10 important steps to co-dependency recovery

Co-dependency is the most painful disorder of loving someone so much so that co-dependents often forfeit their innate ability to create their own life in an attempt to control their loved ones. 

This behaviour is learned and emotional/behavioural condition that comes from childhood, when the co-dependent learns that there may be terrible consequences from failing to take care of a parent’s needs. This kind of condition is also known as known as “relationship addiction” that affects the co-dependent’s ability to have a healthy, mutually satisfying relationship. As a result, they feel tired, lonely, victimised and unappreciated at the end of the day. Are you a co-dependent who is determined to rectify your condition?

Worry not, you can conquer co-dependency by balancing your life by practicing a few self-loving steps as given below.

Practice self-love

The best way to recover from co-dependence would be to practice self-love. This may feel difficult in the beginning because you are so used to spending your entire time loving other people. You might wonder what self-love means? Like you want to know, support, encourage and offer to your loved ones to make them happy, doing the same acts to care for yourself is called self-love. Self-love can be practiced by changing some changes to your everyday life. This helps you recover from co-dependency.

Accept yourself

Accepting your uniqueness as an individual including your physique, feelings, emotions and addictions helps you practice self-love. You do not need someone’s validation to accept yourself. Each one of us have our own importance and purpose in this world and are designed save that purpose. However, as human beings, we deserve each other’s love and respect despite our flaws and failures. When we accept ourselves, we stop worrying about other’s validation.       

After being a co-dependent individual for several years, accepting yourself and practicing self-love cannot happen overnight. Coercing change while still indulging in self‐evaluation and self‐judgment keeps you stranded where you are. But complete self‐acceptance allows change to happen with little by little. Do not worry to make mistakes in the process, you just need to forgive yourself and focus on the change to witness a faster progression towards your goal.

Shifting the locus of control

Shifting the locus of control from external to internal is the first major step to recovery. The intention here is to bring your attention back to yourself. This means you need to act upon your needs, wants and priorities before anyone else’s. So achieve happiness without depending upon anyone.

Practice spirituality

Spirituality helps you let go of control and practice peace within yourself. By saying spirituality, we do not exactly mean to ask you to follow religious beliefs. Instead, we ask you to leverage your inner guidance to help find solutions to your problems. 

Practicing spirituality needs a little time to cater for the meditation or any other such spiritual practice. Setting a little time apart for your self indeed helps you to focus on your needs, insecurities and wants which in turn will address your dire need for co-dependency. Also, meditation re-wires the brain and enables stable moods and controlled emotions. Spirituality helps you create a deeper relationship with yourself, to develop reverence for life, or to experience harmony with yourself and others by allowing you to focus on your thoughts and actions and reactions. Discovering and understanding your truth gives you greater confidence, clarity, and peace in life.

Welcome support

Human beings have evolved to live in social situations. They can survive only by supporting and allowing to be supported by each other. Asking for a little help or support during your weakness does not mean weakness. When you’re suffering loneliness, confusion, anxiety, feeling overwhelmed, or in the dumps because of caring for an addict constantly, reaching out for help is a way of loving yourself. Each of us need others when emotions take us over and we are unable to think appropriately or calm ourselves.

The help you ask can include seeking treatment from a professional, seeking advice from a friend, requesting a friend to stay over at your place especially if you start feeling suicidal, asking a friend/a relative to arrange food for the day so you can find time to think and reflect on your health. You can depend on people for anything that’s well within your limits of dignity.

Learning to put yourself first

Co depends often spend their entire time tending to the needs of others or on the opposite, wait for someone to understand their needs and fulfil them. Both of which are not healthy practices. If you have been neglecting your needs so far, it’s time to turn around and reflect on your needs first. Because, a person who puts himself/herself first, will become a happy person who can think appropriately and distinguish between the needs and demands of others. 

