In Codependent relationships, we lose our individuality because we are so focused on serving our partner’s truth (or what we think is their truth) before serving our own. Sometimes we cannot even hear our own truth because it may seem as if our truth has less weight than theirs. Or you can hear your own truth but to speak it may bring about disapproval from your partner so you acquiesce to their truth in order to avoid disagreement or disappointment. This is what I call the codependent illusion of connection or enmeshment.
Understanding Codependency: The Illusion of Connection
When we are focused on what they want, we diminish our own desires. When we are trying to read their thoughts, we lose connection with our own thoughts. When we give ourselves the job of appeasing their mood, we can’t have our own mood. Being inside someone else’s world so much that you don’t have your own – this is enmeshment.
The Roots of Enmeshment: Childhood Experiences and Their Impact
For me, it started when I was a little girl. My mom’s reality was so much louder and more important than mine. I can remember the 2 times that I told her that I didn’t like it when she yelled. This made her yell even more and accuse me of insinuating that she was a bad mother – which was not what I meant. So I stopped saying how I felt. I think I even stopped feeling what I was feeling.
I stayed focused on calming her down, reading her mind and proving my innocence. I disconnected from my own truth because it would get me in trouble. As much as I can recall, I didn’t have thoughts about myself, I only had thoughts about my mom’s thoughts – I became enmeshed with my mother.
Breaking Free: Steps Towards Embracing Your Individuality
If you were raised inside of enmeshment, individuality can seem like a crime. Loyalty is confused with obedience. Partnership is conflated with subordinance. Enmeshment becomes one with the delusion that we owe another person our servitude. And feeling different, diminished or invisible becomes somewhat normal.
When we make moves towards our real selves and away from enmeshment it can seem like an act of rebellion. An act of going against the system in order to steal the freedom that we’ve always wanted.
Embracing the realization that we co-created the very system that we are rebelling against can be the greatest access to personal freedom. Certainly as children, our parents created the enmeshment that existed in our childhood home. But as adults, we brought our predisposition for enmeshment into relationships, co-created codependence and trapped ourselves in someone else’s world.
Also read about Online therapy for codependency
Building Healthy Relationships: The Power of True Intimacy
YOUR RELATIONSHIP w/ YOURSELF is WHERE it ALL BEGINS.
