Alchemizing Codependency

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Once upon a time, a coworker asked me in an elevator once, “hey are you a codependent? because if you are that’s fine. I just wanted you to know I was one too. You can recover from it.” But I responded with, “no I’m totally fine. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Because I was too ashamed of my shame to admit my truth. And I couldn’t see it then, but I was all over again, simply abandoning the part of me that took shame in as a truth. A part that translated the shame put against me and placed it inside as something to be ashamed of. Shame that I was ashamed of. See that double-wrapping layers of how these things stay untouched by love?

I was trying to cover over it. Force it into non-existence by emulating what to me was the perfect swan dive execution of everyone’s expectations of me. Codependency, at first glance, looks innocent. I mean being around a really good, really stealthy people pleaser can feel really good to your ego. But the truth is, codependents are really deceptive beings. They can’t help it in a way. They have the disease to please. They will say almost anything, even if its something they don’t believe is true at all, just to keep the ruse going.

So what’s the codependent ruse?

A codependent is so afraid of displeasing someone that everything that drives them gets built around this singular defense strategy. They are stuck in their, what in ego development theory is called, the conformist stage of development. And they stay there a way to remove any chance that you could see them in a disappointing, unflattering way. Because their own unconscious shame is already doing that for them and any psychic energy adding to that is crushingly difficult. They are a kind of mirror image distortion of narcissism. At their core, they share a dysfunction in their relationship with themselves. They both are in different ways relational diseases that directly affect anyone they're in a relationship with. They share a shame so powerful, it feels like it has the energy to be able to destroy you, so you never confront it fully. And rather than finding that part and loving it back into its wholeness, their ego develops a strategy to keep that thing locked away. It makes an agreement - let's falsify reality so that I never have to deal with the crushing sense of disappointment.

The ego is that deficient, because of the energy of shame, that a codependent can start believing their own lies to cover over their own truth. Like a narcissistic structure, a codependent one fears exposure and will lie to your face to keep from facing the fear covering over their truth. I was such a good liar. Codependents become good at lying because their whole sense of worth is based on how they appear - their reputation, as acceptable or unacceptable, pleasing or displeasing to others, so we have to lie to protect ourselves from the pain that we cannot integrate.

So even if someone isn’t as severely as codependent as I was, we can all find that part of our ego, right? That part which is willing to lie, even a small lie, in order to appear better to others than we really are to ourselves? Than the story of our actions would claim about us?

Men in particular, I’m talking to you right now.

Though this next part applies to anyone. Stop lying to yourself. Stop lying to anyone else about who you really are. And if you’re truly courageous and honorable, then the truth about yourself and your actions will do all the work to carry you. You don’t need lies in order to be integral. We have to develop a strong, healthy, holistic, unconditionally regarding relationship with ourselves and we have to become completely self-honest. There’s no substitute for it. No strategy around it. And I want you to see how safe it really is to expose yourself. To prove to you that there is sufficient love in the universe. In you, heroic one.

I’m making these videos to try to prove it to you so you don’t have to be afraid of it any more. By doing the most counter intuitive thing for you and that is to simply give up. Surrender. You don’t head off to somewhere else. You can only enter it right here, right now. Surrender to the felt-sense experience truth of the pain you’ve been carrying around with you. The parts that carry the most shame and offer them up on the evolutionary table. We heal each other by being the first to admit what we’re carrying. And we get there together by feeling more not less. By baring more of our souls, not less. By being exposed, not guarded. Stop chasing the next fantasy. Claim your shadow yourself before another hurt person has to claim it for you.

Only you can make the truth enough. No one else will do it for you. It is what love is asking from you