We underestimate how guilt is controlling so many aspects of our lives. Before diving deeper into guilt, it is important to understand how it differs from shame. Shame reflects how we feel about ourselves while guilt involves an awareness how our actions may impact someone else. In other words, shame relates to self; guilt to others.
I was once in an intimate relationship where I felt it was time to move on but could not get myself to communicate it to my partner. She was the same person that I used to adore earlier in the relationship and was actually making steps in the right directions. There were things that bothered me in the relationship but I kept going when she was at her worst, but now that she was making drastic positive changes in her life, showed affection and a commitment to turn her life around, I felt that it was time to part ways. Matters of the heart are not rational and we either feel the love or we don’t. Attraction is more based on suppressed feelings, unresolved traumas from childhood with our primary caregivers than compatibility, comfort or the perks that come from the relationship. Love chemistry is more based on repressed and subconscious feelings rather than what is conscious. In this particular instance, I did not feel it was the right time to communicate my intention to break-up. She was going through an intense personal journey to heal destructive patterns that had significantly limited her life for many years, and I did not want to disrupt her process by breaking up with her. Paradoxically, our relationship had acted as a catalyst for her to commit to this new path. So when I visited her, I pretended that everything was normal while still making plans together for the future. When I came back from the visit, I felt terrible. I felt depressed, disconnected, low-energy, deeply triggered and confused. It took me actually two days to figure out what was really going on. I was overwhelmed with guilt. I felt bad about wanting to pull away from the relationship while she was both fragile and finally working on the aspects that I told her were so important to me. I felt I would hurt her badly by triggering her abandonment traumas, and possibly discourage her to continue on her path of recovery. I was experiencing an intense conflict about how I felt romantically about her and what was the right thing to do according my personal code of ethics and value system.
As we have a tendency to attract partners that reflect the unhealthy dynamics we had with our parents as a child, I went on exploring how this trigger was related to the relationship between my mother and my inner child. I saw my desperate and futile attempts as a child to save my mother, to alleviate her pain and to make her happy. This is how roles get reversed and the child becomes parentified. The child has no choice. The child is too young for individuation. He cannot differentiate his feelings from his parents’ feelings. Unfortunately, this parentification is also amplified by the immature parent that derives their sense of self from the control they exercise on the child. Guilt is the most common way to subject the child: «You are being so ungrateful after everything I have done for you», «How do you dare acting this way to hurt your poor mother after all the sacrifices I have made for you», «You are so selfish, only thinking about yourself» or «This is how good boys behave». We can dive even deeper and darker into the subconscious contract between the dysfunctional mother (or father) and their child «I gave you life so you owe me everything», «I gave you life so that I would stop feeling lonely and miserable», «Be a good boy so that I appear like an excellent mum but not to the extent where you may start to make me feel insecure about myself», «You are flawed. I am the only one who is able to love you. Just do what I say and you will be all right and I may not abandon you. And don’t get too close to other people as they will hurt you».
The child cannot afford the loss of connection with his parents because he depends on them for survival. So he complies and abandons himself to guaranty the security of the connection with his parents. Wires have been crossed, and later in life, his path of awareness, healing and maturation will include attracting partners reflecting the same dysfunctional patterns that he was made to believe were loving. The insecure little girl with an absent father will attract partners that are emotionally unavailable. The little boy with an emotional unstable mother will attract borderline girlfriends and so on so forth. Most people believe they are learning unconditional love by having children not realizing how conditional their relationship actually is. They don’t give without expecting anything in return. We are not saints so it is natural to have expectations and even a sense of reciprocity with our children, however what is not OK is to manipulate, pretend we are sacrificers while we just look for our personal interest and gaslight our kids.
Typically, our intimate relationships follow the same patterns of survival, enmeshment and conditionality that we experienced as a child with our own parents. Break-ups are so painful because we project in them the loss of a parent that we simply cannot afford to lose when, as a child, we depend upon them for survival. These relationships are codependent with a high level of entanglement. While there is love, affection and caring, there is also frustration, control, projection, fear and identification. Passion and romance quickly subside to the routine of the new arrangement and life necessities. For the minority of people (probably not more than 2%) that achieved personal autonomy, I would like to suggest a new model for romantic relationships. These individuals are able to rise from mainstream morality to conscience, they are happy alone and in a relationship, they know who they are, they don’t impose their views on others, and they are able to sustain themselves financially through their own efforts. Everything they do is an act of personal preference and freedom. These persons only get involved and stay in intimate relationships that 1. feel good 2. promote their personal growth 3. are reciprocal; or a combination of these 3 factors. The success of these romances is not defined by the duration of these relationship but rather by the shared good times, and the growth that came out of it. They may not be aware intellectually of why they choose to merge or break-up with an individual but they always do it with it with respect, empathy and truthfulness. They choose to live from the heart and as Blaise Pascal used to say «The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of…». They understand that the beauty of their union comes partly from the total freedom and complete unpredictability of the relationship. They have enough self-love that they are not tempted to control their beloved. They let them fly freely because they desire the same freedom for themselves. In such relationships, guilt simply does not exist.
