(00:00):
I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast, episode number 218 Am I Co-dependent? How to Know if You’re Losing Yourself in the Relationship.

(00:16):
Hello and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast where courageous women learn not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal, but to become the boldest, truest, most decisive and confident versions of themselves ever. If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently living but don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place. Stick around to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks off. Is it possible? It is. And I’m here to show you how I’m your host, Andrea Giles. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

(00:52):
Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to another episode. I am going to talk about codependency today. Codependency, the last couple of episodes have been about energy, about energetic boundaries, about energetic yeses, energetic nos, and this is going to feel a little bit similar, but I’m hoping that the language in this will help you go even deeper into understanding yourself, understanding where you’re at without any kind of judgment at all, just with kindness. We’re just meeting ourselves with kindness and love and grace. Okay, this topic has been on my mind a lot because I will say that for me, this has been quite an intense year of shedding, shedding, shedding, shedding identities, shedding layers, shedding belief systems, shedding things that I have kept dormant inside me or suppressed inside me and brought to the surface and felt big time felt and some letting go. And it’s also been a year of seeing some things in me that I really didn’t see as clearly as I do now.

(02:06):
And it’s been hard to see some of the things, some of my own patterns, some of the ways that I still hold on to relationship patterns that are not particularly helpful. Ways that I can be codependent in my own way, where I have my own energetic boundary struggles and ways that I’m kind of gathering back my own energy. And so much of this has been from my own learning this year, my own understanding, my own looking at what I have contributed to some of the dynamics that I’m in and even understanding where they’ve come from. So before I jump into this, I need to make sure that you know something really important. I am running a pretty amazing special right now where if you have been interested in joining my Get Your Life Back After Infidelity program, but you are looking at the holidays and going, I don’t know if I have the time to commit to it.

(03:07):
I know that I want the support. I don’t know if I have the time, but I want the support. I have a special deal right now where you put down a down payment, you don’t pay anymore until January and the program is not on the clock until January, but you start now. So meaning it’s normally six months, but you get in right now, you get all the support, you get all the content, you get the calls, you get all of it, but your o clock doesn’t actually start until January. So it’s like getting the rest of the year for free with a down payment down and not paying anymore until January. Pretty cool. So if this is something that you are interested in, I am going to pop the link into the show notes for you to just come on in and grab your spot.

(04:00):
I don’t usually do that. I usually have an application or a consultation with me where we talk through it. I am placing my trust in you that if this feels good to you, if this feels like something that is a yes in your body, I’m going to trust you. I’m going to trust you with that, and I’m going to welcome you in and let you come on in and invite you in with open arms. Alright, so the link is going to be right in the show notes for you just for this particular special. Okay? Alright, here we go. How many of you hear that word codependent and maybe cringe? Like, am I codependent? Is this love or is this some kind of tainted, weird kind of dysfunctional love? Is this loyalty? Am I being loyal or am I disappearing in this relationship? If this question feels a little tender, a little uncomfortable, maybe a little bit activating, good.

(05:08):
Okay, good. It means something in you is waking up. If it feels like it stirs the pot a little bit, great, it means that there’s something that’s ready to hear it. Codependence is not about weakness, it’s not about being flawed, it’s not about being too much. It’s not about being too little. It’s about survival strategies that we learned, really young nervous system wiring and relational patterns that were learned long before infidelity entered the scene long before. And today I’m going to help you see with so much love and so much compassion, the difference between love for someone else and losing yourself. Okay, before we dig in again, this ties back to the past two episodes where I talked about energetic boundaries. What you allow in your space, what leaks out of your space. Okay? Codependence is the fastest way for your energetic boundaries to collapse.

(06:17):
You become merged with someone else. We have no edges. There’s no edges to us, and we are merged and mingled with somebody else. You become very porous, very absorbent, very fused. So today we’re going to untangle that gently, honestly, with no shame. So much compassion. Alright? What codependence is and what it’s not. Codependence is not loving too much, it’s not being too loyal, it’s not wanting connection. Those are really beautiful things. Loyalty and love and connection are beautiful, wonderful things. Codependence becomes codependence when we lose connection with our own internal guidance system because our emotional survival feels tied to someone else’s mood, someone else’s choices, their reactions or their wellbeing. It’s disappearing slowly, quietly inside a relationship. It’s becoming so fused with the other person that you can’t feel where you end and they begin, and I’m going to give you some examples of this so that you can recognize it, okay?

