I want to talk about a children’s book.
Not because it’s a simple story — it isn’t — but because it may be the most accurate portrait of codependency I’ve ever encountered. More precise, in some ways, than the clinical literature. Shel Silverstein wrote it in 64 pages of illustrations and spare prose, and somehow captured something that takes therapists volumes to explain.
The book is The Giving Tree. You probably know it. I’d invite you to read it again, slowly, as an adult.
The story
A tree loves a boy. Over the course of a lifetime, she gives him everything he asks for — shade, apples to sell, branches for a house, her trunk for a boat. Each time he returns with a new want, she gives. Each time, she is happy. By the end, she is a stump.
It is often read as a story about generosity. Maybe it’s really about something else.
The first thing I notice
Throughout the entire book, the tree refers to him as the boy. Even when he is clearly depicted as a middle-aged man. Even when he is old.
This is not an accident.
For the codependent caregiver, the other must remain needy. If he becomes a capable adult who can provide for himself, what role does she play? The tree needs him to be a boy — dependent, wanting, unable to manage without her — because that neediness is what gives her a place in the relationship. It justifies the giving. It makes her necessary.
We do this. We project helplessness onto people who are perfectly capable, because their helplessness is the condition of our purpose.
The second thing I notice
The tree gives from her essence rather than her abundance.
At first, the giving is sustainable — shade, apples, things that renew. But somewhere the line gets crossed, and she begins giving what cannot be replaced. Branches. Trunk. Self. She doesn’t seem to notice the difference, or if she does, she doesn’t act on it. There are no limits. There is no point at which she says: I can give you this, but not that.
Boundaries would have looked different. She could have offered apples and then, when he needed more money, helped him think through how to earn it himself. That would have been genuinely helpful. It would have kept her intact. It would have treated him as the adult he actually was.
But boundaries require believing that you are enough without the giving. And I don’t think the tree believes that.
What’s really driving it
Here is what strikes me most about the tree: she lives in a forest, and yet she seems profoundly lonely. She doesn’t seem to get her needs met by other trees. She is desperate for the boy to return.
Which raises the question — who is this giving really for?
The giving, I think, is a strategy. If she withholds nothing, he will keep coming back. He may not stay out of genuine enjoyment of her company, but he will stay for the resources. She accepts that bargain. Perhaps because she doesn’t believe he would stay otherwise. Perhaps because she carries a wound that tells her she is not enough on her own — that relationship has to be earned, maintained, purchased through endless provision.
This is the hidden logic of codependency. The giving looks selfless. Underneath, it is a way of managing a deep fear: if I stop giving, you will leave. And if you leave, I will have nothing.
The relationship may last. But it leaves an aching question unanswered: are you here because of what I provide, or because of who I am?
“But not really.”
There is a page near the end of the book that I think about more than any other.
The tree has given everything — shade, apples, branches, trunk. She is a stump. And the text says, as it has said after every act of giving throughout the book: and the tree was happy.
Then you turn the page.
Just a stump. And two words: but not really.
Silverstein knew. Underneath all the giving, underneath the performed contentment, something else was true. The happiness was a story the tree told herself — because the alternative, acknowledging what the giving had actually cost her, was too much to bear. It is easier to call it joy than to call it what it is: depletion. Disappearance. A self that gave itself away and called that love.
The giving that felt like love on the way in accumulates into something heavier — a slow, unspoken accounting of everything offered and nothing returned. The tree may not have had a word for it. But that stump knew.
But not really may be the most honest two words in the book. They are worth sitting with for a long time.
On the question of the villain
It is very easy to read this story and be angry at the boy.
He takes and takes. He returns only when he wants something. He never asks how she is doing. He never says thank you. He accepts every offer without apparent guilt. By the end he has reduced her to a stump and seems only mildly grateful. If you are wired toward empathy for the giver, he looks like the villain of the story.
But I want to push back on that, gently.
The boy never forces anything. Every act of giving is the tree’s choice — her offer, her sacrifice, her decision. He takes advantage of her lack of boundaries, yes. But is a person responsible for the boundaries someone else fails to hold? He operates within the system she created. He learned, over a lifetime of this relationship, that wanting was enough — that she would provide. That is not innocence. But it is not quite villainy either.
This is the complexity that dysfunctional relationships almost always contain, and that our human instincts almost always resist. We want a villain and a victim. We want to know who is responsible. But in most entrenched relational dysfunction, both people hold a piece of it. The tree for her boundaryless giving. The boy for his unconscious — or perhaps not so unconscious — willingness to receive without question.
Locating all the pathology in the boy is actually a way of protecting the tree. And by extension, protecting the reader who sees themselves in her. It lets the giver stay comfortable in the victim role, without examining what their giving is really for.
That examination is where the real work begins.
What I ask clients
When I share this story in session, I ask one question first: which character do you relate to most?
The answers are always illuminating. Some people identify immediately with the tree — the exhausted giver who has slowly disappeared into the relationship. Others, to their surprise, find themselves in the boy — always taking, rarely noticing the cost to the other, returning only when they need something.
Both are worth sitting with.
Then I ask: what did you notice? And we go from there.
A different ending
Codependency is not a character flaw. It is a coping strategy — a way of getting emotional needs met that made sense once, in an earlier relational landscape, and has outlived its usefulness.
Recovery isn’t about becoming less generous. It’s about learning to give from a place that doesn’t hollow you out. To offer from abundance. To hold limits not as rejection but as the thing that makes real relationship possible — because when you stop giving compulsively, you finally get to find out if someone stays for you.
That, it turns out, is worth knowing.