I used to underestimate how much guilt was controlling my life. I left my parents’ home at a young age and made decisions in relationships, career, places to live and circles of friends and acquaintance independently of other people’s decisions. I felt I was immune to being controlled through guilt until my personal life journey brought me to experience the abomination of parental alienation, when your ow children, the flesh of your flesh, are used as weapons of war against you. The amount of guilt I experienced as a result was excruciating. My full body had become toxic from guilt, and I believe I would have gotten very sick as a result if mother Ayahuasca did not cross my path and help me heal. As a child, I suffered deeply from the separation of my parents and the way they handled it, so I made it a point that my children will never experience the same misfortune. Unfortunately, at the end, it may have been worse for them. I felt so utterly powerless to avoid what I was fearing the most. It took many hours of purging and sobbing with loving guidance of mother Ayahuasca to start feeling better again. When, years later, I was finally graced to reconnect with my son after years of absolutely useless court custody battle, a huge weight was lifted off my heart. It was such a liberation.
On a related topic, this is why judges in family court can be so easily manipulated by guilt. They have a difficult job as their decisions impact in critical and often tragic ways other human lives. They make their judgment with few and often erroneous or even manipulated information. Their intuition is often poor because they had to shut off emotionally to deal with the stress of their profession. As a result, they feel terrible about themselves despite the mask of authority they are trying to project. For 4 years, I kept losing court battle after court battle. While a good dad, I was treated like a criminal and my request to visit my own children was dismissed with prejudice. On top of it, I got a judgment against me for a large sum of money to pay to my ex wife’s parents to take care of my children while being prevented to see them! How did my ex wife achieve this? She was able to trigger the guilt of the judge by playing the victim while dropping that tear at the perfect moment in order to make me look like a monster. Family courts are typically pro women because women are generally more apt at manipulating and feigning victim control drama (men perform the same form of psychological manipulation though less frequently and effectively). Historically, men took power away from women and women had fewer opportunities, often related to marriage and child bearing. Women were left with only indirect ways to exercise control so had to develop more covert manipulative techniques to achieve their goals. So, to an extent, men are collectively paying karma for their own collective abuse of power.
While I mostly talk about the toxic form of guilt, guilt can also be healthy when we become aware of the harm we have caused others so that we may remedy it. In this sense, it is a form of empathy. While I made a distinction between guilt and shame, the unhealthy form of guilt is using personal shame as its foundation. We can be easily controlled through guilt because we believe there is something bad, dangerous or inadequate about us. This is often deep subconscious programming that originated from childhood trauma. Shame acts often as the necessary hook for toxic guilt to take control of us.
I exposed the Covid-19 plandemic early April 2020 as a political and not a sanitary crisis. The criminals that have orchestrated this scamdemic are successfully depriving ordinary citizens of their freedom through the power of toxic guilt. While there is no scientific evidence for the use of masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus as they are often compared to putting up a chain-link fence to stop mosquitoes. The coronavirus is 0.1 micrometer in diameter while the holes in woven cloth are visible to the naked eye and may be five to 200 micrometers in diameter. Still the whole world is now wearing masks. Why? Because of toxic guilty used at a massive scale by politicians and mainstream media. If you refuse to wear a mask, you are simply a selfish a**hole that only thinks about himself, you don’t care about the vulnerable and the elderly, and you are a murdered that does not deserve to live. If you dare to even question the usefulness of masks, you are just a bad person. At this time, people don’t even know why they are wearing a mask. They are just doing it because everyone else is doing it and they want to appear as a good person that cares about others while they are just actually facilitating the spread of fascist regimes all over the world. The mask farce was just a rehearsal for the upcoming vaccine that is meant to microchip (or rather nanochip) the whole population for total mind control while 5G networks allow for massive data transfer between citizens and big brother governments. In order to illustrate how people are attempting to control us through toxic guilt, I have gathered some responses from some of my Facebook postings challenging the mainstream narratives.
It always follows the same pattern «If you don’t do what I believe is right, you are a bad person that doesn’t care about others, you are selfish and inconsiderate». These guilt trips are just attempts for control. On my side, I respect the freewill of people that decide to wear a mask, stay in house arrest or get vaccinated for Covid-19 (i.e nanochipped). I have no interest in making them change their mind as I respect their ability to think and make decisions for themselves unlike the government that is treating us as irresponsible children and leaving us no choice. If their masks or vaccines were that effective, why are they are trying to impose them on us? Let me decide what is best for my health. I am choosing a good diet, plenty of exercises, a stress free life, contact with nature, sufficient rest and good relationships. They are choosing masks, vaccines, pharma drugs, lockdowns and plenty of mainstream news. Let’s actually see who will be healthier down the road. They act no differently than religious fanatics ready to impose their views and way of living by force. Similar than WWII, the collective suffering will have to get much worse before a majority of people will start waking up to the reality of what is really going on.