(07:35):
And the truth is that most women navigating infidelity don’t even know that they’re in a codependent pattern. Guess what I understand about this? I understand about this from myself that many, many of the women that I work with are very strong, intelligent, resourceful women, and I think we think of codependent women as no backbone and just kind of taking what they’re given and kind of taking a beating. And that’s not it. That’s not it. Sometimes codependence looks like somebody is very strong and carrying the whole relationship and calling it strength, and it’s really something else that’s happening there, but we’re calling it strength. And there is a capacity. There is an ability to hold a lot, but it is undermining you, undermining what you need, undermining your own humanness, and somebody who has desires and wants and needs. It’s undermining that codependence can look like.

(08:48):
Commitment, devotion, empathy, responsibility being the strong one, being the forgiving, one being the glue. It’s a survival strategy with a virtue bow on it. Noble, virtuous bow wrapped around it. Okay? Why codependency intensifies after infidelity is because after infidelity, for most people, the way that your body responds to the betrayal is a trauma response. And infidelity makes your nervous system feel like the relationship is on life support and could die at any time. And so from this place, you are scanning, monitoring, managing over-functioning, trying to predict the future. You’re regulating both of you, you’re keeping the peace, you’re carrying the emotional load because somewhere inside you, there’s the story. If I don’t keep us together, if I don’t do this, we’re going to fall apart. Your body is trying to protect you, your body’s trying to protect you, okay? You are trying to avoid a breakdown and you’re trying to survive, but this is going to cost you your clarity, your peace and your sense of self.

(10:13):
Not just your sense of self but yourself. It’s damaging to yourself. Alright? How do you know if you are codependent? I’m going to go through seven signs, okay? Be honest. Be kind, be gentle. Care are some signs sign? Number one, your mood depends on their mood. If they’re anxious, you’re anxious. If they’re grumpy, angry, you brace. If they’re warm and friendly, you exhale. It’s like having a temperature. Check the mood thermometer, what’s the weather today? Oh, okay, note to soap, race up. There’s some anxiety. Okay, now I’m anxious because they’re anxious. We are very much tracking moods and then we are matching moods often. Number two, you over-function so they don’t have to. You carry the emotional responsibility for conversations, apologies, planning, logistics, relationship repair, growth. You’re like the emotional air traffic controller. You’re standing there waving your arms in the air, directing traffic, and you have a story of why they’re not.

(11:39):
Maybe they’re not capable. They didn’t learn. They’re in so much shame right now that they can’t handle all of this, so I have to manage it or I know they won’t, so I have to. Okay, that’s a big one. I know they won’t. I don’t think they will. And if they won’t, then what happens? And so we keep doing this and we’re going to get into later what to do with that. Okay? Number three, you monitor them more closely than you monitor yourself. You’re more aware of what’s going on with them than you are with you. You can describe their thoughts, their reactions, their fears, their excuses, their patterns. But if I were to sit here and say, how are you feeling? I don’t know. I don’t know how I’m feeling, but you know how they’re feeling, what’s going on with them? Sign number four, you want things for them more than they want things for themselves.

(12:34):
Ouch, right? Their growth feels like your burden. You have a thought. This would be so much easier if he would just X, Y, and Z. Heal faster. Be more consistent. Take this more seriously. Stop minimizing, do the work. Bring up conversations. Tell me details without me having to pull it out. Painfully pulling it out. You’re leading their transformation. You’re like the leader of their growth while ignoring your own or you are leading their growth and calling it your own growth. We’ve got this backwards. We’ve got it backwards. We can’t lead anyone else’s growth. We only can lead our own and invite other people where we’re going. That’s all we can do. That’s all we can do. Yet we try to control this so much because of the fear of what happens if we stop. Number five, you collapse your needs to avoid conflict. You silence yourself.

(13:37):
You downplay your hurt, you let things slide when it’s not okay. You’re afraid of rocking the boat, okay? This can look like having a conversation that you’re really proud of, saying hard things and then noticing that they are trying to pull you back into the pattern by dropping into shame, by saying things like, when are you going to stop bringing that up? When are we going to move past that? And you collapse into that. An energetic collapse looks like kind of numbing out or avoiding how you actually feel. Like let’s say that they’re trying to be intimate with you. Your body is saying, no way. No, let’s not get, not right now. We need to stick with this hard conversation. But they’re trying to get you to kind of soothe them with intimacy and you don’t want to, but there’s a relational pattern of intimacy being something that is soothing and something that avoids the bigger, more difficult conversations.

