Healing Co-Dependency

Some incredibly important and valid human needs are love, affection and relationship. The strongest cultural story for fulfilling these needs is falling in love with the “one”. The knight rescues the princess and they live happily ever after. While falling in love is an incredibly important part of life, it often fails to meet our expectations. When we realize the person we fell in love with is just as human as the rest of us and not capable of meeting all of our needs, relationships often fall back on codependent and manipulative behavior. The truth is that one person can not be a substitute for a meaningful career, supportive community or self acceptance. We often try so hard to make our partners into perfect caretakers, cheerleaders, therapists, and roommates. When unexamined and unmet, our unconscious need for love and acceptance is so strong that we believe the perfect partner can make up for this hole inside of ourselves.

Love is Seeing Someone For Who They Truly Are

My first experience of an intensely codependent relationship happened when I started to date a girl who had just gotten out of a Wilderness Program for alcohol and cocaine addiction. This was honestly the first time I had been so close and intimate with someone I was absolutely in love with. She was very open about being in recovery and an incredibly vibrant and intelligent girl. The first time my parents met her, she was very open about where she was in her life, and we all had a very great conversation about wanting to support her as a family.

Moving forward into the relationship I started noticing little things. Stories I heard from her and from friends didn’t add up, we lived very close and had a lot of mutual friends. I’d hear about her doing drugs at a party and she would convince me my friends just wanted to make me jealous and sabotage our relationship. Instead of seeing her as she was, I saw what I wanted to see.

We are inundated with what a perfect relationship should look like from a young age and sold that our true love is the answer to all of our problems. We often project our idea of a perfect partner onto someone and fail to see them more realistically. I was a very lonely teenager who didn’t have a lot of friends. My feelings of self worth were poor, and I craved love and intimacy. I saw this relationship as my one lifeline and went to incredible lengths of self deception to preserve it.

It got to the point where she made me question conversations we had, question myself in things I saw and heard with my own eyes and ears. It reached a breaking point when her and my family went out for dinner for moms birthday. She looked pale and there were dark circles under her eyes. When we had first started dating she was very outgoing, kind and respectful towards me and my family. She was the complete opposite during this car ride and very rude to my parents. At one point my Dad looked at her through the rear view mirror and asked her very calmly if she was using drugs again. She went dead silent, and was on her phone the rest of the car ride. My dad told her we could sit down and have an honest conversation about what was going on or he would take her home.

We arrived at the restaurant, and she got out of the car and walked away. Like a lost puppy dog I followed her. I asked, “Hey my dad means well, I think we are all just worried about you. Can we just go back and talk to my parents?”

“Your parents are such condescending assholes,” she replied. “I don’t want to hear it, I have enough unsupportive people in my life that don’t trust me.”

I pleaded with her to stay telling her what she wanted to hear, that I believed her, to please stay for me. Rather than having a real conversation and being honest with her that I was scared of her relapsing, I just didn’t want her to leave. In my own way I was trying to manipulate her.

My dad said he would take her home and we both rode back together to her house. I kissed her goodbye and told her I would call her. “What the fuck dad why did you do that,” I angrily asked my father.

“Matthew she is very obviously still using and lying to us about it and I don’t want that around our family.”

I thought back to all the conversations that didn’t add up, the way she looked, the things I’d heard from my friends. I suddenly realized how obvious it was, and that my dad was right.

“I guess you’re right,” I said. At that moment I realized how selfish I had been. I hadn’t wanted to confront her about it because in my mind I thought I couldn’t be happy without her, and if I was honest with her I would lose her. I realized up until that moment I hadn’t really loved her, I loved the way she made me feel. I thought about what a bright, intelligent and beautiful person she was. I thought about how much she could accomplish with her life if she wasn’t trapped by drug use. I thought about how horrible it was that her addiction took away the parts of her I had come to cherish and admire. I started crying. “I feel so fucking helpless dad.”

“I know,” he replied, “but she has to decide that she wants help.”

That moment was the first moment I truly loved her unconditionally, without needing her to make me feel whole. At that moment, I experienced the clarity of my own wholeness within myself. What I had thought was love, and what many of us mistake love to be is infatuation or codependency. We are mesmerized by someone’s looks, or the way they make us feel.

In my mind true love is really seeing someone for who they are and putting their own needs above you own. I had a phone call with her later in the week and confronted her about the drugs and the lying, she admitted she had been using and told me she didn’t want to stop. I told her my parents could help her get treatment and she said she didn’t need help, and at that point I knew the best thing for both of us was to break up. I told her I would love to be in her life and support her when she decided to get clean. This relationship taught me a lot. I realized that you can care about and love people even if they want nothing to do with you. I learned how to set boundaries, how to ask for help and how to try a little harder to get to know people as they truly are not just what I want to see.