The mainstream media in the western world has never been so controlled since WWII in order to promote the dark agenda of the 1%, and guilt once again is their most effective weapon of control. Let me give you some examples with recent headlines and you will find that all media are now saturated with guilt inducing news to get people to comply. You may google each headline to access the original article. This is not journalism but fascist propaganda based on guilt.
Translation: it is wrong to satisfy your basic human need to celebrate and mingle with your loved ones. Just stay home, watch CNN, be afraid and comply without questioning
Translation: wearing a mask, a symbol of the loss of our freedom of speech and joy (we stop seeing each other smiles), makes you a good citizen that care about the life of others and your country. After all, we have called patriotic the systematic killing of our brothers and sisters since the beginning of times
Translation: forcing foreign (and probably toxic) agents into our body makes us good citizens. After all, our body is just government property
Translation: we are completely powerless as Covid strikes also on the young, healthy and successful. Forget about a healthy lifestyle to strengthen our immune system. Just follow government regulations
Translation: those who are preventing my access to power will be responsible for the death of many people
Translation: challenging government policies is synonymous of child abuse
Translation: partying is now a criminal activity
Translation: stay away from anyone challenging government narratives because they will destroy your life
One of my French relatives wanted to visit me in Central America. I warned him to hurry-up because the second European lockdown was imminent as it was obvious they will disguise our regular flu season into the second wave of Covid-19. He did not take me seriously until the government announced it. Still, he had 48 hours to escape France and I wrote to him specific instructions to make it happen. However he received a guilt trip from his mother that it was not responsible, safe and kind to leave on such short notice. As a result, while a grown-up man, he is now in house arrest with his mother for an undetermined amount of time. His personal vibration made him a match to this experience. What we are living at a collective level is simply mirroring our subconscious powerless and immature inner child. Our governments are behaving towards us like an overbearing, narcissistic, punishing and controlling mother. As long as we keep playing the role of scared, ignorant, insecure children ready to do anything to deserve mummy’s (i.e the state) love, we will continue to enable the instauration of fascist regimes all over the world. As I wrote previously, the narcissist cannot exist without its codependent counterpart so at the end, we get the leadership that we deserve.
Guilt can only thrive in the shadow of personal shame, ignorance and fear. Fortunately, they are based in illusion in the same way that light exposes darkness as immaterial. Combatting darkness will just make it stronger. The best attitude is to simply continue to live your life according your own values and stay our authentic self no matter what. Shadow can do its little dance however it will pass like everything else in our temporal world while our invincible human spirit remains. We are living through the great awakening but before we can shift to higher awareness, the human shadow has to come out and be expelled. The solution for powerlessness is autonomy, the remedy for fear is love, and the antidote for guilt is authentic self-love. This is what we are meant to learn collectively in the next 5 years.
Disclosure: I am not a licensed therapist so I am not qualified to use these terms in a therapy setting. I have however studied this topic very closely as a tool for self-improvement and self-observation. I am just sharing my own understanding and experience on this matter with the hope it may heal your own relationships and help you to love yourself at a deeper level.
My mother was a discouraged borderline and my father was a codependent. My sister is a borderline, my brothers are codependent and I have been on a life long journey to heal my codependency too. Almost all of my intimate partners have struggled with borderline personality disorder. I am hopefully closer to live a more authentic life as I have brought awareness to my subconscious patterns.
I have shared with you in my previous blog how my attachment traumas made me a match to a cult. The same attachment traumas made me a match to dysfunctional intimate relationships. A number of us with personality disorders can actually be high-functioning according to societal standards. You will find many successful CEOs, performers, top politicians that are narcissistic, borderline or active co-dependents. These personality disorders can best be seen in our personal and intimate lives that suffer greatly from these personality disorders coming from childhood attachment traumas.
I can see that my intimate relationships have been plagued with negative core beliefs coming from an early age. Initially, as a young man, because of my own abandonment traumas, I was deeply avoidant as I was convinced to be unworthy of love. I believed that it was just a question of time for my intimate partners to leave me. I would push them away and they would break-up with me, as they felt unloved. I felt unloved and unlovable as a result while these partners would actually deeply care for me. It was a vicious circle feeding self.