(14:44):
When we are in a codependent relationship, we often drop into that collapse to avoid further conflict. Pay attention to where you are collapsing. Pay attention to where you are shutting down, silencing yourself, downplaying, okay, sign number six, you’re more afraid of losing them than losing yourself. It feels like the worst thing in the world to lose them. There’s an attachment there that feels so scary to lose if losing you yourself feels less terrifying than losing them. This is a symptom of being codependent again, no shame just it just is. I was in this place for a long time. I know it will. I know it will. It’s when we can start recognizing that I will not lose myself for one more second. I will not abandon myself for one more second that we start to reclaim some of their energy back and lose our fear around losing them and show up with a lot more strength.

(15:49):
And the last one is you can feel their energy before you see their face. Okay, so I mentioned earlier the one about your mood. Depending on their mood, this one’s a little bit different. We can feel what’s going on with them energetically, if they’re feeling sad, if they are having a hard time. And what this looks like is we are trying to get inside their head, inside their body, trying to understand their trauma rather than understanding our own. We’re parked over in their body and their brain, and then we’re calling it empathy. Look at how empathetic I am. It’s not actually empathy, it’s hyper vigilance. You are reading that room and scanning, scanning, scanning to know if you’re safe and to adjust accordingly. And you are avoiding the thing that’s actually going to heal, which is connection. Connection heals. Hypervigilance does not heal. Something that I learned recently that I kind of put together and understand is that I learned how to read a room really young, really young, really, really, really young.

(17:05):
Some of, because talked about it here before that my own father was killed in a plane crash when I was two days old and my mother became a widow with three little kids at 23. And I believe that I learned to read a room really, really young that I learned to read the room and see if there’s any room for me really young. If there’s room for me to have needs to have, wants to have things that I cared about and to minimize that in me and be hyper aware of what was going on around me. This has been a lifelong thing for me that I finally see that I’ve done so much work around, but these things go way back to me, literally the beginning of my life. And infidelity can be the thing that magnifies the pattern so much that we finally deal with it. And that’s part of the beauty of this place is going, I finally see it and now I can face it. Good, right? Good, good. Now, why does it matter to know this? It matters because you cannot make an aligned decision whether to stay or go from a codependent state.

(18:31):
I don’t want you making any really big decisions for yourself when you energetically are still leaking energy so much into somebody else. Because in codependence, your choices are not coming from a place of truth. They’re coming from fear, fusion, survival, guilt, people pleasing, self abandonment, fixation on their potential exhaustion. I’m so tired, I’m just so tired. Panic obligation. Their clarity is buried under layers and layers of emotional entanglement, which leads us to what do we do about it? Stepping out of codependence, and this is where you begin. This is where they and their energy and you begin, number one, you stop managing their emotions, their reactions get to be their responsibility. You stop caretaking someone who needs to learn to carry their own weight. When you start doing this work, oh man, you feel their energy so strong when they’re trying to pull from you that you’re just like, get off, get off.

(19:51):
Don’t try to extract from me. Hold your own weight, carry your own weight, hold your own emotion, and you stop managing it and you have boundaries around it where you can step away if you need to, where you can say, Hey, I need you actually to be with yourself and not pull me into this right now. I’m going to step away. Number two, you stop collapsing your needs. You allow yourself to disappoint someone. You allow yourself to take up space. You allow yourself to take up a lot of space. And it’s not to punish, but to honor reality. It’s not to say You did this to me. It’s to honor what is true that I am a human who has needs, who has wants, that my needs and wants are valid, just as valid as anybody else’s. And you stand your ground in them. You don’t shrink into not needing anything.

(20:47):
Number three, you create emotional or physical space, not as a threat, not as a manipulation. It’s to get your energy back to you, to your own body, to have more clarity. You get very picky, very choosy about what and who and how, and when people are allowed into your space, you start practicing these boundaries. You can be in different parts of your home that are reserved for you. You can ask for space that you’ve never asked before. You can go do things for yourself that you’ve never done before without needing permission. You’re just doing it and you are honoring yourself and you are going to get some data. You’re going to understand how this other person responds to you taking up more space. And ultimately what we need to know is, is this something that we can build? Is this relationship something that we can start over with or are they going to ask me to keep collapsing myself?

