Codependency — Losing Yourself to Love Others

Post in our ongoing daily series on the top concerns clients bring to Integrative Mind Body Psychiatry.

Codependency is one of the most misunderstood patterns in mental health. It is not weakness. It is not neediness. It is a nervous system pattern — often learned young — where a person survives by tracking someone else's mood, needs, and behavior so closely that they lose track of their own.

Codependent patterns often show up in the caretakers, the peacemakers, the eldest daughters, the pastor's wives, the nurses. The people who are so good at reading the room that they forget they were in it.

What Codependency Often Looks Like

• Feeling responsible for other people's emotions

• Chronic difficulty saying no

• Anxiety that lifts when everyone else is regulated

• Losing your own preferences, opinions, needs

• Repeated relationships with people who cannot receive love

• Physical symptoms — GI, chronic tension — when trying to hold a boundary

Five Whole-Person Steps

1. Practice noticing what you want, feel, or need — literally, hour by hour.

2. Start with the smallest 'no.' The pattern breaks in small increments.

3. Sit with the discomfort of not fixing someone else. That is where growth lives.

4. Consider therapy specifically trained in family systems, IFS, or trauma work.

5. Treat the anxiety underneath. Codependency is often anxious attachment doing its best to survive.

You are allowed to exist as a full person, not just a caretaker. I see patients via telehealth in Utah at integrativemindbodypsychiatry.com.

Tomorrow: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria — The ADHD Symptom Nobody Names.

Respectfully, Beth Makar, RN, Dual-MSN, PMHNP-BC · Integrative Mind Body Psychiatry · integrativemindbodypsychiatry.com