Codependency: when you rescue someone else and lose yourself

“I don’t know what I want. I really don’t. I know what would be best for him.” That is what a woman told me who came because she could not sleep. We spent the first session on his treatment, the second on his job, the third on his mother. Only in the fourth did I ask when she had last done something because it was nice. She was quiet for quite a while.

This piece is not about how to set a boundary with a partner who is addicted — I write about that separately. This is about a pattern older than that relationship, one that would show up even without the partner: how a person comes to measure their worth by how much of someone else they are holding up.

Where the word came from

The term arose in the eighties in alcohol treatment settings. At first people spoke of the “co-alcoholic” — the partner of someone who drinks. In 1986 Timmen Cermak even proposed that codependency be classified as a personality disorder. It was not, and to this day it is not a diagnosis, neither in the ICD nor in the DSM.

The concept then escaped the profession into popular books and spread widely: suddenly codependency meant almost any form of excessive involvement with anyone. That very expansion cost it its precision — which is exactly why it is worth saying what I mean by the word before I use it.

What I mean when I say codependency

For me it is not a trait of a person but a balance of power in a relationship: a state in which your mood, your worth and your diary are set by the state of someone else. Whether that someone is a partner with an addiction, an ill mother, a brother in trouble or a child who does not become independent.

The signs by which I recognise it in my room are fairly consistent. The person knows precisely how the other feels and poorly how they feel themselves. They anticipate needs before they are voiced. They answer a question about themselves with a story about the other. They feel guilty when they rest. And they have the sense that if they let go of the reins for a week, everything would collapse.

Why rescuing, of all things

This does not happen at random. A child who was useful at home — who calmed things, translated between parents, looked after younger siblings, was good so there would be less noise — learnt a very precise equation: I am worth something when I am needed. That equation does not vanish when you grow up. Only the object changes.

Murray Bowen used the idea of differentiation for this: the capacity to stay in contact with people while keeping your own opinion and your own feeling. When differentiation is low, emotions run through a family without brakes — your anxiety is my anxiety, your anger is my guilt. Bowen warned that the goal is not distance but the ability to stay close without dissolving.

Many people arrive from here with a very severe inner voice that declares any self-care to be selfishness. I have written about it in the piece on the inner critic.

The triangle that turns

In 1968 Stephen Karpman described three positions we take up in such relationships: rescuer, victim and persecutor. What is interesting is not who is who, but that the positions rotate, and that all three belong to the same game.

A typical round goes like this. I rescue, because he is not managing. Because I rescue, I run out of strength and turn sharp — I reproach, I tally, I remind him of everything I have done. Then I see his face, feel terrible, and step into the role of the one who went too far, so I apologise and rescue again. Three positions, one week.

The way out of the triangle is not to become a better rescuer. It is to stop playing all three roles — which in practice means less anticipating and more stating your own condition.

What you lose

The small things go first. You do not know what you want to eat. You have no opinion about the film. Friendships shrink, because there is no time and because it is hard to explain. Then the body goes: insomnia, tension, pains that no test result explains, and that the person puts down to age or poor sleep rather than to what they are carrying.

Last comes resentment, which is the most uncomfortable part for people who give a great deal, because it does not fit their picture of themselves. Resentment is not a sign that you do not love. It is a sign that you gave more than you had, and did so without an agreement. The exhaustion that follows has the shape of burnout — I write about its signs here.

It need not be a partner

Because the word grew up around alcohol, people often assume it concerns couples only. In practice that is not even the commonest version. I see adult daughters who organise an elderly father’s life and respond to each of his calls as to an alarm. I see parents of grown children who pay the rent, look for jobs and keep up the appearance that things are fine. I see sisters who have “held the family together” for fifteen years.

The common feature is not the type of relationship. It is that someone took on a task that over the years became their identity. That is the hardest part: if I stop rescuing, who am I then? The question is not rhetorical and I take it seriously. The emptiness left behind is the real reason people return to the pattern, even once they know everything written in this piece.

