So today obviously is a post about Codependency and Empathy. Yay!!!
Personally, it took me a long time to understand what codependency meant, how I interacted with it, and how it affected my thinking/feelings, and thus my actions. I unknowingly enmeshed codependency and empathy with love and caring. This entanglement often kept me repeating suffering patterns and wondering what the hell I was missing? All I was doing was “loving.”
In the past, I would enact the famous, “They had a really rough childhood” or whatever other fill in the blank. Which served to justify the behavior or treatment I was receiving from them. In turn, it stunted their growth because it avoided them from being responsible or accountable for their actions. It kept me from being responsible or accountable for allowing the behavior. All for love, am I right? Spoiler alert, it never worked out.
Possessing empathy is never a fault. (Quite frankly, I think it is needed now more than ever because we stank of division.) Only when we choose to sacrifice ourselves for it, and that is usually where codependency eeks in. BALANCE!!
It’s something I still work with today but to a much lesser degree. Codependency and empathy are a very interesting duo that can make things very confusing if we are unaware of our behavior. The combo can leave us as doormats for other people’s behavior, and then we victimize ourselves when we are actually full-on participating.
Identifying my behaviors is helpful to me, so I know how to move with them, so I hope this sheds some light for you.
All love.
Ashley