Because I felt unlovable as I was, I decided subconsciously that I need a hook for my loved ones to stay with me and not abandon me. I entered a rescuer phase. As a friend jokingly put it, I became “Captain save a hoe”. In my early twenties, I fell in love with an impulsive borderline in a desperate situation. She had a son with a thug in the northern suburbs of Paris. He was a gambler that would still money from her while she did not even have enough money to feed the child. He used the child to control her. He would sometimes take the child out of the balcony of the 20th floor and threaten to drop him if she did not obey his demands. After I started a relationship with her, my heart broke when I felt the pain of this child. I took many risks to get them out of this desperate situation and we eventually managed to immigrate to the USA together. The relationship eventually ended. I was shut off emotionally past the limerence stage as I continued to focus on external activities to be worthy of love instead of emotionally investing into the relationship. I had no clue that my partner actually wanted to be with me but I felt so unlovable that it seemed like a foreign concept. My partner eventually cheated on me as she was starving emotionally and struggling with her own issues. I felt deeply betrayed and was so confused. How could she leave me after everything I had done for her? As this was not enough, I repeated the exact same experience with a Russian woman and her son a year later. She lived with a violent man who abused her physically. I helped them immigrate to the US as well. Our relationship ended up in the same miserable way and I felt taken advantage, unaware of my own part in the dramas that were unfolding.
These painful experiences made me change my strategy for partners. I felt attracted to stronger and more successful women. However, there needed to be something about these women that was difficult to be with. Something that would keep other men away so that they would not cheat on me. Something that only me could handle so that they would be less likely to abandon me and repeat the abandonment trauma with my mum. The high functioning borderline met these criteria as they share the same abandonment traumas as I did.
Codependents and borderlines are a very common pair. This relationship dynamic allows the codependents to slip into “caretaker” roles, giving priority and focus to problems in the life of the person with BPD (Borderline Personality disorder) rather than to issues in their own lives. No one’s ego likes to see its own dysfunctions as it brings up shame, something especially excruciating for a codependent with a weak sense of self. In these kinds of relationships, the codependent will gain a sense of worth by being “the sane one” and “the responsible one” as he makes the borderline “the crazy one” or “the sick one”. High functioning borderlines are often more narcissistic too. Codependents can provide the narcissist with an obedient and attentive audience that matches the needs of the self-absorbed narcissist. Among the reciprocally interlocking interactions of the pair are the narcissist’s overpowering need to feel important and special and the co-dependent person’s strong need to help others feel that way. Actually, borderline/narcissistic people are only able to create relationships with codependents. A healthy individual with an authentic self could not alternate the roles of perpetrator, rescuer and victim that the borderline requires. Only the codependent can do this as a personality split is required. Their lives together are an endless roller coaster and they alternate control during crises. The codependents submit and weather the storm as the borderlines/narcissists get into their rant or rage. They know however that it is just a matter of time for the borderlines/narcissists to crash. At that time, they can play their favorite caretaker role and get back in control once again. For this reason, it is in the interest of the codependents to worsen and not improve their partners’ mental health. This is a dark side of codependents that only few people understand. This is why they are called enablers. They are enabling and feeding on the most dysfunctional aspects of their partners instead of keeping them accountable for their harmful actions. The borderline is seen in most psychology books as the evil one and the codependent as the good one but the reality is that their shadows are a perfect mirror of each other. The codependent is actually more dangerous as his darkness is more covert. I have worked with many women that had violent and sexually abusive fathers. I have found that they experienced even deeper traumas with their own mothers as they looked the other way and made excuses for their husbands’ behaviors all during the time the abuse was taking place. The child would feel hope as the codependent mother would complain about the father behind his back but felt betrayed over and over again as the mother showed her loyalty to her husband first in her actions. The borderline and the codependent mirror each other attachment traumas, core shame, lack of self-esteem and pathological loneliness. These attributes are directly expressed with the borderline and repressed with the codependent.
Through introspection and the observation of codependents through the diverse communities I have been part of, I have dived deeper into the characteristics of the codependents that I will share with you below. I was able to see the horror of my own psychological make-up through external mirrors and started healing it as a result. I hope you can do the same as you see aspects of yourself in a vulnerable way through the examples below.
No sense of self, low self‐esteem, poor boundaries, absence of conscience
In its broadest definition, a codependent is someone who cannot function from their innate self and whose thinking and behavior is instead organized around another person, or even an organization, or substance. This condition originates from childhood trauma. In the dysfunctional family, the child learns to become attuned to the parent’s needs and feelings instead of the other way around. As a result, the child becomes disconnected from his authentic feelings, as there was no space for the essence of who he is. Codependent people are fixated on another person for approval or sustenance and need to attach themselves to a stronger personality. Poor self‐esteem lowers your expectations of being treated well so we accept the unreasonable demands from our narcissistic/borderline partner with little resistance. Growing up in dysfunctional families, we learn to not trust our perceptions and what we know. We just abide by the narcissist. Most codependents find themselves in relationships where their primary role is that of rescuer, supporter, and confidante. These helper types are often dependent on the other person’s poor functioning to satisfy their own emotional needs and this is the only time they find a sense of self-worth. The codependents cannot believe they can be loved for who they are so they are asking to be given a role where they can be used by their narcissistic partner. They hope to make themselves indispensable through this role so that they would not be abandoned. Their abandonment fears and core shame overpower their conscience so they have lost their inner compass to what is right or wrong. They have delegated it instead to the narcissist, the organization of the substance. As a result, codependents lack authentic and inner accountability. Instead, they do things to stay out of trouble from their partners. They have the feeling to always walk on eggshells as they spend their lives to please their partners and loved ones from the often contradictory feedback they receive externally instead of relying on their inner guidance system that they have shut down to survive their early childhood. Let me give you a couple of examples that I have witnessed personally.
