My first real descent into codependent madness started when I was nineteen. I started dating a guy who was ten years older than me. I didn’t know it when we met, but he was a severe cocaine addict.
I knew I was about to make a terrible decision, but I went ahead anyway. I ignored the red flags and continued. If I’m being honest, our weekends were pathetic. Just sitting in this gross, sticky local pool hall, drinking until we couldn’t see straight, and burning through cash gambling. By Saturday night, my entire pay cheque for the week was completely gone, all because I was trying so damn hard to keep up and prove I belonged there with him.
And the worst part was how incredibly cruel he was. He’d make these passive-aggressive digs about my weight, pick apart my looks right to my face, and constantly throw his ex-girlfriends in my face. He wanted me to feel insecure. He wanted me to think I was lucky he even looked my way and that he could replace me the second I stopped behaving.
I should have packed my bags and left, but I was weak, and even though I was being rejected, I longed for him even more. I was, in fact, obsessed with him. I became incredibly jealous and controlling. I needed to know every single detail of his past. It’s a painful illustration of why we suffer when we expect people to love us our way. I believed with everything in me that if I could just perform perfectly, if I could just be pretty enough or accommodating enough, he would finally change and validate my worth.
By the end of ten months, I had shrunk to a shadow. My weight dropped thirty pounds because I stopped eating. I completely cut off my friends and family out of shame. I was having daily, violent panic attacks. Eventually, out of pure survival instinct, I left.
But here is the absolute kicker about codependency: if you don’t fix the rot in your own foundation, you will just find a new person to build the exact same prison with.
My next relationship lasted four years. He was a good man whom I loved deeply, but he had a severe alcohol dependency. Immediately, my old habits woke up. We spent four years swinging wildly between incredibly beautiful, loving moments and horrific, screaming fights that left both of us completely numb.
The second that ended, I jumped straight into a relationship with another emotionally unavailable guy. I was addicted to the crisis. As long as their lives were a mess, I had a job to do. And as long as I had a job to do, I didn’t have to sit in a quiet room and face myself.
Codependency: No More Saved Me When I Was Drowning in Other People’s Problems
You can’t help others stand whilst still sitting, and eventually, the weight of carrying everyone else’s baggage will break your back. For me, it happened on the bathroom floor of a small apartment, crying so hard I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the wreckage of my twenties and realised that if I didn’t stop this insanity, I was going to spend the rest of my life emotionally bankrupt.
I got myself a tiny place of my own, and the silence of those first few days was absolutely torturous.
I couldn’t stop crying. Doing normal things like walking my dog or going to the grocery store felt like trying to swim through wet cement. The loneliness was a physical ache in my chest. In my absolute desperation, I did something I had never done before: I admitted I was totally powerless, and I reached out for help.
I started reading books, one of which was Melody Beattie’s book, Codependent No More. Reading that book felt like someone was reaching into my chest and turning on a light. I realised I wasn’t some unique, tragic martyr; I was a textbook codependent.
I sat there with a yellow highlighter, marking line after line of behaviours I had normalised for years. I realised I was constantly feeling responsible for other people’s feelings, choices, and well-being. I had this compulsive need to help people fix their lives, even when they didn’t ask me to. It was always easier for me to get angry about injustices done to other people than when someone treated me like garbage. I felt completely empty, bored, or worthless when I didn’t have a crisis to manage or a person to save. I would completely lose my own hobbies, friends, and personality the second I fell in love. And I tolerated emotional abuse and neglect just to keep someone from abandoning me.
Seeing it spelt out on paper was humiliating, but it was also the first time I felt like I wasn’t just crazy.
How to Recover from Codependency
Rebuilding your life after codependency is not a neat, pretty process. It is slow, messy, and incredibly uncomfortable. For me, it started with joining online support groups where I could speak my shame out loud to people who actually got it. Over time, I had to internalise a few brutal, unvarnished truths.
First, if you don’t change your behaviour, absolutely nothing changes. You can’t keep dating the same broken, unavailable archetype and expect a different ending. The cycle only stops when you build a relationship with yourself that is so strong that you refuse to tolerate anyone who treats you like an option.
Second, you cannot control other people, and it is incredibly arrogant to try. For years, I picked addicts and angry, distant men because focusing on their glaring flaws meant I didn’t have to look at my own emptiness. I thought I was being a saviour, but I was actually just trying to micromanage their lives to soothe my own anxiety. Letting people go to make their own mistakes, even if they destroy themselves, is the only path to real freedom.
Third, I understood that love and obsession are two entirely different things. Constant worry, jealousy, and total enmeshment are not signs of love but are rather signs of insecurity. Healthy love does not ask that you erase your entire personality just to keep the peace. It takes two separate people who actually have their own friends, their own interests, and their own
Right now, I do everything possible to preserve my peace. I read, I write, and I go for long, quiet walks. Instead of chasing the chaotic, high-stress highs of a toxic relationship, I spot the world on my back. We look at the people who stick around through the absolute worst behavior; the lying, the cheating, the drinking, the constant disrespect and we call them saints. We tell ourselves that staying to “fix” or “save” someone is the ultimate act of selfless, deep empathy.
Most of the time, that desperate urge to rescue a broken person has nothing to do with love. It’s codependency. And if we’re being brutally honest with ourselves, codependency isn’t selfless at all. It is a desperate, fear-based attempt to control someone else so you never have to sit quietly in a room and look at the trainwreck of your own internal life.
I was the girl who thought she could change a damaged man by simply loving the damage right out of him and making him better, but the truth I eventually had to face on a cold bathroom floor was ugly: I wasn’t trying to save them because I was kind. I was using their chaotic, messy lives as a human shield to avoid dealing with the gaping, empty void inside myself.
How to Stop Seeking Validation and the Need to Please Everyone Else
I’m someone who loved to be validated by others; it started long before I ever met a toxic guy. I was an overly sensitive, raw-nerve kid who picked up on every single shift in the room’s energy. I grew up with this deep, quiet belief that I was fundamentally not enough. Because of that, I outsourced my self-worth entirely. If people liked me, I was allowed to exist. If they didn’t, I was a complete failure.
When I was a teenager, my parents’ marriage completely shattered. The family identity I had used as a security blanket vanished overnight, and I felt stranded on a tiny, dark island.
The loneliness was suffocating, so I put on a mask. At school, I played the loud, funny, boy-crazy girl. I spent hours writing lists of cute boys in my notebooks, daydreaming about some magical, fairy-tale romance where a guy would swoop in and finally make me feel whole. I was constantly looking outside of myself for something, anything, to quiet the background hum of anxiety in my chest.
Instead of finding peace, I set myself up for a ten-year run of absolute relationship disaster.
I ended my evenings taking a warm bath, lighting some candles, and listening to Alan Watts lectures.
Life is not an emergency. You do not have to live in a constant state of panic, waiting for the next disaster to strike. When you finally learn to trust yourself, you realize that whatever happens, you have your own back. You don’t need to rescue anyone else to justify your right to be here.
