear one,

It's not going to work because your picker is going to pick people and women who need to be rescued and may not take accountability for their own actions.

And if you give into that,

If you give into a woman's emotionality and she's not being responsible for her own emotions,

You dear one,

Will be drained.

You may even attract women with high narcissistic traits who don't have empathy for you,

Who feel entitled for you to cater to them,

To pay for their children's education,

To put a roof over their daughter's head who lives in Mississippi or who lives in Canada,

Whatever.

I've heard so many different stories about the entitlement that women have,

Certainly it goes both ways,

But when a man is involved with a highly narcissistic female,

The entitlement that comes when a codependent man who has a rescuer fantasy is completely obliterated by a woman who is so up in her ego and her demands and demanding,

If you will,

To be taken care of,

Demand entitled to be taken care of.

And so those fantasies don't work.

They will destroy you.

And if you don't escape it,

You croak in that fantasy.

So that's important.

The last fantasy I think I want to leave you with is this idea that we are going to have an ideal family situation,

That one day we're going to do enough fixing.

We're going to do enough free therapy.

We're going to do enough of turning our head.

We're going to do enough of bringing everybody together and pretending that it is not as chaotic as it really is,

That one day we're going to be able to convince our mother and convince our father of the error in their ways,

And they're going to help us bring our family together.

We'll one day have that amazing relationship with our mother,

Just like the relationship our best friend has with her mother or the relationship our best friend has with their dad.

One day,

One day,

One day,

I'm going to finally figure out how to say what needs to be said,

And I'm going to save my family.

Dear one,

It doesn't work.

So this is a fantasy that we also have to start coming out of.

We have to start living in the now.

We have to start accepting what is.

We have to develop detachment,

And I'll talk about that in a future session because that's so important,

But before detachment comes a recognizing of what is that's painful and what is that's wrong,

And I'm a firm believer in I cannot figure out the solution unless I clearly identify the problem.

So one of the tools that I would like to leave you with is,

And I think it's the easiest,

Whether you're in codependency recovery for decades like I am,

And you're on the inner child recovery path like I am,

Recovering from narcissistic abuse like I am,

Emotional neglect,

All of it,

Call it whatever you want,

The outcome and the effects are very similar.

So whether you're on this journey for a long time or you're just becoming acquainted with the word codependency and inner child wounds and childhood emotional neglect and narcissistic abuse by a parent and so on,

It really doesn't matter.

This skill is going to help you,

And it's a great reminder of where you can get started.

So all day,

Every day,

I want you to start asking yourself,

How do I feel?

Now the reason this is so important is because if you're codependent,

You are naturally focused on the outside.

You know what Mary feels,

Or you know what Sam feels,

You know what the UPS driver feels.

You are so hypervigilant,

You have this sixth sense about picking up on other people's energies.

Now many things happen.

Now that's a survival strategy from childhood because nobody,

There wasn't a consistent witness outside of you that was mirroring back,

Lisa,

What do you think?

Lisa,

How do you feel?

Lisa,

What's going on with you?

There was no witness.

That's called healthy mirroring.

And we have these mirror neurons.

If we don't have a mother and father who are aware enough,

God knows my parents were not,

They were just in their own head,

Right?

They worried about themselves.

They didn't worry about us.

We were in the way.

We were seen and not heard.

When that is your experience,

Or if you are in a more overtly abusive childhood home,

Then the effects are going to be similar because the abuse of the parent and the emotional toll on you,

Psychological,

Mental toll,

Physical,

Spiritual toll on you is being ignored.

And so now no one's teaching you,

How do you think and how do you feel?

So what happens?

Your mind,

Your inner eye stays fixated on the outside,

But that's not where your joy is.

That's not where your recovery is.

That's not where your abundance is.

Your abundance is found within you.

We have to make this U-turn.

How do I feel?

How do I feel?

I remember the day,

And I'll leave you with this.

I remember the day I had therapy.

It was early on,

And it was my birthday,

And I went to my mom's house.

We had pizza on paper plates,

And I'm not complaining,

Just explaining.

And we also had six adults that had had coffee.

There were six mugs in the sink.

My sister-in-law was cleaning the mugs.

I made the mistake of saying how I felt.

All I said was,

Wow,

I'm so tired today.

And that was a no-no in my house.

You were not allowed to say you were tired.

You were not allowed to acknowledge yourself at all.

And if you did,

You were harassed,

You were criticized,

You were demonized,

And it was weaponized against you.

So mind you,

I'm in the middle of craziness that's going on with my marriage.

My mother invited my ex-husband there.

Well,

We weren't divorced yet,

But she maintained that relationship with him,

Which I think was part of a gaslighting thing.

Like,

I'm going to maintain a friendship with him,

Even if you're telling me it's this bad.

Like I'm letting you know I'm not letting him go.

Like that was .

.

.

I never had them.

That was an illusion that I ever had parents that were on my side.

