Codependency Will Change Your Life

By Cheryl Fidelman, The Conscious Codependence™ Coach.

As long as Codependency is a dominant force in your life,  your life and your identity will not be yours. You won’t be living as the truest version of yourself. Your identity will be in the hands of someone else, what you think their interpretation is of who you are and what you are doing.  As we interact with someone else’s interpretation of us, our truth can turn into a consistent proving of our innocence or some sort of consistent effort of trying to be heard. Repression is often a safe place even when you may not feel as if your real self is subdued. 

Sometimes we can’t even find ourselves beyond the identity that we take on in our Codependent moments. And some of us have some Codependent moments, and others have mostly Codependent moments– it may direct who you are most of the time.  It has changed you to be someone you are not. And you may be able to feel the real you underneath the Codependency, but that real you is trapped inside. What is being exposed to your family and friends is the you that Codependency has turned you into.  It can change you until it becomes you. And for a lot of us, it has either completely taken over the trajectory of our life or it has directed an entire phase of life. 

When I was 4 years old, Codependency came into my life. At first, I didn’t recognize it.
But I remember as it slowly came in and I slowly left. And over the next 25 years, it grew inside me until it was me. It steered my beliefs, choices, decisions, relationships, identity and self-image. Codependency became me and I became Codependency – we were one

I unconsciously gave 25 years of my life to it. That is to say that I was on autopilot. It was automatic. I saw other people as more valuable than me, more important than me and more desired than me. I saw everyone else as gods that I felt diminished by. My mother looked at people this way and I acquired her lens. I felt like everyone treated me bad– but maybe my feeling bad about myself came first and their behavior came second. I knew Codependency better than I knew myself. It had been my leader, my master and the main director of my life. 

I experienced glimpses of me through the years as I fought for those moments of air beyond the subtly suffocating and dominating chokehold of Codependency. So I knew that there was a real me in there. And I was determined to heal my Codependency and change back to the real me.

You may not be saturated with it as much as I was. For some of my clients, it shows up at work but not at home. For others it’s at home and not at work. Some feel like it comes over them and changes them in certain categories of life and they have no agency when it does. 

You may want to avoid being the real you in some relationships because you anticipate that the real you may not survive in the relationship OR the relationship may not survive if the real you is present. This is the stronghold of Codependency changing you so that you can sustain certain relationships that Codependency tells you that you can’t do without. It can also change you to become someone who avoids certain relationships because it tells you that the real you wouldn’t be welcome there. 

Codependency is looking for you to be Codependent unto it. Our unconscious loyalty to being Codependent is what keeps it in our lives. And we have to change ourselves for the sake of our loyalty. 

As you dissolve your Codependency and your loyalty to it, you’ll get to live as the real you in all of your relationships. And everyone that you are in a relationship with will get to be the real them because your sense of identity and safety will no longer depend on anyone else changing how they see or hear you. When everyone around us gets to be liberated from the confines of our Codependency – more love, fun, freedom and intimacy rains upon all. 

I’m free from it now and on a daily basis I support others in walking towards their freedom. 

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.