fostering codependency

There is a shrink, trollling for clients with Youtube videos, who says codependency is when a person tries to control another. Man, that sure is different from the definition of codependency I learned in Al-Anon and Codependents Anonymous. I also received treatment from a psychologist who specialized in recovering from codependency.  In those groups, codependency means people enable someone else's addiction or dysfunction. An example:  an alcoholic's family might cover up for her. The codependents are the folks covering up for her drinking.  Another example:  giving someone who does not work a phony job title on your website and allowing her to tell the world she is your director of development when she is mentally ill and unable to work. That is classic codependent behavior, with the person giving the dysfunctional person the fake job title being the codependent. The mentally ill person doesn't control the others behavior in codependency. The codependent chooses to enable for various reasons, mostly to avoid facing him or herself, to avoid seeing what they are willing to do to keep someone's "love". Calling in sick for the hungover alcoholic is codependent behavior.

If the only way you can keep someone in your life is by enabling them, covering up their dysfunction -- and giving them a phony job on your website is classic codependent behavior -- the person with the limitation (addiction, alcohol dependency, whatever) is not the codependent.  The person who is drug or alcohol dependent or mentally ill is drug or alcohol dependent or mentally ill. The person enabling them is the codependent.

The codependent is the person who enables the dysfunctional behavior, codependent on the dysfunction. 

Why do partners of alcoholics cover up, or enable, them? Because they are afraid of change. If someone is in a codependent relationship and one person gets healthy, that throws the whole relationship out of balance.

Codependency is not about controlling others. It is about enabling dysfunctional behavior in dysfunctional people in our lives to maintain the status quo of our lives, usually because the codependent fears change. A wife dependent on a husband for some income might fear that if she stops caretaking, or enabling, him codependently, she will upset the apple cart. Fear of the unknown is why codependents enable dysfunctional people in their lives.

I was codependent with my long ago wasband.  I enabled his behavior. I lied about the bruises he gave me.  I did legal work that I let him pass off as his own.  And I debased myself in what I finally understood was an utterly futile attempt to get him to stop criticizing me. I tried to change who I was because he didn't like who I was. Gosh, when I wrote that last sentence, I felt countless sharp knives slashing into me. I felt great pain to remember how I debased myself.

I went to two separate weekly support groups for codependents, all women, for about three years. All of the women I met in those groups had been both physically and emotionally abused. Every single one of the women I met in those groups, one of which I attended at the secretly located battered women's shelter, had been physically abused as well as emotionally abused. And every single one of them said they'd rather get hit any day than endure verbal abuse unrelentingly.

I have mentioned the fact that every battered woman I ever met, and I met many in those three years and in the following years when I represented many in divorce, would prefer to get hit than verbal abuse, women say, always with pugnacious gestures and much bravado, "No way I'd prefer to get smacked."  It hurts me when women say that to me. I have just told them something vulnerable, something I am still ashamed of, that I accepted verbal abuse, that I allowed myself be treated like I did not matter for years and years. And I had just told them the verbal abuse hurt more than the physical. I even tell them about women I knew who got broken bones, required stitches, almost died from physical abuse and they all say the nonstop verbal abuse was worse.  Any woman who says she'd never let a man smack her around likely never would. And she likely never would tolerate verbal abuse. Walk a mile in the abused person's shoes before you judge them.