What Is Codependency In Relationships? Is It Bad?

by Inspiration4Living.com

People get so wrapped up within their relationships that they aren’t able to look at it from a healthy perspective.

For many individuals, it’s the idea of being alone, of losing the love and affection of that other person, that frightens them into acting differently or fearing losing them. This often tends to lead to codependency in relationships and the bottom line is that it is a bad thing.

But isn’t it good to rely on someone else?

While it may not be a bad thing necessarily to rely on someone else, it does become an unhealthy aspect in a relationship when you two become codependent. Codependency in relationships develops more from the negative aspects of the relationships than from positive ones.

What is codependency in relationships?

At the core, codependency in relationships occurs when one person has some issues and the other person is helping him or her out with those problems. While this may seem normal and healthy, the problem evolves when the person offering the support system does so because it creates a bonding agent in the relationship, meaning that the other person is going to be much less likely to leave him or her.

The codependent relationship is not based on love or affection at this point, but rather on a mutual need of some sort or another to stay together. People in these kinds of relationships are often not happy, but they believe that they are happier than they would be if they were alone. It is that underlying fear of being alone that drives most codependent relationships.

Another factor that drives people to stay in these unhealthy relationships is that these people don’t believe that they deserve anyone else in their life. They assume that they are not worthy of anyone else’s affection and therefore they will take whatever they can get from this other person in their life. That doesn’t sound all that enjoyable, does it?

So why do people stay in codependent relationships?

Many people who are stuck in these kinds of relationships simply don’t see any other viable option. They don’t believe that they can abandon the other person at this time in their life, when they happen to need them the most. Or they have too much invested with each other that they don’t believe that they can survive on their own.

Many women who end up staying home to raise children become stuck in codependent relationships because they don’t see a way to support themselves if they were to leave their spouse.

If you know someone who is stuck in codependency in their relationship and you want to help, the first thing that you can do is to begin to show them what they have to offer the world around them.

Don’t try to pry them away from their partner because this tends to make them want to stay longer. When their livelihood is threatened, they tend to dig in deeper and entrench themselves more. Simply show them what they have going for them and what they could accomplish with their life. With enough encouragement, they’ll soon gain the strength that they need to break away from the codependency in the relationship.

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