How it sounds in conversation

A few sentences I hear almost word for word. “It’s not that bad, I’m just tired.” “Nobody else is going to do it.” “If I told him, it would be worse.” “Now isn’t the right moment for me.” And the most frequent: “I’m fine, I just need some sleep.”

What is striking is what they have in common. They are all true. None is an excuse and none is a lie — each describes a real circumstance. That is exactly why the pattern is so solid: it is built from a sequence of sensible decisions, each of which is right on its own. Only together do they assemble a life in which you are absent.

When I say this to someone, guilt usually appears, and immediately. That is to be expected. I have written about telling apart guilt that flags a real mistake from guilt that only makes sure you do not move in the piece on healthy and toxic guilt.

Why the concept is contested

Now the part you almost never find in articles about codependency, although it matters.

First, codependency is not a diagnosis and never was. The measures for it are varied and poorly consistent with each other, and the definitions in the literature are so broad that almost any caring person would fit. When a construct captures everything, it explains nothing.

Second, and this is the more serious objection: the concept has often been used to shift responsibility onto whoever stayed. Women have been pathologised by it for having cared — as though the act of caring were an illness, and as though a lopsided investment in a relationship followed from a personality flaw rather than from a balance of power and very concrete circumstances. Social workers such as Sandra Anderson pointed this out back in the nineties.

Third, and most importantly: in relationships involving violence, talk of codependency is dangerous. If someone stays with a partner who endangers them, that is not a sign of their rescuing pattern. It is a question of safety, money, children, threats, and the fact that the most dangerous period is often the leaving itself. There you do not work on a “pattern” but on a safety plan, and the first port of call is a social work centre, the police or a specialist organisation.

And fourth, caring for another is not a fault. Part of what popular literature labels codependency is simply love under hard circumstances. Someone nursing a partner with cancer or a parent with dementia is not codependent. They are exhausted.

What I keep of the concept anyway

Despite these objections I do not discard the word, because it names something people genuinely live through and have no other name for. I just use it more narrowly.

It is useful when two conditions hold at once: your conduct systematically removes consequences on someone else’s behalf and you are systematically losing access to yourself in the process. If only the first holds, that may simply be over-involvement in a crisis. If only the second holds, it may be depression or exhaustion. Only both together make a pattern that runs itself.

What helps

The work does not start with the other person, and it almost never starts with leaving. It starts with a question people cannot answer at first: what would you do today if you did not have to hold anyone up?

In practice I do three things. The first is separating: whose feeling is this, and whose task. The second is practice in statements about yourself rather than about him — “I will not sort this out any more” instead of “you are impossible”. The third is giving back the small decisions that disappeared first: what I will eat, what I will listen to, who I will write to. That sounds small and is not.

A fear almost always surfaces here, and it is worth saying aloud: if I stop holding it, it will collapse. Sometimes something does collapse. A deadline is missed, a job is lost, there is a row. The pattern does not come apart without consequences — it comes apart precisely through them, because consequences are the only thing that tells the other person where they actually are. That is not punishment and not a test. It is the return of something that was never yours.

Your own support, separate from his treatment, helps too — groups for relatives such as Al-Anon have research support for improving the relative’s wellbeing regardless of whether the drinking stops. That is important information: your recovery is not conditional on his.

And if addiction is in the background: stopping alcohol or tranquillisers abruptly can be dangerous and belongs under medical supervision. It is not your job to manage that. On choosing the person who will do this work with you, I write in the piece on choosing a therapist.

And last: this work does not go without kindness towards yourself, or it turns into a new form of severity — “now I must stop rescuing, and if I can’t, I have failed again”. I have written about why self-compassion works better than pressure in the piece on self-compassion.

What to remember

Codependency is not a diagnosis and not a character. It is a pattern in which your worth hangs on how much of someone else you are holding up — recognisable by two things at once: you remove consequences on his behalf, and you lose contact with yourself.

Care is not codependency, exhaustion is not pathology, and where there is violence the concept falls away — that is a matter of safety. The loop does not break through less love, but when someone stops removing consequences. And your recovery can begin before his does. That is probably the most important sentence here.