A confidante of a spiritual teacher was asked to lead a group through a process. She started working with the group but in the middle of it, she felt her presence was required next to her teacher so she left without notice leaving all attendees open, vulnerable & incomplete in their healing.
In the cult the Fellowship of Friends, a woman who was struggling raising her child for both financial and emotional reasons asked the narcissistic cult leader what to do. The leader never had children, did not like to be around children and was a sexual predator. He told her to give him for adoption to a couple he designated. Though they were taken by surprise, all parties complied. This left the child with severe abandonment traumas.
A man fell madly in love with a woman but she came from a higher social class. They married and had a child but he compensated his social status insecurity by becoming a workaholic and building/running a successful trucking business. One day, the child died in a car accident. When his wife informed him of the tragedy, he responded he would come after he was done with all his meetings of the day. When he finally came home, he told his wife that nothing could be done, as the son was already dead so life had to go on. The wife left him, as she felt her husband was as sensitive as a cold stone. He later collapsed emotionally and became homeless.
A son visited his dad after not seeing him for 2 years to celebrate his grandmother birthday with him. He spent a day with him then asked to have a walk with him to talk. The father who was afraid that he would get in trouble with his wife (his stepmum) to spend more time away from her encouraged his son to leave right away. The son could not tell him in person that he was getting a divorce with his wife.
As a prank, I showed the most ridiculous video once of an individual portraying himself as a tantric master and I told the manager of a spiritual teacher that she wanted to work with him and invite him to her facility. Though he was conservative and in any other circumstances would have been outraged at the video, he expressed that he was impressed with the tantric teacher and would do the necessary to bring him. I was in complete disbelief that the prank worked so well with no resistance on his part.
A community member of a spiritual teacher fell in love with a woman. He wanted to have children with her but his teacher could not handle having children around him. His teacher required him to continue living with him at the same time. He complied and buried the issue. His girlfriend eventually left him as she understood her family life and her needs would be always second to the whims of his partner’s spiritual teacher.
Enabling the dysfunctional relationship by feeding the partner’s shadows
As we have learned previously, the codependent is an enabler that does not make his narcissistic partner accountable in any way. As a result, the partners’ mental health continue to decline and his narcissistic and paranoid tendencies get worse overtime. While this is true that the narcissists’ natural tendency would be to be comforted in their drama, and have little interest for personal accountability, the codependent enabling tendencies make it much worse. There is a famous quote from Edmund Burke “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. The codependents are these “good men” that do nothing. Codependents and narcissists feed each other false selves as they grow more unhealthy dependency with each other. To survive the dysfunctional environment, the codependent has learned not to challenge the narcissist and on the opposite to play with their shadows to ensure his safety. In return, the narcissist gets addicted to the false validation he gets from the codependent. They both isolate from the rest of the world so that they may not be challenged in their vision of reality. As the borderline/narcissists get more controlled by their addictions, shadows and inflated sense of self, the more they may be controlled by the codependent. Edmund Burke said also “Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver”. Why it is one thing to boost our loved ones’ self confidence, it is another thing to feed their inflated sense of self. By using flattery on his narcissistic partner, the codependent understands he can kill two birds at once. He gains his favor while isolating him from potential rivals. I remember a situation where a follower was shamed for hours by a spiritual teacher and his codependent manager for recommending a change of schedule where another teacher would come on the last day of the program. The codependent manager of the spiritual teacher insisted he was the best of the world so that he had to conclude the program. The spiritual teacher fell for it and went on a rant for hours how this so-called fan could even dare to propose this change of schedule. He was very insecure and insisted for anyone around him to always say he was the best in the world. If anyone would see the value in another spiritual teacher, they would have to face the borderline rage of the teacher that was fueled by the codependent manager. Over time, he developed paranoia for anyone who could potentially compete with him so he got rid of his best disciples, which also comforted the codependent manager who felt insecure with anyone who could have direct access to the teacher. A “royal court” was formed around the teacher that isolated him from reality, and consequently his mental health declined at a rapid pace as his narcissism turned into megalomania.
