Brief overview
- Definition: Co-dependency affects loved ones of addicts whose lives are overshadowed and entangled with the addiction. They develop strategies for dealing with the disease that harm themselves.
- What to do. Don’t support the addiction, but help the addict quit, also take responsibility for yourself and seek help yourself.
- Tips for dealing with addicts: address the addiction, stay with yourself, refrain from accusations, signal willingness to help but not support addiction, remain consistent.
- Signs of co-dependency: putting one’s own needs aside, covering up the disease, taking over the addict’s tasks, trying to control and prevent consumption, feelings of shame and guilt.
What is co-dependency?
Co-dependency means that one person is involved in the addiction of someone close to them. The addiction of the other person often becomes the all-dominant topic – the co-dependent person himself fades into the background. He develops strategies to deal with the addict’s disease, which harms himself.
Ways out of co-dependency
Breaking free from co-dependency is not easy. Loyal and devoted people in particular quickly struggle with feelings of guilt about abandoning the patient. But breaking free from co-dependency doesn’t necessarily mean giving up and dropping the addict.
The following measures will help you get out of codependency:
Accept the disease
Addiction is a disease. It can only be overcome if the addict himself accepts that he is ill and his suffering is great enough to take up the fight with the addiction. You can support him in this, but you cannot take it off his hands. The first step is for you yourself to acknowledge that the person is addicted.
Stop protecting your loved one
Show willingness to help the patient on his way out of addiction. However, make it clear that you will not continue to support him in his addiction. If you protect him from the consequences of his addiction, you will prevent him from seeking help. You are only prolonging the disease process in this way.
Seek help
Seek help to break free from codependency. Contact a counseling center and enlist the support of a support group for loved ones of addicts.
Take responsibility for your own life
It is possible that, as you become more independent, the addict’s concern about losing you will even contribute to him seeking help. However, this hope should not be the primary motive for your detachment.
Say goodbye to feelings of guilt
Even if things haven’t gone smoothly in your relationship, you have no responsibility for your loved one’s addiction.
Tips for dealing with addiction
Addiction is a taboo. It is therefore difficult to bring up the subject. People fear shaming, wrongly suspecting and offending the other person. And in fact, people whose consumption of intoxicants is problematic often react dismissively and thin-skinned.
Doing nothing and looking the other way is nevertheless not a good option. The problem will not go away on its own. Only if someone holds up a mirror to those affected will they get the impetus to deal with the problem.
- Be brave: Speak up if you have the feeling that your friend, colleague, parent or partner is using too much or is developing addictive behaviors.
- Stay with yourself: Describe to the addict how the use or addictive behavior affects you and how you feel about it.
- Signal that you will help him on his way out of addiction. However, make it unmistakably clear that you will not support him (further) in his addiction.
- Don’t expect too much: Don’t expect immediate improvement from a conversation. However, your honest feedback can help the addict to come to terms with his problem.
- Be consistent.
How does codependency manifest itself?
Co-dependency has many faces. If at the beginning the focus is on excusing the addict’s behavior and protecting him or her, this is often followed by a control phase. In this phase, the co-dependent person tries to prevent the addict from using drugs or engaging in addictive behavior – usually unsuccessfully. His failure leads to anger or resignation and then often turns into blame, threats and rejection. These individual phases may or may not follow one another.
Protect
A first impulse is usually to protect the addict from the consequences of his consumption. For example, an alcoholic is excused to the employer as being ill with the flu, even though he or she is actually very hung over.
Hide
In addition, there is shame – addiction is a disease that is strongly stigmatized. The problem is also played down and concealed among friends and extended family. The co-dependent is ashamed of the alcohol addiction or the gambling addiction or the constant being stoned of the partner, the daughter, the mother.
Apologize
Also common is for codependents to excuse the addiction. Stress, a difficult childhood, a job loss – these are all reasons why the addict cannot cope without the addictive substance. This can go so far that co-dependents provide the addict with his addictive substance.
Whether protecting, hiding, or apologizing, the supposed help makes the problem worse. Since the addict does not feel the full effects of his disease, the pressure of suffering remains bearable. As a result, he can suppress the extent of his illness. The sufferer will not seek help and will continue as before. As difficult as it may be, not seeking help helps addicts more in the long run.
Control
Charges
Even confrontation usually accomplishes little. The addict is forced into a defensive role by accusations, makes promises to get better, and breaks these promises again and again. Disappointment is followed by renewed accusations: a vicious circle.
Consequences of co-dependency
The consequences of co-dependency are serious. The quality of life, which suffers anyway due to the close contact with an addict, is additionally intensified. The co-dependent person’s life essentially revolves around the addiction, and his or her own needs are neglected. Secrecy and shame overshadow life. The co-dependent finds himself in a grueling roller coaster of love and hope, disappointment, anger and disgust.
The fear of the next excess is compounded by financial worries when the addict spends too much money on alcohol, drugs or gambling – especially if he loses his job as the main breadwinner because of his addiction. Adding to the psychological overload is the burden of tasks that the codependent must relieve the addict of.
Co-dependency makes you sick
The consequences are particularly serious when addicts are prone to violence or even sexual assault while intoxicated.
Children are victims
The children of alcoholics and other addicted patients suffer the most. They take on tasks that they are not actually up to yet, live in an environment that is characterized by fears and worries. The fear of the next excess of the addicted parent overshadows their lives. Added to this are the shame and secrecy – they cannot talk to anyone about their situation, friends cannot be brought home for fear that the addiction disease will become public.
For children, it is particularly disastrous that one of the first and most important relationships in life is shattered: that with their own parents. Security, attention and support fall by the wayside. Trust in parents is repeatedly disappointed. Such experiences can leave their mark for life and undermine future relationships.
It is not uncommon for what they learned as children to carry over into adult life: 60 percent of women who live with an addicted partner grew up in a household with an addicted parent.
Who is at risk?
Women in particular run the risk of becoming co-dependent – they account for 90 percent of those affected. This can be partly explained by the fact that addictions affect men more often.
Another reason could be that it is still part of a woman’s role model to sacrifice herself and hold a relationship together. In the self-perception and the perception of others, a woman “abandons” her alcoholic partner if she leaves him. A man, on the other hand, is socially “not expected” to have an addicted partner.
People who grow up in families with addicted parents are also particularly at risk. In principle, families in which problems are swept under the carpet are also problematic.
Co-dependency: Therapy
In the case of a pronounced co-dependency, psychotherapy may become necessary. The goal is to bring the affected person back to himself. He learns to perceive and focus on himself and his own needs again, and to put aside feelings of guilt. The goal is to build healthy distance.
To the extent that the co-dependent frees himself from the entanglement, the oppressive feeling of powerlessness also disappears. He can do something again – namely for himself – and regains control over his own life.