(22:00):
And if that’s the case, it’s not going to work right? And we need to know that they can carry their own weight. Number four, asking yourself, what do I want without censoring the answer? What do I want? This is where women suddenly remember their preferences, their desires, their truth, their intuition, their boundaries, their limits. It’s like a homecoming to yourself, like a getting reacquainted. I can’t tell you how many people I work with are like, I don’t know what I want. And I’ve shared this story before, but I’ll share it again. I remember in fifth grade going to a friend’s house and her mom saying, Andrea, for dinner I have leftover spaghetti and I have leftover lasagna. Which one would you like? I’m like, I don’t care. Either one, whatever’s easiest. Andrea, which one do you want? Either one’s fine. And I remember her saying this wise, mother of my friend, Andrea, someday somebody’s going to give you a choice and you are going to regret not standing up for what you want and not speaking what you want because somebody else is going to choose for you and you’re not going to like that choice.

(23:11):
That has stuck with me since fifth grade. In reality, any day of the week, I would pick lasagna. It’s one of my favorite foods ever. And you know what? I make a mean lasagna. I love it. But at that time, I didn’t give myself permission. I thought that I had to just be nice. Now, all day long, give me the lasagna. That’s my preference. How about you? What do you like? Want what’s true for you? No censoring. No censoring. Okay. Number five, you regulate your nervous system because you cannot hear your truth in a braced, collapsed, or hyper alert state. Your body cannot give you clarity through contraction. Working with your nervous system is crucial. This is something that we start with in my program, by the way, we start here because all else comes from your nervous system, expansion and capacity. Number six, you stop centering the marriage as the most important thing and you start centering the woman in it.

(24:25):
This is the shift. This is the shift. Start focusing, centering you. Stop centering the marriage and the outcome of the marriage and start centering the woman in the marriage. So we go from this place of codependence to stepping away into independence. And from that place, we get to decide what kind of relationship do I choose? Do I want to step back in? And this can happen living under the same roof. It really can, but you cannot jump straight into an honest choice without moving away from the codependence into this independence place. It’s a developmental step. Moving from codependent into independent. It’s a more mature way of navigating relationships. And then when we are in that place, we get to decide what kind of relationship we choose, but we can’t move into that until we’ve first gone into independence. It goes in that order. Independence feels like freedom, like remembering yourself, like breathing again feels great.

(25:42):
And that interdependence is when somebody else meets you there, where they’ve done their own work and they are not dependent on you. Then you have relational freedom. Okay, here’s a quick little 62nd practice of unhooking, untethering. Pulling yourself out wherever you are, take a breath. Imagine your partner stepping off the emotional stage just for a moment. You’re taking them off. You’re not abandoning them, you’re not punishing them, you’re just stepping back. You’re now putting yourself in the spotlight center stage. You’re taking them off. Feel your body. Ask what sensation is present in me when he’s not at the center? You’re just asking. You’re up on that stage. The light’s on you. What sensation is present in me when he’s not at the center? You don’t need to fix it. You don’t need to interpret it or make it mean anything. You’re just noticing you’re being with that feeling, and that is a huge start in coming home to yourself.

(26:49):
I want you to know that codependence is a doorway, not a diagnosis. This is no diagnosis. Recognizing codependence is a doorway into clarity, peace, boundaries, independence, power, truth and choice. Choice, powerful, free choice, freedom. Again, if something today stirred up an emotion in you, great. It means it struck something in you that says, I’m ready to shift this. If you want support untangling this, rebuilding your self trusts, making decisions from your own highest, clearest, most grounded self, this is the work that we do every day in my group program. Get your life back after infidelity. You don’t have to do the so alone, I’ve got you. Remember that the clarity that you’re seeking lives inside you. Let’s make some space for you to hear that. Alright, thank you so much. Sending you love, encouragement, all good things, and I will chat with you next week.

(28:04):
Thank you for listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast. If you would like to be kept in the know about upcoming free classes, new podcast episodes, and other ways of working with me, go subscribe to my weekly email. You can subscribe@andreagiles.com slash lies about dash infidelity slash. Again, it’s andrea giles.com/lies about dash infidelity slash I will see you next time.