Healing Your Relationships: Reclaiming Safety & Self-Trust

In this talk, you’ll explore why patterns of codependency run so deep. These patterns don’t just live in your mind. They live in your body and nervous system. You may have learned early on that your safety or worth depended on keeping others happy, reading the room, or shape-shifting to avoid conflict or rejection.

You’ll discover how codependency is a survival response, not a flaw, and how old protective patterns may still be guiding your reactions today. You’ll be invited into gentle reflection to notice where these dynamics still show up in your life and how you can begin choosing something different.

This work is about honoring where you came from and returning to yourself. Thank you for being here as you continue this healing path.

Transcript

So in our first episode we talked about coming into awareness.

Awareness of codependency and what those patterns of behavior might look like in your life.

And I invited you from a place of compassionate observation to think about the ways that you might abandon yourself to feel loved,

Safe,

Or chosen.

And today I want to dive a little deeper and talk about why you,

We,

Those of us who struggle with codependent patterns,

Do this.

So many people come to me inside of this when they've learned that this is work I've done and they say I don't understand why I keep doing this.

I don't understand why I keep putting myself through so much pain.

I don't understand while in my head I understand that I'm safe or I don't need to be an obsession.

I don't understand why even when I feel that I move into compulsion.

I don't understand why my body goes into fight or flight just because my partner doesn't respond to my text message right away or every time someone in the office calls me into their office I immediately go to a place of fight or flight.

I don't understand how I can be confident.

I don't understand how I can love myself and still feel this way.

All of this is very common.

We're multifaceted beings.

We have a head and a mind and an ego.

We have a heart and a soul and we have a body with a nervous system that keeps the score,

Right?

So there's all these different parts of us that are all working at the same time together filtering in information and the wires get crossed and we experience this conflict and it is confusing and that's what can make it so painful or feel like it's just the way it is and it can't be any different.

So let's start with the body.

Let's start with the nervous system because again codependency is not who you are.

It's not an addiction.

It's not something that you can't heal from.

It's really a learned behavior.

Something that you learned.

Something that worked in order for you to survive.

Survive emotionally.

Survive physically.

So you can really pull yourself all the way back to when you were a child.

Our nervous systems were wired to keep us safe and so we learned automatically how to read rooms,

Sense danger,

Notice who we felt safe and comfortable with,

Notice that person in our life that made us feel afraid and so maybe we would cower and get really small but we would change our behavior to protect ourselves.

As I'm speaking to this,

Think about those different people,

Those different places that you had to scan.

Not only for a physical threat but an emotional danger and when something feels threatening even if it's just someone's tone of voice,

A shift in their mood,

Our bodies can go into a different type of survival response and sometimes that is fight and getting mad,

Physically fighting,

Pushing energy forward.

Sometimes we run away,

We shut down and for a lot of people we learn how to fawn,

To please,

To appease,

To take care of others in order to avoid conflict and disconnection.

It feels kind,

It feels like the thing we should do but really underneath it,

It's coming from a place of fear,

Right?

I said this in the last episode that when we are engaging in behaviors to be loved instead of because we want to be loving then right there is a little red flag that goes up that lets us know,

Okay maybe I'm not appeasing and pleasing and taking care for the right reasons.

Maybe I'm doing this to keep myself safe,

Protected or loved because most people do fear we're being rejected,

Most people fear being alone and a lot of us fear someone being angry or withdrawing their love and so these patterns,

They're not flaws,

You're not broken,

They're really brilliant survival strategies that just kind of like addiction,

When your drug of choice works for a while,

You think to yourself,

You imagine,

You're telling yourself a story that oh yeah this is keeping me safe but after a while it stops working and the coping mechanisms that we created and came into as children,

They do not work as adults.

We still fear being abandoned and I had a therapist tell me this once and I personally liked it,

It helped me but I've shared it before and it's really activated some people,

They don't agree,

So you can decide if this serves you or not but it did serve me.

She said,

Marisa,

Adults cannot be abandoned,

You are fully capable of taking care of yourself physically,

Emotionally,

Spiritually,

You do not need another person to survive and stay alive and when you're a child,

You do and so as a child,

When you are abandoned,

Emotionally,

Abandoned,

Physically,

That type of being left is traumatizing and as an adult,

She said,

When we are living from our functioning adult,

Not from a trauma response of the adaptive child,

Then we know that yes,

We might have been left,

We might have been betrayed but we haven't been abandoned because no one else is responsible for taking care of us.

As adults,

If we are fully functioning adults,

I know there are lots of adults out there that need care to survive but for me,

For my story,

When she said that to me,

Something clicked.

