Is Codependency Bad For You? Here's the Science

I started going to counseling several years ago. What first brought me there was a troubled relationship - a negative situation that, of course, I thought I bore no responsibility for. I didn't know how wrong I was, and how much learning I had ahead of me.
I know it might sound utterly ridiculous, but I really thought I was doing okay. The other person I was dealing with was the one who "had all the problems." I thought I had it all together and did not have any work to do on myself.
Within the first six months of working with a therapist, I found myself engrossed in a topic that had been 100-percent foreign to me: codependency. What I learned opened doors for me to take responsibility for myself, which was a huge step in my journey toward personal growth.

What is codependency?

A number of people could have their own unique definition to capture what codependency is, but no one captures it as well as leading author Melody Beattie. She explains, "A codependent person is one who has let another person's behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person's behavior."
The important thing to remember about this definition is that it is focused on our own behavior, not someone else's. Beattie explains that though a relationship might seem to be outward-centered, codependency "lies in ourselves, in the ways we have to let other people's behavior affect us and in the ways we try to affect them: obsessing, the controlling, the obsessive 'helping', caretaking, low self-worth bordering on self-hatred, self-repression, abundance of anger and guilt, and communication problems."
Codependent tendencies are often found in people who are dealing with a person who is struggling with an addiction. In some sense, a codependent uses these unhealthy ways of coping to deal with the chaos they find themselves in.
A codependent may actually think they are "helping" the other person by trying to control them. In actuality, they are taking responsibility for someone other than themselves; and that is always a dangerous role to undertake.
But when we know better, we can make better choices.

Read the rest at Grotto Network . . .