5 Essential Beliefs All Codependents Must Drop

… if they ever want to have a healthy relationship

There are essential components that every healthy relationship has. Respect, consideration and kindness are just three of them. Codependent relationships lack the components required for creating healthy and loving relationships.

There is a tendency to look at our partner and blame them for not providing these components for us. We believe that if they only did it, then we would finally have a healthy relationship.

The truth is that we do not know how to provide these components for ourselves. We are asking someone else to do something for us we cannot do ourselves and they usually don’t know how to do it either.

It is pretty hopeless.

The solution to this problem is learning how to become the person we wish our partner was. Whatever we are expecting from them is something we do not give to ourselves. Maybe we don’t know how to. Maybe we simply refuse. In any case, it is our responsibility to move away from what doesn’t work to make space for something new that does.

When we develop an understanding of our inner world, we step away from old codependent ways of relating and learn to love with clarity.

Here are 5 essential beliefs every person has to let go of in order to create loving and healthy relationships with others:

The Belief of Self-Rejection: I am unlovable.

We create what we fear. Whatever our mind focuses on is what we create. We look out for it and so we see it. We change our ways of behaving and so we express our fears in ways others can directly observe.

If I fear that I am unlovable, I will behave in unlovable ways. My fears will look like they have come true. Most of us don’t see this connection. We are not aware of how our beliefs and especially our fearful beliefs influence the way we behave.

When we miss this link, we are dealing with completely separate components that don’t seem to have anything to do with one another: my fears and the reality that exists outside of me.

And we don’t see how we are the missing link.

So if I enter a relationship believing that I am unlovable, I expect the other person to make me feel lovable when that is something no human being can do for another. We can only reflect back what we see in ourselves.

And if you perceive yourself as unlovable, all that will be reflected back to you is all the ways in which you are unlovable, all the ways in which you interpret your partner’s reactions as evidence for why you are unlovable.

You will be blind to the love that is being shown, the love that is there because you have not found it within yourself. Your reality cannot reflect love because your belief does not contain any love.

You cannot see what you don’t recognise. But you see what you believe to be true. And then you call it reality.

The Belief of Self-Abandonment: I am alone.

We begin a relationship on the wrong foot when we choose to be with someone out of fear of being alone. This choice is not based in love. It is based in fear.

We don’t create a loving relationship this way — we create a hostage situation. We may say all the right things and we may even believe them at times, but in essence, we have chosen someone not because we truly love them and want to create a healthy life and relationship with them, but to avoid our own feelings of loneliness. This simply is not love.

If you struggle with feeling alone in the world, you struggle with self-abandonment. You do not know how to care about yourself. You may believe that you are unlovable or somehow lack worth as a human being and so have turned away from yourself. This is one of the most painful ways of being.

The suffering this causes is meant to tell you that you are believing something that is untrue. You are believing a lie of the mind and it hurts. And like with physical pain, we are meant to move away from it. We are meant to ease our own suffering.

But you avoid yourself. You do not pay yourself any attention. You do not soothe yourself. Instead, you leave yourself in your suffering while not being there for yourself.

That’s cruelty right there and I am not surprised that this is hurting.

You are alone not because you are not in a relationship (or in a relationship with someone who actually doesn’t care). You are alone because you have abandoned yourself. You ignore yourself and you don’t even care.

Only that that’s not true. Because all of that is built on a lie in your mind.

You don’t have to abandon yourself because you are unlovable. You are lovable. You are.

It makes no sense to abandon yourself and continue to suffer when all of it is based on a lie, something that is completely untrue.

When you see that you cause your own suffering because you believe something that is not true, you can let go of it. It’s outdated habitual thinking that was never based in reality.

In this outdated and untrue version of reality, no healthy relationships are possible. If you ever want to relate to someone in healthy and loving ways, you need to relate to yourself in healthy and loving ways.

We really cannot give what we don’t have.

“I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
— Maya Angelou

The Belief of Self-Sacrifice: I don’t matter.