Denial is prevalent for both the borderline/narcissists and their codependent partners. By staying as victims, they avoid facing their own shame. They both play an elaborate dance to construct a reality that boost each other ego but isolate them from the rest of the world. While the codependent gets rewarded by praise, appreciation, a sense of control, attention and often financial security from their dominant partner, the narcissist gets a sense of security and personal power as their self-concept stays unchallenged. As the pattern amplifies, the chance for this duo to build or maintain any authentic relationship become smaller and smaller. The narcissistic partner thinks he is the one in control however the more their ego get inflated, the more controllable they become by their co-dependent partner that lead the way from behind the scenes. The codependent feeds on the partner’s mental health issues. They may get drown and overwhelmed at times by their partner narcissistic episodes but they know it is just a matter of time for them to regain control as their partners’ steam run out. The narcissist cannot have friends. He can only have employees, followers or fans, basically transactional relationships.
The codependent pattern will encourage the negative behavior “I am serving your father a glass of Whiskey because he needs to relax after a long day” while a more healthy partner will set a clear boundary “If you continue drinking I will have no other choice to leave though I love you very much”. A friend of mine contacted me recently. She broke up with a boyfriend she loved very much because he started being abusive with her. It broke her heart to do it but she knew this was the only way to wake him up. This is the difference between codependent and healthy relationships. The codependent will feed your shadows to be in control and create more unhealthy dependency. Healthy partners will not hesitate to confront you on your shadows even at their detriment. An intimate relationship is the closest mirror we can have. Do you choose to mirror your partner light or darkness? And remember by doing this, you are doing else then mirroring your own light and darkness. By committing to support your partners to become the best version of themselves, you are doing the same to yourself. Codependents choose to do the opposite because of their own insecurity.
The codependents cannot meet their needs directly so they manipulate
This came from childhood trauma. The codependent was simply an accessory to their primary caregivers narcissistic needs. They never received the mirroring they needed to discover their authentic selves. Not only are they unable to meet their needs directly but they are simply completely unaware of their needs. They are actually terrified to figure out what their needs are as this would mean they could be rejected or ridiculed for wanting what they need. It feels so much safer to say their needs do not matter or focus instead on the needs of others. They place a lower priority on their own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with other people needs. For this reason, many codependents learn to be self‐sufficient and to deny their emotional needs, and this is not sustainable. They match perfectly their narcissistic partners that are self-focused on their own needs. If your important emotional needs were shamed or ignored in your childhood, would you not grow up shutting down the feelings associated with those needs? Why would you feel a need if you do not expect it to be filled? It is less painful to deny it entirely. However, no one can un-need what they need so they live in state of emotional starvation and develop manipulation strategies to meet their needs indirectly.
Manipulationthrough communication triangulation, being double faced, alienation and” Divide and Conquer” strategies
Codependency is more about why and how you do things than what you do. Their actions are often driven by not getting in trouble with their partners instead of doing what feels right according to their authentic self (that they do not know). They rarely perform any action from their heart instead they expect something in return. They have a transactional mind. Codependent parents would often remind children of all the sacrifice they endured to raise them to adulthood. If they want to be touched by their partners, they would offer to give them a massage instead of asking directly for their needs. The massage would not feel good because of the feeling of expectation. And if the partner does not reciprocate, they are then punished emotionally through withdrawal. If they want a night girl out, they would ask their male counterpart if they would be interested to spend a weekend away with his friends. If they would like to bring their parents over, they would encourage their partners to have their parents visit. Once their partners express their own needs, then they feel they are allowed to express their own needs. It is an exhausting way to live life and they are continuously set-up for disappointment. A relationship is not about keeping counts but it is about meeting each other needs in a mutually beneficial way. When someone does not express their needs directly, the probability for someone else to meet these needs go drastically down. Because of their deep shame, they spend a lot of energy justifying why they need what they need. They react often in a passive aggressive way when they unexpressed needs are unmet. I knew a woman that was in love with another woman but she could not face the truth that she was a lesbian. She made herself her caregiver. Once she felt she had leverage by becoming more indispensable, she would threaten she may leave to find the love of her life (often described as a male). This would make the other woman panic however it was obvious that she did not intend to go anywhere. She eventually succeeded in splitting her with her husband by becoming what she felt the other woman really wanted and by showing her the incompatibilities she perceived with the husband the other woman loved. These types of relationship are doomed and I can speak from experience. I have too attracted lovers and partners by pretending to be what they wanted to see. However we can only hide for so long. Once the real us come out, our partners feel duped and they make our lives impossible. A common ploy for codependents interested in a woman that is a single mum is to build rapport with her children. They understand the intense guilt the targeted partner is experiencing from not providing a full-time and caring father to her children. Overtime, however, the single mum often realizes that the new partner never truly cared or had true ownership with their children. And if the man leaves the relationship, there is no interest in maintaining the relationship with the children.
