On demystifying codependence

What asking for your needs to be met means about you:: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on SEPTEMBER 25th 2022

It is my experience that so many of my clients have been under this illusion that they are codependent when they are not.

Now let me start by saying many clients who come and work with me are codependent and this is a product of trauma and abuse and we can absolutely work on this to have you be able to recover your sense of self or/and be able to assert it. It is one of my favorite things to work on with clients - so this is in no way excluding those who are currently in imprints of codependence. You are very welcomed here and ALSO there are certain toxic, false and unhealthy frameworks around codependency that I see people perpetuating and I wanted to address them.

So let’s demystify codependence shall we? What is it from a nervous system perspective?

Codependence is present when you do not have a consistent sense of self across different relationships or situations. Codependence is being unable to define your own interests, opinions, experiences, likes or dislikes and/or identity without the help of someone else confirming it for you or giving you permission to assert such things. People here will have a hard time trusting themselves.

Codependence from a nervous system perspective is about seeking all your resource from external sources and having zero (and I do mean zero) internal resource built up or skills to access it.

Codependence is also present when someone uses someone else to meet their needs, because they are in an illusion that they are incapable of meeting them themselves. It is living in a flawed perception, rather than a reality, that you are powerless and that you do not have agency as an adult. A good way to tell if you or someone is in this is how much internal or external locus you’re in. People with little to no sense of internal locus (connection to agency and their own power) will often blame bad timing or circumstances instead of taking charge of timing or shifting undesirable circumstances, or in more spiritual words those with a primary external locus of control will say stuff like, what will be will be. And that’s not really true - in most cases, what will be is what we direct our energy toward. Internal locus of control means you believe you have power and agency over the outcome of your life, and external locus of control means you think you don’t and that time, other people and external factors rule you.

Survival dependency is a branch of codependency, but is not quite the same. Survival dependency is when you are dependent on someone for survival purposes, this can be due to oppression such as socio-economic disparity, ableism, racism, patriarchy. So you need another person to survive, and you do not have free will around whether you are staying in the relationship or situation because you want to, it’s more so because you have to. A good example of this is someone who is chronically ill and is in a survival dependency financially with someone else because they are too sick to work. Or someone who has to work a job with an abusive boss to be able to afford their rent + food due to systemic poverty that leads back to racism. This person can be in what we call a survival dependency but is not codependent as in they can internally resource many of their needs and they know their thoughts, opinions, and have a consistent sense of self.

Codependence is NOT present when you are caring and attuning to people or receiving care or attunement from people.

A good way to know if you are healthy in general in relational settings is how much balance you have between your internal and external resourcing and what happens in your nervous system if an external resource is temporarily unavailable.

If an external resource that is built into your world is unavailable, do you have internal resourcing that can hold you over?

If you don’t, then yeah, at that point we can consider codependence as a possibility.

But what worries me just as much that is not talked about nearly enough (in my opinion) in self-help spaces is if you only use internal resourcing and refuse to engage in external resourcing. That is also a sign of poor nervous system vitality.

A flexible and resourced nervous system is able to depend on both itself and on those they are pair bonded with (this doesn’t have to be romantic or sexual in nature, pair bonds can also exist between platonic members of a relationship.)

It is not functional or healthy for you to ask for your needs met by a person you’re in a pair bond with and be met with rejection, a flat out no never, or shame or abandonment or neglect.

It takes a lot of courage to ask for our needs to be met, especially with dicey developmental trauma histories. So I want to say that you are brave if you’ve asked for your needs met, and if someone rejected or said no or shamed you or neglected or abandoned you when you tried to self-advocate, that sucks and if it’s a person you were in active and involved relationship with, this not only sucks, but is a huge sign of dysfunction and lack of health and capacity in the other person.

In fact, what is healthy and functional is being met with warmth and availability and curiosity when you bring up a need.

Relationally, we are meant to meet each other’s needs. Meeting one another’s needs is not codependency. It is healthy interdependence and a sign of functional relationships.

If someone in your life who you are close with and whom you are meeting the needs of, is not meeting your needs in return or refusing to meet your needs and calling you codependent for wanting some basic external resourcing, they are wrong.

