Before you dive headlong into the work of Codependency you will need some tools. This is hard work, and it might feel a lot like changing your whole outlook on life. It will require a high level of self-awareness. You will have to be able to look at your behavior and choices honestly. You will need to make time to reflect on the questions at the end of each section from the lens of how you were raised and what influences your worth and value. It helps if you have a few key people in your life who know you well and who are willing to give you unfiltered feedback. You will need to take breaks and have the ability to give yourself grace and patience. It will be helpful to have a therapist to work with you through the tough parts, especially around the resentments you have built up from doing all the extra things.
Self-awareness is the ability to recognize your patterns and behaviors. Often times we move through life doing things because that’s how we have always done them. It will be helpful to start to question and evaluate your behavior from the perspective of what you gain from doing things for other people. Consider how it feels when your instinct is to decline an invitation or do something you don’t have time or a desire to do. It will be a good idea to increase your awareness of the people in your life that you struggle to say no to and why. As you read more about the motivations for doing things, you may start to experience resistance and a need to take a pause. The awareness is just the first step, the real work will come when you start to make changes. Then you will need to be aware of how it makes you feel to set boundaries or say no.
Having a team of people in your life will help you feel supported. Being able to talk to them when you have questions about what you don’t necessarily see in your own behavior. It helps if they have been in your life for multiple seasons and maybe through some hard things. Consider your close friends or family members who do a good job of keeping you accountable. You might find that in the midst of this work, you will lose some of them. They might be the people who like that you do things out of obligation. There have been people in your life who like that you do those extra things for them. There will also be people in your life that don’t appreciate boundaries and prefer the unhealthy connection of you validating them. Consider the people you have confidence in that will be honest with you. The ones who don’t just tell you what you want to hear but what you need to hear.
This work will be difficult and emotional. It will be important not to rush through each section without sinking deeper into the emotional responses. I will encourage you to set time aside when you read each section. Make time to unpack the information. Take breaks if it starts to feel overwhelming or like too much. It will be helpful to use the questions as journal prompts. Write about how it feels to look at how your codependency shows up. Having a place and time to read through your answers will give you an opportunity to add things as they come up. If you’re reading it on a device have a place to keep notes will be useful. Make sure to go back and look over what you have written. At different times in your life, your answers might change. As your relationships change you may want to rethink how those people show up in your life.
Doing any kind of deep introspective practice will bring up old issues. It will be useful to consider going to therapy or getting back in if it has been a while. If you are already seeing a therapist, you may want to let them know you are working on codependency. They might be a resources to help you increase awareness around issues and challenges that contribute to the reasons you started therapy in the first place. Though reading this book can be therapeutic, it should not be used in place of therapy.
More than anything, give yourself patience and grace. We can often get down on ourselves for making choice and behaving in a way that wasn’t the best for us. This awareness and reflection might give you insight, but it also might contribute to your negative self-talk. Try to be gentle with yourself and recognize that changing patterns takes time and you will relapse. You will fall into old behaviors. It will happen. Rather than beating yourself up, take a breath. Recognize it took a while for you to build up those skills and it will take time to unlearn your old behaviors. It might mean you spend time with different people or have different relationships with the current people in your life. Giving yourself grace will look like taking a pause, being kind and understanding with yourself, you deserve it.
Things to consider:
What patterns would you like to change in doing this work?
Think of at least two people close to you that you can process with and why would you choose them?
When do you have time to process this information and where do you work best?
What does giving yourself grace look like and how do you show yourself kindness?