A relationship consists of 2 separate individuals. You are both two complete human beings. Both partners need to contribute themselves to the relationship. This means that you need to share your interests, your thoughts, your experiences, your wishes and aspirations, your wins and losses. You have to be in it!

We cannot create a relationship if we do not make ourselves matter. In essence, we are matter and if we do not put ourselves into it, then we are simply not there. If we don’t give ourselves to a partner, we remove the only thing they can connect and bond with.

Learning to make yourself matter is essential if you ever want to have a healthy relationship. This does not mean that you have to force your will or become insistent on having your rigid rules for living followed at all times. No.

It means learning to open up. Learning to show someone else who we are and what kind of life we are willing to co-create.

This can only be done if you are there. You matter.

You have always mattered. You just didn’t realise it.

The Belief of Self-Doubt: I am wrong.

We all doubt ourselves sometimes. It is a healthy sign that we are open to being wrong for the purpose of personal growth, change and evolution.

However, doubting our own experience is an unhealthy sign of an insecure mind. It allows others to dictate how we should or shouldn’t feel. Our self-doubt lowers our boundaries and we start to believe other people’s perceptions more than our own.

This can enhance our sense of self-alienation even further. So we must learn to trust ourselves. We are the only ones to determine our own experience. We feel our own feelings. They cannot be judged as wrong. They are what they are: a felt expression of what we think and believe.

In a healthy relationship, two people with separate realities co-exist without making each other wrong. Differences in perception and personality are not problems. Believing that they are problems is what make them problems.

Everyone is perfectly fine to live in their own reality and to have their own feelings and experiences. Just because they may be different and difficult for us to understand, does not mean that they are wrong.

And neither are you. Honour your experience. Feel your feelings. You are not wrong.

The Belief of Self-Inhibition: I must hide.

Self-inhibition is an openly expressed sign of internal toxic shame. We hide what we feel ashamed about. And sometimes that’s us. When we are codependent, that’s us.

Toxic shame is one of the pillars of codependency. It is vital to challenge beliefs around toxic shame in order to break our codependent patterns. Codependency cannot exist without toxic shame. See through the lie that is toxic shame and free yourself from codependency. (I know it’s easier said than done …)

As long as we inhibit ourselves, we give ourselves the message that we are shameful. We reinforce the belief by acting as if it is true. Our behavior is the evidence that keeps the belief strong. Everything matches. There is incongruence here. “I am bad so I feel ashamed. I hide and inhibit myself because I am bad.”

We provide the evidence for our belief. Again, we create what we fear. We will behave in ways that will make the belief look truer. We create the evidence for keeping it going.

Moving away from self-inhibition is as much an internal process as it is a behavioral one.

We can learn to act and react differently by just doing something differently. No great strategy is needed. None of it will feel great or natural at first. But it will be a step away from toxic shame and a step away from codependency. And that in itself is progress.

It is giving yourself the sign that you no longer have to inhibit yourself and play by the rules of codependency.

Healthy relationships are built on self-expression. We cannot create feelings of comfort, safety and familiarity when we consistently stifle and inhibit ourselves. By doing so we recreate an atmosphere of constant self-observation and self-scrutiny. Healthy relationships don’t exist in that environment.

We became safe for ourselves when we find our way back to authentic self-expression embedded in compassion and encouragement.

There Is No Love in Codependency

Every codependent I have ever met or worked with did what they did because they believed that is was love. It did not come from a place of malice. It always came from a place of confusion and a state of not-knowing.

We all want to have healthy and loving relationships. We all do. It is just that not many of us were shown or taught how to.

It is easy to understand the self-sacrifice of codependency as a sign of love. We rarely ever see how the things we do are unhelpful or actually stopping us from getting the things we want.

Codependents want healthy and loving relationships. Codependents want love. But codependency itself robs us from that.

By letting go and see through the codependent beliefs that have kept us tethered to dysfunctional models of relating, we finally give ourselves a chance to create what we have always wanted: a healthy and loving relationship.

At first, the one with ourselves and then those with others.

- Marlena Tillhon - Jun 7, 2019