She was helping separate me,

The woman who was in her late 30s,

From the eight or nine year old girl and that worked for me.

Might not work for you,

I'm sure if you Google can adults be abandoned,

You'll find an article that says absolutely.

You decide.

I'm not here to tell you what to do,

I'm just here to inform you and to invite thinking,

To invite questioning,

To invite compassionate observation,

To invite coming into a place of awareness of whatever that is for you,

Okay?

But to understand this a little bit more,

Let's look at some examples.

Many of us learned that early love,

Like in our early stages,

That love was conditional,

Right?

That we had to earn it and Don Miguel Ruiz talks a lot about this in the four agreements and how we're domesticated,

Right?

Like when we're kids,

Oh you got such a good grade on that test,

I love you,

I'm so proud of you,

Versus you failed,

You didn't study,

You're grounded,

Go to your room.

Domestication is literally how we're created.

That depending on our parents,

Our culture,

Society,

We are conditioned with a system of punishment and reward.

So it isn't surprising when we link reward to love,

Right?

Because we can be loved,

We can love our kids and be totally annoyed at them for getting bad grades.

It doesn't mean we don't love them,

Right?

But as a child,

We do often equate the good and the praise with love and the anger and disappointment with being unloved.

It's just a natural thing that happens.

And so you might have learned that if you're good,

And if you're quiet,

And if you're helpful,

Then you're more appreciated,

Loved,

Seen and affirmed.

You might have learned that if you were too loud,

People might have said,

Oh,

Be quiet,

You're too loud.

Oh my gosh,

Your energy is too much.

Can you just calm down?

I just don't want to see you.

I don't want to hear you.

You could have grew up in a home where there was a lot of yelling and unpredictability.

A lot of children of alcoholics really struggle as adults with hyper awareness,

Scanning and controlling their environment.

Because when you have a parent that is volatile,

Then you might have grown up scanning your house for tension and adjusting yourself and your behavior to keep everyone calm.

You might have one parent that was harming the other parent in some way,

Whether physically or emotionally,

Let's just say they're not even addicts or alcoholics doesn't matter.

And maybe you tried to compensate and overcompensate for the one parent that was hurting your mom or your dad,

Or your grandparents or whoever that you lived with.

Maybe you had a parent that struggled with depression.

So you became the happy one.

Always trying to cheer everybody up,

Never letting yourself show your own sadness,

Because it felt like too much for other people to handle.

So you had to really keep yourself really in that place of ease and joy and everything's fine.

Because I don't want to add any more stress or pressure.

You might have been told as a child that you were too sensitive or too dramatic.

And this is a really big one,

Especially for empaths,

Especially for people that really care about others and have big feelings and see things and experience things in a different way.

And so you might have learned down to shut your emotions down.

So you could be easy and quiet.

Because you don't want to get shut down,

Right?

Because it doesn't feel good to get shut down.

So you just shut down yourself,

You preemptively shut down.

So nobody tells you to shut down.

So that feels easier.

That is really one of the I know in my own personal relationship life,

That I shapeshifted myself so I wouldn't hear it.

I didn't want to hear it.

So I did x example here,

I wanted to avoid that comment from someone.

So I would do a very specific thing to avoid the comment.

This is what I'm talking about when I'm saying shapeshifting.

So when you go back and you look at your family of origin story,

That is the dynamics of the family that you were raised in.

That is the energy,

The shadow,

The flaws,

The dark parts of who you lived with.

It was the energy in your household.

It was the way you saw the people in that home treating each other.

All of that affected you.

And then you have society of origin.

So my society of origin was the most traumatic,

Probably more than my family of origin.

And my religion of origin was also very traumatic.

So these are different energetic,

Emotional,

And physical containers that we grow up in.

And in each one of these physical containers,

We have developed these strategies to keep us safe.

And you know what?

A part of me wants to be like,

Thank you for figuring out a way to endure that pain.

Because I know it was really hard for you.

But so much pressure.

It's just so much pressure for a young child.

And it's really sad that we've equated being good and doing it right and being perfect with being lovable.

Because those two things,

In my opinion,

Have nothing to do with one another.

And honestly,

When I started believing that someone could love me,

Even when they were upset at me about the dishes not being done,

Or leaving the back door open,

Or whatever the might have been.

And I experienced that disappointment.

And I would immediately feel like the 10-year-old girl who was getting yelled at by her dad for being too messy,

For being unorganized.

And I projected my dad onto them.

And I went to complete fight or flight and thought,

This man's trying to control me.

This person's trying to control me.

They don't love me.