Your needs may range from basic physical needs such as food, shelter and clothes to self-maintenance requisites like time-to-time breaks from works, health check ups and developing a social circle outside the co-dependant’s needs to keep yourself nurtured and nourished. To understand what’s causing you to be a co-dependent, pay attention to your thoughts when you are lonely, sad, furious, tormented, overwhelmed, confused, exhausted, or feeling like a victim, ask yourself what you need. You will get the answer.

Develop hobbies

Every day, at least for an hour, you need to indulge yourself in pleasurable or creative activities that hijack your mind from the daily tasks of attending to a co-dependent addict. For, focusing on the same pain that has no solution for too many hours only pushes you off balance and creates in you a feeling of being victimised. While anything that happens continuously for 21 days seems to become a habit, co-dependency is a long-term pain that must have landed you in chronic self‐pity by now. If not addressed at the earliest, living becomes a struggle, a competition, or a test of endurance and achievement day in and day out.

To break this habit, you need to plan pleasure, recreation, and hobbies to be a part of your everyday life. Having fun makes your worries disappear magically at least for a short while. Pleasure revives your energy and sense of well‐being, which not only nourishes your soul, but creates a sense of fulfilment and purpose in your life.

Escape abuse

You need to keep yourself away from physical, mental, and emotional abuse that is a common side effect of living with an addict. Loving someone doesn’t essentially mean that you need to be accepting of their insulting or ­demeaning words or abuse. It doesn’t help trying to convince or change an addict/abuser as they are often intoxicated and will not be in the right mind to understand your effort. Protecting yourself is your primary right and you need to try and move out of that place where your are emotionally, physically and verbally abused.

Addicts are slaves of their disease and are often in denial. Therefore, they try to pass the buck on to others for their weaknesses. It is very important to understand that no one is responsible for someone’s addiction. You didn’t cause or drive other peoples’ actions, words or behaviour. You always have a choice to speak up, draw limits, opt out of the conversation, leave the room, get professional help. It only makes sense to call the police when there’s violence, or end the relationship. Because you are responsible only for the safety of yourself and your children. 

Practice self-compassion

Practicing self-compassion creates a soothing effect on the otherwise tired and agitated mind. Treat yourself with utmost gentleness and compassion. Curate your inner voice so that its always calm and kind. In co-dependents, its mostly the self-blame and the assumed responsibility and guilt for other’s actions that creates pain. 

There is always an inner conscience that suggest other wise but, unfortunately, co-dependents tend to ignore their own feelings. When you’re tempted to ignore your feelings and distract yourself with more activity, obsessions, or addictive behaviour, it amplifies multifold and manifests as physical and mental ill health eventually. 

Accept yourself, forgive, and embrace your humanness in its entirety. You should practice to comfort yourself with all the tenderness you would an extend to a crying child or a wounded animal. Develop that trust which helps you count on yourself.

Encourage yourself

Each of us have an inner critic that makes or breaks the quality of our life. Transforming our inner critic into a friendly mentor who constantly encourages us to take care of ourselves and adopt a positive approach comes a long way in building a quality life ahead for you. Building the habits of identifying and acknowledging your strengths and appreciating, yourself for the good things you do, complimenting your self for the goals you achieve are a few healthy life building processes that help you in recovering form a co-dependent state.

When you love and encourage yourself, you can do whatever you want. It doesn’t need you to accomplish big tasks to encourage yourself. A task as small as tidying the room in your breaks, cooking a nice dish, choosing an attire that really compliments your personality deserves to be appreciated by yourself. A word of encouragement creates a good impact for everyone. Just imagine a what impact a few words of encouragement in a day would cause to a human being? If I say that you need to praise yourself over and over, it doesn’t mean that you should take your habits for granted. It means to acknowledge the existing good habits and develop more of them in order to achieve more benefit from self-praise and self-appreciation.

The above mentioned are just a few of many self-loving activities that you could pursue. These tasks may seem impossible, especially for a co-dependent who spent their entire life trying to impress and gain control of the behaviour of an addict. But, will and determination are the two great traits apart from self-love that can turn your life around.

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