So you may be wondering, what are the needs I can ask to be met and what are the needs I should be able to meet myself?

Ideally, both. Here’s what I mean… in nervous system health work we want to have all of our needs met (our core 10 that I specialize in for example), by both internal and external resourcing in our daily life.

Take the need to be valued. You should (in an ideal nervous system health scenario) be able to meet this need internally and also have external sources of attunement around it that are interchangeable.

This could look like you having a celebration jar and writing in it at the end of the day all the things you did that were really contributive to the world around you and to your personal wellbeing (internal acknowledgement). And then it could also look like letting a few key people in your life know that you experience feeling valued the most when people use words of affirmation to tell you how much something meant to them (external acknowledgement). Like for example, my mom loves words to affirm I appreciate what she has done for me throughout the day. So I’ll make sure to remind myself to say things like, “hey thanks for cleaning the kitchen. It made me feel so relaxed and made my day so much more easy.”

If we play with another need - the need for connection.

This could look like going for a walk and sitting by the lake to connect with yourself and god (internal connection) every morning, and then asking for a date night with your person(s) without phones and just catching up with intentional questions, or just holding hands and watching a tv show and laughing together.

How about the need for safety?

Well an internal way to resource this need is to do soothing stress organ supporting tools like placing heat on your adrenals or doing containment so that you don’t feel so hypervigilant as often. You can also work with boundaries here, and pay attention to building a healthy sense of neuroception so you move away from danger + chaos and toward safety + love in your life. Externally, you could ask for reassurance around where you know you need nurturance to elicit a sense of being safe. Like for example, let’s say you need nurturance around your self-esteem, you could ask your people to tell you what they admire and respect about you from time to time. My mom and I do a quick round of “what’s 3 things you love about me” at night before bed often. Your generosity, your sense of humor, your intuition. Or you could ask someone to drop your adrenals for you or come with you on an errand that is hard for you.

Let’s do the need to be seen and heard before we go.

This could look like doing morning pages (internal resource) and really truly hearing yourself and seeing what it’s like to be you today. And then it could be asking someone to check in with you when they see you’re in a tender mood or looking disconnected/ frazzled and offer you a bridge to holding space for you - like hey I am noticing you’re in a sour mood, what’s bothering you? Can I validate your pain or help you make sense of anything that’s on your mind?

Or if that feels too self-helpy, you can ask or asked to be asked, hey, how you really doing currently? Or my favorite, “what’s it like being you right now?”

The healthiest relationships I see in my practice are those in which people are meeting each other’s needs or want to learn how to meet more of each other’s needs while simultaneously having a strong internal resource bank to draw from.

Now I also want to demystify that we are all allowed to say no to meeting someone’s else needs. We can also be temporarily unavailable to meet our people’s needs and they will need to go to other sources of resource they have in their lives until we become available again. So it is completely okay that someone says NO to meeting your need and it is completely okay that you say NO to meeting someone’s else need. Consent is queen.

However, when we are experiencing pretty inconsistent and unmet needs in our relationship(s), and we’ve already advocated for ourselves and given appropriate chance for the other person to be invited and show up, the answer is not to try to coerce people into meeting our needs. It’s in looking at the information and deciding the availability of said person for healthy and reciprocal relationship, as well as your availability. If you’re not both available for this, it may be time to consider incompatibility or the end of said relationship, or a shift in the roles you occupy for each other in your world (romantic partner to friendly acquaintance, best friend to workout partner or TV show or book club members, friend to colleague/co-worker, as examples) -at the very least.

So please please please, do not let anyone tell you it is codependent to ask for your needs to be met. It is not. Actually knowing your needs and being able to acknowledge and ask for them met externally while also meeting them internally is the biggest sign you are not codependent.

Know with confidence that a balance between meeting our needs internally and externally with the help of people who truly love us is that best path to stability and peace.

And in conclusion, I’d like to end this essay, with the paraphrased words of pop icon feminist and survivor Kesha, and we kick em’ to the curb unless they tell us our needs matter. ;)