We should start at the beginning. I came by Codependency honestly. I had the great fortune of being born the oldest female child of six humans. My parents were both relatively young, 28 and 25. They were both raised by single mothers. My dad lost his dad when he was 9 and my mom’s parents divorced when she was 3 or 4. My parents started their family out of love. They told the story when I was older, that I would have lots of responsibility being the oldest of their kids. I was an over achiever from the beginning. There are pictures of me and my parents all chubby cheeks and giggles. I was tested for gifted classes in early childhood. I liked the validation of adults. This started the formation of needing to perform to receive validation. Culturally, this is typical. We start as small children wanting to get reactions from the adults in our experience. It is how we develop empathy. Babies exhibit early signs of empathy in mirroring their parents’ smiles and cooing. Our brains start to wire the importance of reflecting emotions and facial responses almost immediately. All this information is to say that it is completely normal to build an empathetic response as a human. For me and for most humans, we develop a sense of validation from how other people see us. The challenge comes when we start to connect our worth and value from those interactions.
There is a place in human development when we start to see ourselves in how other people see us. In today’s social experience much of who we are is seen through social media and relationships. Things go awry when that becomes the only way we get validation. The maladaptive response is when we do more things that are necessary to feel worthy. It is an unintentional consequence of being human. As higher thinking beings we make inferences about our worth based on other’s responses, reactions, behavior, and interactions. Parents start with messages about how others view us. The concept of “what would people think” starts very early. Mostly, the idea comes from the adults raising children and their own perceptions. The reality is no one is thinking about us all that much. Think about the first time you started to consider how other people were looking at or considering your outfit, behavior or how you spoke. Most kids don’t really think about those things until they get out of their family of origin. All this is something to consider under ideal circumstances. Most of us were not raised in “ideal” circumstances. If any trauma, addiction, or unforeseen situations take place things get much more challenging.
In the home I was raised in, my parents had lots of goals about raising a family. They wanted lots of kids. They valued education and their Catholic faith. They wanted to give their kids the best possible future in a complete family with two parents. Great goals when you think it was 1973 in the United States. I can imagine they both considered their own upbringings and wanted better, like most parents do. They had 5 more children over the next 16 years. My mom stayed home for much of my early childhood. My dad worked a lot with his job with the power company and the Army National Guard. They did the best they could with the tools they had at the time. Unfortunately, they had limited tools for how to raise a growing family and being in relationship without healthy examples of how to do that. I grew up with lots of yelling and conflict. My parents loved the idea of having a family but were ill equipped to deal with marital conflict. My mom had a temper, she yelled often. My dad was avoidant. Neither of them had addiction issues. Dad smoked marijuana and had the occasional beer. My mom wasn’t much of a drinker and didn’t ever use drugs. So where did the codependency come from? I’ll tell you. It came from unpredictable emotional responses. It came from feeling uncertain about what was going to happen on any given day. Even with a “stable environment” it was difficult to predict what was going to happen. I learned as a child that my behavior and choice might determine the outcome. That’s a lot of responsibility for a little kid.
Think about your own childhood. Think about what the expectations were of you by the adults in your experience. Take a few minutes to write your own early childhood story.
Who were your adult caregiver?
What did you consider the expectation about your behavior were?
What did you infer from those early experiences about what you could change or control?
How did you start to adapt your behavior to get the “best” possible response?
What were the possible influences informed those expectation?