Just a complete spiral.

And then I question their love.

And it's not that someone else doesn't have a part.

They might have a part.

They might seem controlling or project in ways you can't be yourself.

And that's what I was talking about in the first episode,

How we bump our trauma and our family of origin trauma bumps up against each other.

We're always drawn to people that can be opposite of us,

Right?

So when I would have those experiences,

I would equate them to someone's love for me.

And the reason why I did that was because there was still a part of me that didn't believe I was lovable in my imperfections,

That believed that I couldn't just get it right.

Why do you always forget to make the bed?

Why can't you see this?

Why do you forget to put this here?

My whole life I was raised with that in my family of origin.

So I do have that in my family of origin too.

Some of the bigger things came in my society and religion.

But I did have that in my family of origin with my dad and my mom being opposites in terms of like cleanliness and how they kept the house.

And so that never went away.

I never even thought to check in on that or ask myself why I still got so hurt.

And in school,

It was the same thing.

It was like,

Why can't you remember this?

Or how come you forgot this?

And what I didn't know then that I know now,

And which actually gave me so much peace and my partner is I have ADHD.

And so a lot of those things I couldn't control no matter how many times I was being told.

But at the time,

And even at the time I was beginning this coda recovery inside of my relationship,

I didn't really know that.

I thought that,

But I didn't really know it.

So I really thought that I was just broken.

I was stupid.

I couldn't finish what I started.

I forget things.

I can't put anything away.

I'm messy.

I'm a slob.

So when people activate these beliefs that we have deep down,

We feel they're real.

So we don't feel like we are lovable,

Right?

So this is kind of that mind stuff.

This is like what we've learned beliefs and agreements.

Now,

Let me take you into the body.

Cause I said,

I think I might've said,

That's where we're going to start with the nervous system.

So the nervous system can tell us a lot about whether or not we are in a fight or flight response.

And this was something I learned in therapy because I didn't realize that if my body was in fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

Like if it was actually a somatic experience,

That that was a trauma response,

Especially if it was happening around something that was not actually danger.

Okay.

It wasn't actually almost getting hit in your car and you go,

You know,

When you freeze,

It wasn't a dog chasing after you.

So you run,

It wasn't a natural organic survival response.

We're talking about my partner's tone.

When I come in or getting upset or raising his voice about the dishes.

And then my body goes into complete fight or flight.

And then I feel the need to fix it.

Then I feel the need for affirmation.

I need something outside of me to regulate me.

I desperately need to fix this or receive something to regulate me.

And so these symptoms in the somatic body can be like anxiety,

Tightness in your chest.

Uh,

It could be like a shallow breathing when someone pulls away,

Feeling responsible for other people's emotions is like draw to fix it,

Not being able to relax,

Obsessive thoughts,

Looped thoughts,

And then maybe even feeling completely drained after,

After somebody in interaction,

Because you're just managing other people's energy.

You know,

And sometimes we do wrap this,

Those who are sensitive or empathetic really do wrap this up.

Oh,

Well,

I'm just sensitive.

It's like,

Yes,

You might be sensitive and you could be having a trauma response,

That hypervigilant state,

The bracing.

So if you're in a relationship where you're just kind of constantly waiting and bracing,

You know,

That,

That was part of my story,

Just waiting,

Just waiting,

Bracing myself,

Wondering little tiny things,

A shift in tone,

A delayed response could send me into an absolute spiral of self doubt and people pleasing.

And I know that is a common,

Common theme.

So if you experience these small changes in someone's mood and you immediately feel like you need to solve it or fix it,

Or there's something wrong with you,

If you immediately start shape-shifting,

This work is really not about never leaving yourself or never having these experiences.

You're going to have them.

Okay.

It's just about noticing when you're in it and choosing to be in a place of compassionate awareness,

Choosing to hold yourself,

Choosing to stay choosing to ask yourself,

Hmm,

Is this mine?

Or is this theirs?

And in the next episodes,

I'm going to help actually give you the codependency and recovery,

The differences.

Cause you're like,

Well,

You don't want me to do this.

Marie says,

So what do I do instead?

And I'm going to get,

I'm going to get you there.

So don't worry for now.

We're really just tapping into why this happens.

Okay.

And why does our body go into response before the mind goes into story?

And I want you to check in on that.

Does your body go into a response before your mind goes into story?

It's a very good sign that you're having a trauma response.

So a little tool to help you step deeper into awareness,

Maybe try this for the rest of your day or tomorrow,

Or give yourself a day before listening to the next episode.

You could write this down in your phone.

When someone around me seems upset,

What happens in my body first?

