Codependency & Your Nuclear Family
By Cheryl Fidelman, The Conscious Codependence™ Coach.
Are there things that you may share with a complete stranger but wouldn’t think to share with a family member? Would you tell a friend about who you’re dating but you wouldn’t tell your mother? Does your husband/wife (or partner) know things that you would never share with your sibling – or vice versa?
It’s certainly important to honor the context of each of our relationships. We don’t share everything with everybody because there are so many different kinds of connections and relationships that we may have in any one phase of life. And it can be beautiful to keep some things private and sacred with certain people in our lives. Aside from our moments of honoring context and privacy, codependency can have us completely hide parts of our lives from our nuclear family.
For some of us in our codependent moments, we only share with our family what we think they can hear or understand. So we tailor our personality and our expression to fit into their ears. We become muted versions of ourselves with our family (or certain members of it). Or we only share what we feel safe to share because we anticipate an off color response that they will have. Ultimately, what we are avoiding is NOT their response, but how we will feel as a result of their response.
In the Conscious Codependence™ Process, we learn how to not avoid or resist our own feelings. We learn how not to avoid or resist other people’s feelings. And when we become adept at expanding our threshold for feeling, we no longer place our permission to share ourselves in other people’s hands. The habit of hiding precious parts of our inner world from our family members is regressive – as is Codependency. The act of avoiding not being seen or heard by our family is a habit of becoming a younger version of ourselves around our family OR dissociating from our True Nature around our family. We can mature and evolve beyond measure when we no longer regress around our family.
We don’t have to share everything with everyone. But one of the greatest access points to personal evolution can be found in re-orienting your self-expression around your family. Shedding the learned behavior of codependently shutting down around your family can impact all areas of your life – personal and otherwise. When we remove our access to personal safety from the hands of our family, we can greatly diminish any suffering in relation to them.
I’m not saying that this is easy. It can be so automatic to slip into our Traumatic Identity around certain family members. This is the identity that developed within us as children in order to survive their reality. It can be like an unconscious habit to defer to our family’s truth in order to find our own. But we no longer need to survive their reality. An important rite of passage as adults is to no longer need our parents (or certain family members) to see and understand us. We now get to see and understand them while giving up the need to experience that in return. In the Conscious Codependence™ Process, we get to have our reality and our voice survive and thrive in any environment and in the presence of any one person’s psychology.
YOUR RELATIONSHIP w/ YOURSELF is WHERE it ALL BEGINS.
You can get your FREE PDF of The 3 Codes to Clear Codependency at www.cherylfidelman.com. The PDF lists the common developmental roots & behavioral patterns of each Code and also some questions to customize them to your experience.