The codependent cannot be trusted because he is double faced. He shows a different face for every different person he is interacting with. He is a people pleaser and adapts his messaging accordingly. I am also guilty to have played the same codependent game with my company executives in the past. A vice president would come to my office complaining about the behavior of another executive that they would consider bossy, disrespectful and unprofessional. I would empathize with her and would confirm the flaws she had noticed in him. Then the other executive would stop by my office complaining about the immaturity and lack of experience about the first one. I would validate the same way, happy to get rapport through opposition. I felt good and important as the rescuer. However I was undermining my management team spirit and cohesion. Then I was acting surprised why these grown-up executive cannot get along and keep fighting! Overtime, they lost trust with me as they could feel my lack of authenticity.
During one of my divorces, I trusted an individual to act as an intermediary of my wife to act on her behalf, as she was too emotional to take care of legal details of the split. He was very nice and amicable with me while I realized only months later, he was disparaging me behind my back as friends made me listen to voice mails he was leaving about me. Instead of making things better with my ex wife, he kept putting oil on the fire to antagonize each other behind our backs. Both she and I felt very thankful to him at the time to act as a mediator as the other party seemed crazy and ill intentioned not realizing he was largely responsible for the increased strife between us through triangulation. The intermediary ended up getting married to my former spouse!
The codependent learned at an early age to manipulate their caregivers to survive emotionally in a dysfunctional environment. They are excellent at identifying the blind spots to the people around them for their benefit. The can place shame on others to manipulate a situation and then use charm to come off caring as their typical fashion to get what they want from others. They are experts in alienation and playing on people fears. They identify a weakness in a rival and makes a crack looks like a canyon while they state how different they are. Sometimes they just make things up and hope they will get away with it. A friend of mine did not know anything about finances so her business manager puts doubts in her mind that her husband was embezzling money to create a rift in their relationship as the manager was in love with her. He also showed her how her husband was a liability to her career while at the very same time he kept complementing the husband on his contribution to her business. The wife fell for it and divorced the husband while she was away from the husband on a business trip while the manager took on the savior role. The manger continued to ensure there would be no contact between them so that she would never figure out the manipulation that had taken place. “Divide and conquer” is the favorite power dynamic of the codependent.
I knew a lady that lived with her best friend and his girlfriend. Both girls used to get along very well. He was very codependent and made his girlfriend feel he cannot fully present to her because of the commitment he has towards his best friend that was also his employer. He made his friend/employer insecure that telling her that he cannot be really there for her because of his relationship to his girlfriend, which he claimed was the most important thing in his life. As a result, the two ladies that really adored each other started feeling threatened with one another.
Addiction
When we did not receive enough nurturing or had your feelings respected, we may attempt to fill this void with an addiction. Addictive relationships or substances serve as a substitute for real connection. Some people are caretakers who hope to receive love in return but are unable to be vulnerable about their own feelings, which is necessary to maintain an intimate relationship.
Many who don’t recognize their needs for support and comfort isolate — especially when they’re hurting. Even with awareness of their needs, asking someone to meet them can feel humiliating.
As a result, many people turn to some addiction. Many of my clients had a codependent father or mother that was alcoholic. I had an uncle that was a gambler to compensate for the lack of intimacy in his marriage. I became a workaholic and the high intensity of running a Silicon Valley business was my own way of compensating. Some men escape in following sports on TV while many women do the same with their soap operas. The options of escape are endless to avoid feeling the lack of intimacy and connection that we are experiencing.
The goal of the addiction is to prevent us from experiencing painful feelings, often originating from childhood traumas. It is critical we allow ourselves to sit with these painful emotions and do shadow work when they come up instead of falling for an addiction to escape. As we experience consciously these difficult feelings, we will start healing and eventually generate the desires to make the necessary changes in our life to create a life that genuinely feels good.
Replaying trauma from childhood
Codependency is often associated with abusive, addictive, or controlling home environments. Or it may be the product of emotional neglect and absence. Any painful experience from childhood has the potential to become a trauma that can affect our present actions. Fortunately, there are many modalities today that can support soul retrieval so that you do not need to manifest into your life the original trauma. I knew a woman who suffered incest from her brutal father all of her childhood. As a child and teenager, she kept fantasizing that mum would leave dad to save her. Unfortunately, mum was very codependent and an enabler to the abuse so the rapes continued into adulthood. She brought that intense desire into her adult self and she became a close confidante to a married woman. The wife had suffered a lot of abuse too in her childhood in the hands of a psychopath. They both replayed their drama and made the husband the bad guy they had to escape from. The husband was ostracized overnight and completely cut from his family. Even months after the separation had taken place, they were still making lists to demonize the poor fellow. The husband was abandoned by his mum when he was a child so this is why he was a match to this experience as well. There are no bad people only people who have been traumatized. If their childhood traumas are not healed, people will have a tendency to replay them in their adult lives. If they are unable to heal, their traums will unfortunately repeat into the next generation, the lives of their children. This is why soul retrieval and trauma healing are the most important thing we will ever do.
