Codependency
Organising your sense of worth and your behaviour around another person's needs, moods or problems, typically someone addicted, unstable or demanding, at the cost of your own needs.
What drives it
Being needed keeps anxiety and worthlessness at bay and gives a sense of control over a frightening or unpredictable person. It also lets the person avoid their own desires, which feel selfish or dangerous.
How it shows
Work
The manager who covers for a drinking or failing direct report, rewrites his work at midnight, explains him to leadership ('he's under a lot of pressure at home') and cannot start a performance process. The rest of the team is neglected for the one person being saved. Phrases: 'If I don't do it, it won't get done.' 'He needs me.'
Relationships
Managing a partner's drinking, debts or rages: phoning in sick for them, hiding bottles, checking their mood before speaking. Their wellbeing is the weather; yours is never discussed. Friends notice you only talk about the other person.
Self
You do not know what you want until you know how the other person is. Their crisis gives you a strange steadiness, and their getting better, or someone else helping them, makes you uneasy.
What tells it apart
Dependent personality: Dependent personality seeks to be looked after; the codependent looks after. Ask who makes the decisions: the dependent hands them over, the codependent takes them on.
People-pleasing: People-pleasing is spread across everyone to avoid disapproval; codependency centres on one person and their problem, and includes control (monitoring, fixing), not just compliance.
Altruism (as a defence): Healthy altruism leaves the helper intact and accepts a no; codependent help continues when unwanted or harmful, and the helper suffers when it is refused.
A test
Watch what happens to the person when the other is fine or gets help elsewhere: relief points to care, unease or loss of purpose points to codependency.
Questions to carry
- When the other person was doing fine or got help elsewhere, what happened to the helper, relief or unease?
- Who would I be, and what would I want, if this person no longer needed me?
How strong the research is
weak. Not a recognised diagnosis; scales exist but overlap heavily with neuroticism and dependency, and the concept is criticised for pathologising ordinary caregiving.
Where it comes from
Alcoholism treatment field, late 1970s; popularised by Melody Beattie, 1986 (Codependent No More)