And you can actually do this.

When someone around me blank,

What happens in my body first?

Because I want you to think about what's brought you to this place.

Some part of your internal or external world feels unmanageable and feels painful.

So there's something happening.

When my mom calls me and goes on a rage rampant,

What happens in my body first?

When my partner comes home and complains about the dishes,

What happens in my body first?

When someone blanks,

What happens in my body?

And you could,

When you have some time,

Do some journaling and really think about the top things right now that are really causing a lot of pain in your life.

And then the second question I want you to ask yourself is,

What story do I tell myself about what I need to do in that moment?

What story do I tell myself about what I need to do in that moment?

Because here's the wild thing about your codependent behavior is you probably don't even realize you're telling yourself a story.

It is so ingrained in such a natural response at this point that you don't even realize that you're saying,

Oh,

I'm not safe.

Be hyper-vigilant now and clean the entire house so I can avoid this because my person doesn't love me or they don't care about me.

So much of the story that you tell,

If you really ask why you're afraid,

Why you need to do this,

Why,

Why,

Why?

A lot of it comes down to wanting to be loved,

Wanting to be seen or wanting to be affirmed or wanting praise because we've attached perfect behavior to love.

And guess what?

There's no such thing as perfect behavior.

There's no such thing as perfect behavior because every person in this world's idea of perfection,

Right or wrong,

How to look,

What to wear,

How to speak,

To care about an education,

To not give a shit about an education,

Every single person sees the world through their own pair of glasses of what is important,

What is right and what should be.

And every single person has their own desires of the environment and the relationships that they want to be in.

That's why you've probably dated someone that couldn't stand something and then dated someone else that loved that about you.

How could you possibly find a way to shapeshift to be for everybody?

You just can't.

You just can't.

And what you have to begin to start to trust for yourself is that you will not be alone,

That you will find people and there are people out there that not only love you as you are,

But want you to be who you are,

Even when it bugs them,

That they love you and they're willing to work on their own stuff too.

Why they get so uncomfortable with your natural essence.

And to me,

That's what co-creation in relationship is,

Is that we both people understand they have family of origin,

Society of origin,

Religion of origin,

Trauma.

Both people understand that they're projecting constantly on each other in the world.

And both people understand that they need to do their inner work and they need to really be aware of their own behaviors so that they can have grace and patience and really practice what it means to be loving,

Which is unconditional love.

It's not,

If you're perfect,

I love you.

It's under any condition.

I love you under any condition.

So even if I get mad at you,

Please know,

I love you.

Even if I do this thing that hurts you or bothers you know,

I love you.

And you know how I love you is because I'm working on myself.

I'm showing up.

I'm doing my inner work.

At least that's what it is for me.

The people that are in your life are never going to be perfect.

They're never going to check every box and they're really not going to make you feel safe.

And often the ones that make you feel the most safe are not necessarily the ones you want to be truly in relationship with.

That happens a lot.

I know a lot of people that pick safe partners because they don't activate their trauma,

But then they're not happy in those relationships because they're also not getting some of the other aspects of relationship that are really important.

We are constantly navigating each other.

And the more authentic we are,

When we show up in relationship and show up with each other,

The more authenticity we bring,

Then the more the other person has the opportunity to bring theirs.

We really don't have to work so hard to be loved.

And we really don't have to work so hard to be loved by ourselves.

Yes,

This is going to be a lot of work.

It's a lot of awareness.

When women do this work in the beginning,

They're exhausted by how much they think like,

Marisa,

I'm over,

I'm thinking more than I was thinking before.

And it feels like that in the beginning.

It's a lot of work to show up for yourself.

It's a lot of work to unlearn.

It's a lot of work to go back into your family of origin.

It's a lot of work.

It's a lot of work to deal with our trauma.

It is a lot of work,

But honestly,

It doesn't take that much to really know and embody that you are lovable because there's a part of you that absolutely knows that you are.

And that's your spirit and divinity.

And we'll talk a lot more about the spiritual aspect of this work,

Because in my opinion,

There's a big one.

And Jacqueline Small wrote from Awakening in Time,

From codependency to co-creation.

And the very first sentence is,

Codependence is a crisis of the spirit.

It is a way we give our power away as human souls.

So for today,

Just remember,

Codependency didn't start with you being broken or doing anything wrong.

It started with your body trying to keep you safe.

And the beautiful thing is,

Is you can learn new ways to feel safe without leaving yourself behind,

Without abandoning yourself.

I love you.

I'm proud of you.

And I'll see you on the other side.

Reviews

Insightful. Very insightful.