Why Healing Codependency Feels Unsafe--That's A Good Sign

Healing isn’t the calm, peaceful experience most people expect. For many, it feels like confusion… grief… anxiety… even collapse.

And if you’re healing from codependency, that discomfort isn’t a sign something is wrong—it’s a sign your nervous system is being asked to leave the only version of “safety” it has ever known.

In this episode, we explore the part of emotional healing no one prepares you for: Healing doesn’t feel safe. It doesn’t feel familiar. And it certainly doesn’t feel fun.

When your identity was shaped around people-pleasing, hyper-vigilance, and emotional self-abandonment, healing can feel like stepping into the unknown without a map. Old coping strategies begin to collapse, but the new way of being hasn’t stabilized yet.

That in-between space is where most people panic—and mistakenly turn back.

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. So today we're going to think about codependency as a monkey mind. We hear this term in spiritual practices, The mind that never sleeps, The mind that is always quaking, Always quivering nonstop in constant motion. And the reason I want to help anyone out there who is interested in healing from codependency, Which let's hit the pause button, Codependency is not a weakness. It's a survival pattern. It is subconscious and it is tied to childhood trauma. It is not something that heals when you intellectualize your trauma. It heals when you learn to be present with the energy that has been stored due to childhood trauma. Trauma is not the event. Trauma is the residual. Trauma is what happens to you as a result of a traumatic event, An event that you as a child or at any time in your life could not process completely. Think of trauma as an incomplete cycle. There was an event, There was an emotional charge. You could not process the emotional charge cognitively because you had to survive the moment. You had to shunt this information. Your body keeps the score. Most often you feel the energy or the body stores the energy in the lower chakras and this constricts you. And for anyone who's turned off by the word chakra energy center, Think about the vagal nerve. Think about living in survival. Think about constriction. Think about living inside the survival nervous system response versus the peaceful response, Which is the parasympathetic nervous system. Remember that your nervous system is always receiving information and when you have trauma and it is suppressed and repressed, Then your nervous system is responding to that repression and this is trauma. And when we are codependent, We manifest with a false identity. We identify as being broken, Often unfixable, Unworthy. We have low self-worth. We develop behaviors that mask that low self-worth, Such as fawning and people pleasing, Overgiving. And in the whole process, What we are not aware of is that we have a monkey mind. Is the problem outside of us? Is it our relationships? Is it our career? Is it our narcissistic sister or brother? Is that the problem? Or is the problem much closer to home? Is the problem now within the monkey mind or within the subconscious mind? That's what we're here to explore. And there is a moment in every codependent person's life that changes everything and it doesn't come quietly. At least it didn't come that way for me. It comes through a pattern interrupt, A divorce, An emotional collapse, A devastating loss, A breaking point that you didn't plan for. For me, It was the moment I realized that nothing, And I mean nothing that I had ever done, No amount of fixing, People pleasing, No amount of achieving or rescuing or sacrificing had actually brought me happiness, Not real happiness, Not the contentment and the peace or the harmony or the balance or the love, The love that I thought that I would achieve in all of these behaviors. I never found peace. And in the moment, At that moment, When my life imploded, When I was sitting on the edge of a gurney in my allergist's office in a full-blown asthma attack, Feeling as if I was sucking air through a cocktail straw, I had an oxygen mask on my face and spit was in the mask. I was leaning forward on the gurney. I didn't even know how sick I was, Which is an indicator of childhood trauma because we're so used to ignoring our needs and sucking it up, Buttercup, And just pushing forward and keep going and keep going and ignoring the signals that our body is giving us to slow down, To rest, To ask for help, To stop taking care of others at the expense of the self. No, Codependents don't do that. We forge on. We adult daughters of narcissistic mothers and fathers and sons of alcoholic parents, We forge on. And in that moment, When my doctor leaned in and said, You better listen to your body because your body is listening to you, I felt a window in my mind open. And he said, If you fell asleep, You'd die right now. And all I could think about was leaving my children to my ex and to my in-laws and to my parents. And that thought just frightened the hell out of me. I could not leave this world and not model something other than what I had modeled for them. And I still didn't know that I was codependent at that time. I just knew that I better start listening to myself. And although that we had been to a number of therapists, He wasn't really interested. He was placating me and amusing me and just figured eventually I'd shut up. And that's a mistake I think a lot of men make. And please forgive me, I'm overgeneralizing to any men who are listening. I'm sure it's true for you as well, Perhaps. But I can speak to this as a woman, That the mistake a lot of men make is that when women stop complaining, When we stop asking, When we stop pleading to fix our relationships is the moment we're done. We've been drained dry. And so that was the mistake my ex made. And that is just the way it is and that's the way it was. But I did not know at that time on that gurney that I had a monkey mind. I did not know that I had attachments, What the Buddhists speak about as attachments. I had no clue. I was so unconscious, So ignorant, But that wasn't my fault because my whole life, My adult child of alcoholic parents kept telling me how lucky I was, How lucky I was, How lucky I was. And to them, I was lucky. They didn't drink. We didn't have rats in the cabinets. We went to private school. What was wrong with you little brats? So from their perspective, From their limited consciousness, We were lucky. And they could never have understood because they didn't do the work. They didn't do the work. They didn't do the work. They didn't break the cycles. They weren't