Why Isn't Therapy Working I Am Codependent

Codependency is an umbrella term used to describe a broad spectrum of emotional, mental and behavioral, subconscious, and automatic trauma responses developed in early childhood as an adaptation to chronic, inescapable stress.

A child who has learned they must scan their environment must:

Use their conscious waking hours scanning their parents' facial expressions, moods, and tones--while this is occurring, a child is learning how to morph and adapt, rather than explore the inner self, their inner child, their inner landscape
Abandoning the self, including their innate needs, wants, emotions, and right to be authentic, to avoid further emotional neglect, abuse, bullying, or rejection—while this survival response was useful during childhood, the adult child eventually learns that they often don't know what they want or need. This can be a frustrating experience in therapy and relationships.

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 talking about why adult children from toxic homes,

Adult children of narcissists and alcoholics,

Those of us who identify as people who struggle with codependency,

A lack of selfhood,

Personal boundaries,

Seeking validation,

Looking for permission to breathe,

And feeling guilty,

Actually,

For living.

Why is it that we are so frustrated in therapy?

And why is it that oftentimes even therapists don't know what to do with codependence?

I want to unpack that today.

This has been my path.

And I can tell you that when you finally see the light,

So much of the fog and the confusion that was in your head about who you think you are begins to dissolve.

And that is so important on the healing journey.

So before you could really heal or help yourself,

When you're in therapy even,

You need a backdrop.

You need some type of fabric.

You need some type of information.

You need some type of program to be able to articulate what you feel,

To be able to articulate what you need,

To be able to articulate what you want,

To be able to articulate your inner reality.

And here's the problem.

And what sparked the reason for this session is because I recently coached a therapist who hired me because she was so frustrated because she didn't know much about codependency and she wanted to learn.

And she was upset with herself because she was getting frustrated by people who identified as codependent and then came to her looking for some type of resolution,

Some type of understanding.

And that got me thinking,

I understand why a therapist would be uncomfortable or stressed out or frustrated with someone who was codependent because oftentimes in therapy,

A typical situation is I'm angry at my mother or I'm so frustrated with my husband.

I do everything for him and he can't do the slightest thing for me.

And I just don't understand why I'm so stressed out and everybody is okay.

Nobody cares,

Cares about me.

Now a typical conversation with a trained therapist might be,

Well,

How do you feel about that?

I just told you I'm frustrated.

What do you want to do about that?

I don't know what to do about that.

So the therapist is trying to help a codependent person figure out what they want to do.

But here's the problem.

I don't know what to do.

I don't know what to do when I have these negative emotions.

I don't know how to feel when I can only feel frustration and sadness and powerless as a codependent.

I don't have the data for a boundary,

An internal boundary.

I don't have the fabric for an internal emotional regulation system.

So when I tell somebody,

It could be a friend,

It could be a parent,

It could even be your partner or a therapist,

It could be anybody.

When a codependent person starts talking about how they feel and the person trying to help them says,

Well,

What do you want to do about that?

That's the conundrum.

We don't know what to do.

We don't know what to feel.

We are arrested little inner children.

All we know how to do is fix people,

Solve their problems,

Take on everybody else's stuff and pray to God that one day we will do so much for this person and this other person will finally figure out what I need.

You ask a codependent person,

Well,

What do you need?

That's the problem.

I don't know what I need.

I wasn't allowed to need.

The real problem,

And only someone who is actually healed from codependency,

Face these shadows and worked out these truths for themselves will know this.

Not only do I not know what I want,

Not only do I not know what I need,

Not only do I not know what my options are,

I really don't know.

Number one,

I don't even know that that's what's going on,

That I don't know what I want.

I don't even know that I don't know.

It's sort of like if there was,

Let's make up another continent.

Let's say there's another continent on earth,

But for some reason nobody on earth could see that continent.

You can't know that that continent exists.

So let's say you needed a certain mineral that existed on that continent and someone says to you,

Well,

What do you need?

And you need that mineral that's on that invisible continent.

You don't even know that's what you need.

Maybe your lips are shriveling up because you need a particular type of mineral,

Or maybe your eyes are shriveling up because you need this mineral.

You know you need something,

But you don't know what you need.

That's a problem.

The second really big issue with that is that we are subconscious,

And so we don't know what we don't know,

And we also don't know this is subconscious.

That's a problem because we operate from the subconscious mind.

We all do.

The other issue that we have is that we don't have the data necessary to be functional human beings,

Autonomous human beings.

Functional and autonomous could be very subjective.

When I say functional,

I mean healthy.

I mean I'm not going to devolve when you don't text me back right away.