Okay,

I digress.

Anyway,

I made the mistake of saying,

I'm so tired today.

And I'm telling you,

I was,

Because recovery is exhausting.

It's mental Olympics.

My mother has this snarky comment.

I don't know what the hell you're so blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Tired for.

You didn't lift a fricking blah,

Blah,

Blah finger since you're here.

Now,

That was common in our house.

My parents were allowed to say any nasty comment they wanted to us,

And we were supposed to take it.

And we did,

Because we all had attachment issues,

And we were afraid to rock the boat.

But your life coach,

Lisa A.

Romano,

Is in recovery now.

And my therapist that day said to me,

The next time someone says something really nasty to you,

Don't react,

And don't let it slither under the rug.

Ask yourself how you feel.

I was like,

That's it?

And he said,

Just ask yourself how you feel.

So I did.

I heard her.

I put my eyes down,

Again,

Focus off of her,

Focus on my heart space.

How do you feel?

And when I asked myself,

How do you feel,

The tears came.

That was me integrating with my inner child for one of the first times that I can really say that I was connecting to her,

Like,

I know what this is supposed to feel like now.

And I pushed myself away from the table,

And then I asked myself,

Well,

What do you want to do now?

I was like,

I'm out of here.

I'm tired of this.

Like,

I'm not 12 years old anymore.

I'm done.

And I went in the back room.

I called my kids one by one,

Put their jackets on.

My little one's like,

Mom,

Are you crying?

I said,

Yep,

Telling the truth.

That's my authentic truth.

Why are you crying?

Because grandma's mean to me.

My sister came in the back,

Oh,

Lisa,

Don't leave.

I said,

Oh,

Yeah,

I'm leaving.

You know,

I'm leaving.

And then my mother came with a dish towel on her shoulder,

Away you go,

And I said,

I'm leaving.

And I'm pointing my finger at her face,

And I said,

If a girl ever needed her mother,

It was now.

You don't get to talk to me like I'm 12 anymore.

Move out of the way.

And then my brother's screaming,

Get out of the house.

You know what it's like if you come from a crazy lunatic family.

Get out of the house.

Ah,

You're crazy.

I'm like,

Here we go.

That's it.

Because I told the truth,

I'm out.

But I was at a point where it's like,

I couldn't take the lies anymore.

I couldn't take the fakeness of my family anymore.

I just couldn't play the codependent,

Please don't leave me,

Abandonment trauma,

Tell me that I'm worthy enough.

I can't live without my mother and father's approval.

That was the seven-year-old in me.

And I was learning to be my authentic self.

And so I had to let go of the fantasy that my mother and I were ever going to be close.

We weren't.

We were closer towards the end of her life than ever when she got dementia.

Wacky experience that was.

But suddenly her personality disappeared,

Or her aggressive personality disappeared.

And this beautiful soul emerged.

Never really got to a deep connection with my dad.

But you can't get close to narcissists,

Because they don't want you to get close.

Because if you get close,

They implode.

They have to dominate and control.

And they have to hold on to an arsenal of personas and identities that they can throw at you whenever they feel like you've threatened them.

And so I accepted that.

But these were fantasies that I had to let go of.

The fantasy of being rescued.

The fantasy of rescuing my ex-husband and thinking he'll rescue me.

The fantasy of one day my parents will love me.

And one day we'll have this great experience,

This mother-daughter relationship.

And one day my siblings and I will get through this and we'll be really tight.

And it doesn't work.

You can only rescue yourself.

So today,

Moving forward,

Ask yourself how you feel and start anchoring to the reality.

That is step one.

I mean,

There are many more steps that you have to take from here,

But that's a great place to start.

I so hope that this has been helpful.

Namaste,

Dear ones.

Until next time.

Bye for now.

Reviews

🙏

How grateful am I for you sharing this 🙏 thank you thank you thank you

So very helpful- thank you 🙏

🙏🏽❤️

Very helpful… Thanks for sharing 🙏🏻☮️🪷

My childhood life was a lot
like yours, I wanted a husband to rescue me, that was a lesson learned, as you say, I can only rescue myself. Thank you for your insightful talks✨

All good as usual with this teacher.

So true 🙏❤️

So grateful for your talks. They can be a lifeline to personal growth.

Wow. I just finished writing a song last week about a dream I had when I was very young (I’m 53 now) in which I come back from the dead to surprise all the mourners and “save” them. Ronald McDonald is there alongside me in the dream and I always just took that at face value until I shared the song with my wife and she (not knowing anything about the dream or my understanding of it) immediately identified him as my mom. This has really unsettled me bc it fundamentally changes the meaning of it and I have been grappling with that. But this talk about rescue fantasies w codependency and narcissism helps a lot. So, thanks!

You hit a home run on that one, Not fun to hear but spot on. Thank you

Very helpful. Many thanks Lisa 🙏❤️💫