Codependency

There is a simple way I like to define codependency: it is outsourcing your wellbeing to another. In essence, you make someone else responsible for how you are doing. When they are well, you are well. When they struggle, you struggle alongside them — not out of empathy, but because their state has become the weather system you live inside.

That word — selfhood — is important. Codependency isn’t just a relational pattern. It’s a gradual erosion of the self.

It isn’t only about people

When most people hear the word codependency, they picture a specific kind of relationship — usually one involving addiction. And yes, codependency shows up frequently there. But it isn’t confined to it. We can enter codependent dynamics with a person, an animal, a job, a cause, a community. Anywhere we have outsourced our sense of okayness to something outside ourselves, the pattern can take root.

Our culture doesn’t always help us see this clearly. Codependent behavior is often mistaken for generosity. On the surface, the two can look identical. Underneath, the motivations are quite different.

The shape of it

If my wellbeing depends on yours, I will work hard — often exhaustingly hard — to keep you okay. Not because I am simply generous, but because your okayness has become the condition of my own. This is the quiet transaction underneath codependent caregiving: I take care of you in order to take care of myself.

There is a children’s book that illustrates this dynamic more clearly than almost any clinical text I know. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein tells the story of a tree and a boy across a lifetime of relationship — and it is worth reading slowly, and sitting with. I’ve written more about it in Field Notes, if you want to go deeper.

→ But Not Really: What The Giving Tree Taught Me About Codependency

What drives it

Codependency is a coping strategy. It develops as a way of getting emotional needs met — often in response to early relational wounds where love felt conditional, where worth had to be earned, where the self learned it was safest to attend to others rather than to itself.

The giving, the caretaking, the vigilance — these become ways of ensuring someone stays. The cost is never fully knowing whether they stayed because of what you gave, or because of who you are.

What recovery looks like

Healing from codependency isn’t about becoming less caring. It’s about learning to give from your abundance rather than your essence — and understanding the difference.

In our work together, we’ll develop a clearer picture of what drives your patterns. We look at the day-to-day decision-making: whose needs you track, whose you overlook, where your attention lives. We explore early relational experiences that shaped how you learned to belong. And we work on something that can feel counterintuitive at first — building boundaries not as walls, but as the thing that makes genuine relationship possible.

The self that gets recovered in this work isn’t a new self. It’s the one that was always there, waiting.