I'm not going to overreact because my manager said,

Hey,

Lisa,

I think you could have done a better job on this report because that means I'm not good enough when I'm an unhealed codependent.

I'm going to have a very strong reaction to what my manager has said because of my unhealed trauma because I've been living below the veil,

And I've been trying to people please my manager.

I've been trying to fawn after my manager.

I have come to work early.

I have stayed late.

I brought the manager coffee.

Why is she picking on me?

That is the way a wounded person sees that situation.

We can get depressed.

We can stay in bed.

We can feel really,

Really,

Really distraught over the slightest thing that gets said because of this trauma,

And we're trying so hard to be enough.

The fantasy is I'm going to do enough,

I'm going to be enough,

And then I can avoid this pain of rejection.

Maybe someone will love me,

And of course it's a fantasy,

But the real,

The sad,

The real sad,

Sad issue that we have to take stock over if we're going to reparent ourselves,

If we're going to climb up and out of the subconscious mind,

If we are going to reframe and recreate our identity from the ground up from not enough to I am innately enough simply because I exist takes time,

But you got to start somewhere.

What I want everyone to understand is that it comes down to we don't know what to do because as children,

We lost out on the basic needs of a childhood.

What do I mean by that?

We don't know what it's like to sit around a table and have authentic conversations with family members that don't make us feel like the floor is about to fall out from beneath us.

We don't know what it's like to go to grandma's house and grandpa's house and have everybody get along without some blow up.

We don't know what it's like to come home from school and have a real concern and know that we can talk to our mother and she's going to get it.

She's not going to ask us,

Well,

What did you do?

She's not going to flip on us.

She's not going to criticize us.

We don't know what it's like to come home and be able to talk to somebody about our pain.

We don't know what it's like to have someone consistently meet our needs,

Which is what is supposed to happen in childhood,

Not out of obligation,

Not because the mommy and the daddy feel like they have to,

But because the parents in the family make the child feel like they want to meet their little dear one's needs.

We don't have that experience.

We don't have the experience of watching a mother and a father have a disagreement and have mommy just explain rationally why she feels the way she feels and daddy explain why he feels what he feels.

And we don't know what it's like to see two adults lovingly negotiate their needs in a relationship or their frustrations.

We don't have that data.

We have a bunch of denial.

We have shame.

We know how to repress what we need and bury it.

So when I go into therapy and I'm complaining and a codependent has a long list of complaints and rightfully so,

Because when you're a codependent,

You fuse with other people and lots of times you fuse with people who are highly narcissistic.

You can fuse with another person who is codependent,

But before long,

One of you are going to feel super suffocated and you're going to want out.

You're going to create chaos in the relationship and it's going to fall apart.

This is very,

Very normal,

Maladaptive,

But normal.

So I want everybody to understand that if you are codependent and you are the adult child of an alcoholic,

If you are the grandchild of an alcoholic,

This is not bad news to see yourself in these stories because this group of people,

Specifically codependents who are adult children of alcoholics,

We are a group of people who are on fire for looking within.

We even though we know when we look within,

We're going to see our pain,

We look anyway.

Please don't ever feel like identifying yourself as a people pleaser or a fixer,

Codependent,

Somebody who fuses with other people,

Somebody who seeks a sense of self in the catering and the fixing and trying to be good enough for other people.

Please don't ever see that as a weakness.

See it as trauma response and see it as a way that your inner child figured out your problem,

A problem of abandonment,

A problem of rejection.

That's a superpower.

You have the right to take off that cape and step out of that inner child role,

Reparent the self,

Do the codependency recovery work,

Rise up and out of the subconscious mind.

You have a right to do that.

I can tell you as someone who has done this work and I'm still doing this work,

It is very humbling to me to recognize that this is lifelong work.

It's very humbling to me,

But it keeps me on the straight and narrow path of recovery.

I have codependent programming.

There is a person inside of me or a facet of my personality,

A facet of my neurology that will always feel more comfortable in the role of doing for others before I do for myself.

Keeps me very,

Very humble and it also keeps me committed to breaking that cycle.

It keeps me committed to healing the wounds inside of me that were created when I was a little innocent baby girl that only deserved to feel loved,

To feel wanted,

And never deserved to feel not good enough.

I remember being as young as probably five or six and knowing I can't ask for anything.

It's not safe to ask for anything.

I would see other little girls with their moms about seven,

Eight,

Nine,

Certainly into my teenage years and I was so envious because these girls were having experiences that were the foundation of future life skills.

I remember the first time I was about 12 years old and I saw one of my friends at the time putting lotion on her legs before we went out bike riding.

I was shocked,

Shocked,

And it was so foreign to me to see a girl my age taking care of herself.

