Co-Dependency is one hell of a drug.

Like any addiction, you can heal and transfigure your relationship to it.

Here’s how.

First things first, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU. Co-dependency arises from the fear of abandonment. It is a behavioral adaptation that you learned in order to feel safe in your environment and relationships.

If you can learn it, you can unlearn it.

You need to understand co-dependency as one big paradox. We adapt the way we relate to match the way we believe that others think we should be in order to receive love.

“I abandon myself and my needs so that I will not be abandoned by someone else.”

Co-dependency is a self-fulfilling prophecy of abandonment. We have already been abandoned when we try to not be abandoned, and we are abandoned by the most important person in the equation: Yourself.

The only way out of co-dependency is through tending to the ways you abandon yourself.

- Become aware of the small needs you abandon

- Be honest with how each of these decisions lead you away from yourself

- Question how safe you really feel when everything you do is for someone else

- Spend time alone doing things that nourish you.

Self-abandonment is inauthenticity.

If you don’t feel safe in yourself, your relationships will only illuminate more of your own insecurities making it harder and harder to sustain them. Inauthenticity only leads to unnecessary suffering.

There are only two games we can play in life. Its eithe the outside-in game or the inside-out game. Co-dependency is trying to feel internally safe through surrendering all agency to the external. Wholeness is knowing the inner state will dictate the outer reality.

Practice aligning your decisions with more of what feels authentic and life giving to YOU, even if that means less time with your relationships. Be graceful when you loop into self-abandonment. Accept the scenario without guilt, recognize that there is another way forward, and lead with tenderness for your needs.

Co-dependency is transfigured into wholeness through:

- meeting your own needs first

- applying grace where there is shame

- replacing inauthenticity with honesty

- cultivating safety from the inside-out

Healing for one is healing for all. Know that you already are complete and you just need to unlearn.