Femininity, Codependency & Receiving

By Cheryl Fidelman, The Conscious Codependence™ Coach.

There’s a fundamental distortion that Codependency creates when it comes to our ability to receive connection. It’s like a skip in the record. It’s a personal disconnection that we project onto someone else.  It’s like the analogy of the monkey trying to pull a perpendicular banana through parallel cage bars.  She can just turn the banana. It’s a very simple fix. But Codependency can live in such a blindspot that we can’t see that we are pushing away in our longing to receive. 

I’m mainly addressing those that identify as women but this can apply to anyone. Regardless of what gender one identifies as, your ability to receive connection, love & compassion from another exists on your feminine side.  Your ability to identify emotions & sensations comes from your feminine side.  Your facility to not only receive a depth of connection from others, but to be deeply connected to the multi dimensions of your own inner experience is your feminine. Your longing for a sense of safety to come from another person is your feminine side seeking to be anchored.  

Here’s where it all gets tripped up. And where the receiving turns into pushing. Here’s where you may be begging for your heart to be honored but it comes across as blaming someone else for not doing their job. It’s when your heart feels hurt and blaming keeps you from being taken care of. When you’re begging to be seen but you’re not seeing yourself. When you don’t trust them when they tell you what they’re thinking & feeling. When you’re avoiding or anticipating their mood.  When you think you know what their facial expressions mean more than they do. When you want them to address your feelings while you’re blaming them for them.  And when your pain is so big that they don’t know what to do for you and you think that they should know. 

When you point to someone else’s experience, you push them away from you and you push yourself away from yourself. Please stop doing that. The #1 most Codependent thing that you could do is to tell someone else what they are thinking or feeling or doing to you. You certainly can ask them, then you are tasked with believing them. Don’t project your reality about them onto them. This is when you lean into your punishing masculine. You are giving them a projection that they can’t receive because it may not be true for them. Your projection is coming from a feeling that you are having –not what you think is going on for them. Identify the feeling, drop the projection and surrender to your body. Your femininity is the inner alignment of your truth about you – not your truth about someone else. 

When you think you’re right about what someone else is feeling and thinking you’re leaning into the righteousness of Codependency. The righteousness of Codependency can create the illusion of being gaslit because we won’t accept any other truth about another person than our own. If someone tells us that they didn’t do what we think that they did, we judge them as being narcissistic or gaslighting because we can’t see past our own truth of what they did. But it never matters what someone else did – it’s likely mostly made up of added interpretation anyway. What matters is how you feel. And if you can’t connect to how you feel with no projected or implied blame, then likely the other person will not be able to connect to how you  feel. It’s a slippery slope where we can push people away when what we’re really wanting is a depth of closeness that we may not even know how to create. 

Your femininity is located in a surrendered place inside of you. If there is resistance in that surrendered place, you will fight to receive as opposed to opening to receive. If you reshape your life based on someone else’s nervous system, then you have agreed to put someone else in the driver’s seat of your experience which would inherently be difficult to surrender to.  Especially if you resent them for their limitations that you have taken on in the name of “compromise” or “keeping the peace.”   

Remember, if you have a partner, please don’t assume that they owe you anything. And please don’t assume that you owe them anything. You don’t owe them your repression and they don’t owe you change. They are a human trying to manage an imperfect psyche just like you are. Your femininity lies in getting to know yourself deeply, getting to know them deeply and listening to your intuition from a place of acceptance. Acceptance diminishes resistance and allows you to surrender and receive  – most importantly receive from yourself. 

Surrender isn’t always gentle. It could give birth to deeper intimacy or divorce. When you are in your sacred feminine, you welcome (and can hold) the change(s) that are born from clarity. In your healed feminine, you can be a vessel for spirit & universe alignment such that your connection to your intuition is clear and your intuition is that which you live in a state of surrender to. 

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.