Unhealthy dependency instead of autonomy
Human beings are a social species so we need each other to live a good life. There are healthy dependencies and unhealthy ones too. The codependent has the later form of dependency. Their fear of loneliness would keep them in abusive and dysfunctional relationships instead of looking for better options for partners. In a codependent relationship, the codependent’s sense of purpose is based on making extreme sacrifices to satisfy their partner’s needs. Codependent relationships signify a degree of unhealthy “clinginess”, where one person does not have self-sufficiency or autonomy. One or both parties depend on their loved one for fulfillment. In romantic relationships that do not involve children, we need to remember that the individual in the relationship is more important than the relationship. There should be no coercion in such relationships. The codependents need to be committed to put themselves first and accept that it is better to be alone than being with people that are not ready to accept and love their authentic selves. Of course, they first need to figure out what this authentic self is all about. Once they make this step, they will be on their way to create a life that feels good. Thich Naht Hanh said “You must love in a way that the person you love feels free”. To become autonomous is to able to share a life with a loved one without trying to possess or control him/her. We do not need to possess him/her because they live within us. It is not anymore a relationship where two become one, but two become three: the two partners and the relationship. They create a conscious relationship instead of being consumed by it.
How bad can codependency get?
The Selena story
Selena Quintanilla-Perez was an American singer that achieved international fame. Her story was immortalized in the Selena movie starring Jennifer Lopez. As Selena’s singing schedule became more demanding, she came to rely on Yolanda Saldivar, a San Antonio nurse who had founded her fan club in 1991 and was a devoted follower of the band. The family did not realize how much of a sycophant she was. Shy, plain-looking, and eleven years Selena’s senior, Saldivar made herself indispensable, taking on the job of managing the boutiques and eventually becoming Selena’s confidante. Selena had a caring but narcissistic father that was ruling the whole family. As a result, Selena desperately needed a confidante outside her family circle. That’s when Yolanda stepped into her life and made it seem like she was taking care of everything. Yolanda appeared to everyone like someone sweet, like a mother figure. She used to mother people around her and ask, “Do you need anything, m’ijo/a?”. Yolanda managed to gain a lot of importance in Selena’s life. Whether Selena realized it or not, Yolanda became her filter and gatekeeper. Selena had lots of friends working for her at the beginning of her career. Once Yolanda came on board, she got rid of Selena’s friends one by one. Anyone who captured Selena’s attention, she eliminated. After the family found out that Yolanda was taking advantage of her position to steal money, she felt her life was over and shot Selena to death as her life felt meaningless without Selena. By killing her, Yolanda assured that her name would be associated with Selena for eternity.
Wild Wild Country: Osho and Sheela
A recent documentary Wild Wild Country narrates the rise and fall of Osho Rajneesh, a gifted and controversial spiritual leader that set-up a community in the US state of Oregon. Osho’s passion was teaching spirituality and waking up his followers through various healing modalities. He trusted a young and a very ambitious early disciple of his: Ma Anand Sheela to deal with all the material and organizational aspects in creating the community. Osho liked reclusion and long periods of time for meditation and contemplation so he let naively Sheela take more and more power. For a very long time, she was the only one meeting with Osho and through communication triangulation, she was able to dictate all important decisions in the community. People started to fear her. Power went to her head, as she obviously did not have the experience, integrity and wisdom to handle this level of responsibility and decision-making. She created her own group of devotees and instructed some of them to perform unethical actions. For example, he convinced one of her close follower to kill a doctor that she felt was getting too close to Osho. Unbeknownst to Osho, she built a multi million dollar center to spy on all community members. She armed the community, brought thousands of homeless people from all over the country to win county elections and poisoned the water of the nearby town. During this time, Osho was doing a 3 years’ silent. The whole state of Oregon that had been antagonized by Sheela’s actions was on high alert to bring the community down. Sheela was finally arrested but US officials felt it was safer to bring Osho down too. He was arrested too, and suffered such bad treatment in custody that he died a few months later.
These are some of the most extreme forms of codependency and everyone can see how dangerous it can be. Idolatry can flatter the ego but everything is a transaction for the codependent. It is just a matter of time that they will come for their due once the dependency is complete. Every relationship is a mirror and one cannot be controlling in a relationship without being controlled oneself. We eventually receive what we give in a relationship. How do you recognize a dysfunctional relationship from a healthy one? The dysfunctional one puts you down while the healthy one will make you a better human being.