You see,

I got the impression that I was not good enough and I was undeserving,

So why would I ever love myself?

I used to pull my hair out.

I wasn't massaging my skin with this luxurious bath oil or whatever it was,

Lotion,

That she had.

I was harming myself and in a few years I would end up starving myself.

That is just indicative of being starved of maternal warmth.

That's all that was.

Here was a young lady who had a mother who taught her,

Here's some lotion,

Your skin looks a little dry,

Put it on.

Believe it or not,

That's a tremendous life skill.

I did not know how to love the self.

I did not love myself.

That took quite a while for me to figure out how to do that,

But I have figured out how to do that.

And so when you talk to codependent people,

You might be frustrated because when we're talking,

We're talking from such a pure place of frustration,

But it does help other people to know,

Therapists included.

The problem is we don't know what to do.

So when you put it back on us,

What do you think you should do?

We're frustrated.

And what will happen then is we will feel more crazy.

We will feel more worthless.

And all of the manipulative,

Narcissistic people that we've manifested in our lives,

We're going to start to feel that they were right about us all along.

So I think that what would help people if you're dealing with codependent people is what you want to say is like,

Well,

What would you do if you weren't afraid to make choices?

What choices might you make if you,

If fear wasn't involved for you right now?

Because it sounds like there's a little,

A lot of fear for you.

So that asks the codependent to step out of this fear-based mind.

Well,

Maybe I would tell my husband,

No.

Oh,

Okay.

That makes sense.

Now you're getting information about this fact that this person is afraid to set a boundary.

Why would anyone be afraid to set a boundary?

Because as a child,

They were taught that they weren't allowed to have a boundary.

Their parents were bullies.

They were coerced.

They were gaslit as children.

They were overpowered by their parents' personalities.

Their parents might have said,

Sure,

You can talk to me about anything.

But the minute the conversation started rolling,

Mom and dad bulldozed right over them.

Let the child know,

I'm really not listening to you.

And every time you open your mouth,

I'm going to come back with a comeback that makes you feel wrong so that I can feel right.

And so when you start asking questions like,

What would happen beyond fear?

Or we could ask people who are codependent,

Well,

What options are available to you right now?

Do you think about this?

What are some other ways that you think that might work out for you?

So it's asking curious questions so that don't ask,

What do you want to do?

Because I don't know what I want to do.

But if you ask me,

What are my options?

I think we'll find some wiggle room there.

At least that's what I find when I'm coaching someone who is codependent or the adult child of an alcoholic.

We really want to explore why it is they feel the way they feel.

What is it that they're exactly struggling with?

Is it a boundary?

Or is the fear of rejection?

Sure,

It's all of that.

But at the end of the day,

What's really going on is I,

As a codependent,

I don't have the life skills to even know what I want.

Because when I go back into my databank,

There is no program for how to problem solve effectively.

It's just not there.

It's non-existent.

In order for me to be able to make a healthy decision based on what I need,

I need some framework around being able to self-reflect on a self and say,

Oh,

This is what my self needs.

But codependents do not have a self.

We weren't allowed to have a self.

And so when people ask us,

What do we want?

We don't know.

Because in order to know what you want,

You have to have a self.

What movie do you want to go see?

I don't know.

We frustrate people.

What do you want to have for dinner?

I don't know.

We don't know what it's like to be valued.

We never had that experience.

And so I really hope that this helps someone out there who might be struggling with these issues.

You're not crazy.

People are waking up and recognizing that codependency is a real thing.

We really do have these data problems.

The good news is that we can recover.

And it's just absolutely amazing when you start doing this work.

You can recover.

Namaste,

Everybody.

Until next time,

As I bow to the love and light that is absolutely in you.

You are enough.

Reviews

It resonated so much for me I listened a second time to take notes. How do I move forward? I need to learn more? I have to help myself.

I appreciate your input and on my own journey to solve the mystery of who I really am. Thank you for sharing.
Namaste 🙏

This was a light bulb moment for me! Thank you for explaining co-dependency.

I feel warm and glow-y after listening to that. Just basking in the acknowledgment is upgrading my “operating system.” A lot to let soak in and contemplate. 🙏🙏🙏

This is so helpful🤗Thanks for the clarity ✌️🌷

Helpful information. Thank you.

I've been asked What do I want what do I need and have never been able to respond. This explains why. Now what do I do with this information? I've left many relationships.... And then repeat it in the next ...

Wow! Thank you. 🙏🏻 As a senior citizen, I am still struggling with practicing self care. I have talked with my therapist and asked, “What is wrong with me? Why do I start and then after a matter of days, stop?” This gave me some great insights. ♥️