conscious. They weren't aware. I no longer blame them for that. I get it. I understand. From the greater perspective, I can see the pattern. It wasn't their fault and they did the best that they could. And they, Like a lot of adult children of alcoholics and a lot of adult children of trauma, When they have children, They think it will never happen to them. They will never become their mother, And then they do. They will never hurt their children the way that they were hurt, And then they do. So healing the monkey mind does not come through an invitation. It comes with a bang, And you don't oftentimes see it coming. And the beauty of that, That moment where, Here I am on the brink of death, If I had closed my eyes and given in to the attack, Had I not gone to the doctor and gotten IV steroids, I would not be here. But that moment, He said, You better listen to your body because your body is listening to you. And that collapse and then that breakdown, In that moment, All codependent monkey mind thinking stopped, Which meant the momentum of the childhood trauma programs stopped. The strategies that I had relied on, Although that they were subconscious, Failed. The rules I lived by, Be good, Be needed, Don't rock the boat, Lisa, Make others happy, So you'll be okay, No longer worked. And for the first time I could feel it, Something wasn't wrong with me as much as something was running me. That freaked me out. It was as if the veil lifted just enough for me to see that I had been living inside an actual program, Like a Sims character, A subconscious script written long before I had a choice, A way of being that was designed for survival, Not fulfillment. And that moment was terrifying. So I was as terrified, As curious, As I would say, Hopeful. It was a mixed bag. You know, When you have that breakthrough moment and you peer above the veil, The veil is just for a moment, The veil lifts, You're like, Oh my God, Where have I been? It's very unsettling because it challenges your entire belief system, Your entire paradigm. And it was scary because I didn't know what was going to happen next. I was in a predictive machine. I was in a predictive model. Remember, At the age of 25, By the time you're 25, Your brain decides, Oh, You know, I've got enough information and data on how this world operates, On who I am, How people see me and what I can expect. And that's the worst thing for a trauma survivor. It's not bad news if you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth and you have enlightened parents, But when you come from trauma, That is not a good thing. And if you don't awaken to that truth, You recreate your childhood trauma, You attract narcissists, You self-sabotage, And you live a very unfulfilled life. And it doesn't have to be that way. And so we have to realize that rock bottom isn't punishment. It's an interruption. It's the point where the nervous system finally realizes this isn't working anymore. And when that realization lands, That's when your awakening begins. So I take codependency deep into the spiritual realm. I don't keep it at the psychological level. Hell no. Hell no. Codependency is the cover word for self-actualization. I should say codependent recovery leads to self-actualization. It leads to personal enlightenment. It leads to transferring from ego consciousness to love consciousness. It's absolutely amazing as long as you stick with codependent recovery until you're able to shed the ego mask. And it's just absolutely, Absolutely beautiful. And so this is the beauty of codependent recovery because it will lead you to the beginning stages of an awakening, But it's up to you to keep walking through that door. And this is the breakthrough moment when you realize, Uh-oh, Nothing that I've worked or actually nothing that I've relied on is working. My kids can't stand me. My marriage is falling apart. I hate my job. I hate people. No matter how hard I try, The worse I feel and the angrier people get at me. And when we have this pattern interrupt where everything collapses around us, It really is an invitation. And you're not going to feel better right away because that's what a pattern interrupt does. This is a breakthrough moment, Not because everything suddenly feels better, But because for the first time you stop running the script. You stop fixing. You stop judging yourself. You stop shooting yourself. I should do this. I should be further along. I should have said that. I should. . . How many codependents have conversations in the car with themselves? I should have said, I should have said this to my ornery sister. I should have said that to my husband. Why didn't I say that to my mother-in-law? We do it all the time. We're on a loop. We just don't know it. In the breakthrough moment, You stop trying to make life work through effort and control. And in that moment of stillness, A new awareness appears. Who have I been living as? What have I been trying to outrun? What am I without this program? Where did this program come from? Who am I without this program? So do you want, If you're here right now, At the end of what once worked, Please know you are not failing. You do want a waking up. And that moment, As painful as it is, It is the doorway back to yourself. Thank you so much for being here. You don't have to live in a monkey mind. You can learn to let go of your attachments to approval. But how do you let go of an attachment that you don't know you have? That's why this work is so profound. Before you can heal codependency, You first have to understand what it is, How it manifests, And why it is. Then the true transformational work can occur. Then you can release the monkey mind. Then you can find balance. Then you can find peace. But this, Dear one, Is a process. It's an unfolding. It doesn't happen talking about your trauma. In fact, Studies prove that talking about your trauma in those moments makes your brain worse. What does help is addressing the energy of that trauma from a higher state of consciousness with a clear intention and a clear goal. Once you know why you're self-reflecting, Once you understand the purpose of self-reflection, You get out of that, I would say, Fuzzy brain state relatively quickly. And that's when you ascend up and out of the subconscious mind, Out of the monkey mind, And into the light of the higher self. Thank you so much for being here. Namaste, Dear ones. Until next time. Bye for now.

Reviews

Great information. Thank you.

Thank you Lisa! I resonate with your words that coming to the awareness of being in a state of codependency sparks a spiritual awakening ✨️

Thanks

Thank you, Lisa
Very helpful