exploring therapy for codependency

Reclaiming Your Edges, Wholeness, and Sense of Self

I’m sensitive to how we use language to talk about ourselves and our experience.  When I am using “codependency” here, it is in an effort to awaken to your particular lived experience, which will be nuanced and specific to you (rather than using this term as a label, which assumes things about you that may not be entirely true).

Codependency is often described as “needing to be needed,” struggling with boundaries (aka your edges: where you end and the other begins), or losing yourself in relationships. But underneath these patterns is something deeply human: the longing for connection, safety, and belonging.

If you find yourself prioritizing others’ needs at the expense of your own, feeling responsible for others’ emotions, or struggling to say no, you aren’t doing something wrong. These patterns likely developed as creative adaptations to your original environment: ways you learned to survive and maintain connection in an intolerable situation.

Exploring therapy for codependency is about helping you reconnect with your wholeness.

What Is Codependency?

What do we mean when we say “I am/they are codependent” or “this is a codependent relationship?”

Co-dependent: I depend on you or the situation being a certain way so I can feel okay.  Co-, meaning with.  Co-dependent inherently implies a relationship with an other (person, situation, etc.).  And we as humans are always in relationship.  This is how we define ourselves.

The culture suggests that codependency can show up as:

• Difficulty setting or maintaining boundaries

• Chronic people-pleasing

• Feeling overly responsible for others’ emotions

• Fear of conflict or abandonment

• Losing your sense of identity in relationships

• Guilt when prioritizing your own needs

• Anxiety when others are upset

At its core, codependency involves relational patterns where your focus becomes fixed on managing, rescuing, or stabilizing others in order to make sense of yourself, often at the cost of your own needs, desires, and autonomy.

These patterns frequently develop in childhood or early relational environments where love, safety, or approval felt conditional or shaky.

Codependency and Relational Trauma

Many codependent dynamics are rooted in early relational wounding for which there wasn’t sufficient support for us to feel held or safe to be ourselves.

If your early experiences required you to:

• Caretake adults emotionally

• Suppress your own needs

• Stay hyperaware of others’ moods

• Earn love through helpfulness

… then your system - your being, your bodyness - may have learned that your safety depends on being indispensable or useful or “good enough” for the other.  These qualities - good, useful - are subjective, and often we were left wondering what the criteria were, having to creatively figure that out for ourselves in order to belong.

Connection and belonging are essential for survival.  Know that you did your best in an untenable situation.

The Cost of Losing Yourself

When your energy is tied up in rescuing or managing others, you may experience:

• Emotional exhaustion

• Anxiety and hypervigilance (extreme alertness/caution)

• Disconnection from your own wants and needs

• Resentment or burnout

• Confusion about who you are outside of relationships

• Difficulty making decisions

Over time, doing this Hard Work to feel connected, held, and safe can create a deep sense of disconnection from your body, your desires, your purpose, and your self-knowing.  

There is a path back to trusting your embodied knowing.  

And sometimes it requires you to let yourself let others down as you learn to take care of yourself and your own needs.

Therapy for Codependency: An Embodied, Relational Approach

In our work together, we don’t try to “fix” you.  How can we fix something that isn’t broken?

Instead, we explore:

• How these relational patterns developed

• What they once protected

• How they show up in the present moment

• What happens in your body when you try to set a boundary

• How anxiety or guilt emerges when you prioritize yourself

Using an embodied, relational Gestalt approach, we gently bring awareness to your present-moment experience: sensations, emotions, impulses, and relational dynamics you are becoming aware of.

Awareness creates choice.  Moreover, once you become aware, something has already shifted.  Change is happening.

Together, we work toward:

• Clear, flexible boundaries: knowing where your edges are, knowing your line in the sand

• Acknowledging and expressing your “no” (and your “yes”!)

• Reconnection with your needs and preferences

• Greater awareness of your emotional tides

• A clearer sense of your self: when and how you reveal yourself, when and how you hold back (both are important!) 

• When and how you include your own experience, when and how you exclude yourself

You can care deeply about others without disappearing yourself.

Signs You Might Be Co-Creating Codependent Patterns

You may resonate with this work if you:

• Feel anxious when others are upset with you (obviously it’s natural to be impacted by someone’s anger or disappointment, but we can notice if/when this becomes rigid or limiting for you)

• Struggle to say no (including to yourself!)

• Over-explain or over-justify your boundaries

• Stay in relationships that feel one-sided (or stay too long when it’s been over for you for a while)

• Feel responsible for “fixing” others

• Prioritize harmony over authenticity

• Experience relational anxiety or fear of abandonment

If this feels familiar, you are not alone. These are common and deeply human patterns.

An Invitation to Move Toward Wholeness

Addressing codependency is not about becoming a self-reliant island.  As humans, we need each other to survive, we need each other to blossom and thrive.  Recognizing your co-dependent tendrils is part of coming into your inherent wholeness: being able to stay with yourself and your values while reaching/being reached for in relationship.

This could look like:

• Staying present with yourself while in relationship with another 

• Allowing others to have their own emotions, thoughts, values

• Trusting your internal signals

• Expanding your capacity to tolerate discomfort and difference without self-abandonment (this is often referred to as “differentiation”)

• Discovering who you are beyond the role of caretaker