Why Codependent Relationships Don’t Work
I don’t know about you but I enter a relationship because I like to experience love.
I love to love, I love to be loved and I love to feel loved.
So I guess it would be fair to say that my main motivation is love.
I would have said the same thing 10 and 20 years ago but knowing what I now know I was going about it in the all wrong ways.
Ways that were never going to allow me to experience real love.
What I experienced instead was codependency or as I prefer to call it these days a ‘codependent nightmare’.
And so, instead of loving the person I was with, I loved their potential or who I thought they could change into. Most certainly not love and not very loving either.
Every time they showed me who they really were, I was heartbroken and felt bereft. I thought that they were causing my pain but really it was my unloving choice and misplaced expectation that caused my suffering.
Every time they didn’t love me how I wanted or needed to be loved, I felt triggered, abandoned, unworthy, unloved and re-traumatised.
But it wasn’t necessarily the unloving or uncaring act that broke me over and over again. It was the unhealed trauma I was carrying with me.
It weighted me down in every way possible. It clouded my reality and it tainted my experience. It also made me repeat all the old patterns and habits over and over again so that I could never have a new experience inside of my relationships.
And so my relationships were all about threat, fear and trauma, not love. Never love.
Why?
Because I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to feel safe enough to open up, to connect and to let love in.
That’s what unhealed trauma does to you.
You are connected to your healthy instinct and need for connection but the trauma that you experienced but didn’t process, heal and work through keeps you stuck in self-protection mode.
And that’s what blocks connection.
That’s what keeps you re-creating all the old experiences over and over again.
So creating healthy relationships and breaking free from codependency go hand in hand with inner healing.
It’s unavoidable.
But it’s also not as scary as some might make it out to be.
We have this tendency to overcomplicate things. Our brains are never satisfied and love to come up with more complicated and complex solutions.
In my experience, this stops us from taking action because it feels too overwhelming and therefore keeps us stuck even more.
I have a habit of simplifying things.
To me, things have to make sense and they have to work.
This highly pragmatic approach has worked wonders in my own healing journey but more so in my work with clients.
At the moment, what energises me more than anything is to work 1–1 and so — as my littlest child has now gone to school — I have decided to increase the number of clients I can see.
So if you would like to break free from codependency and unhealthy relationships and have a luxury experience of healing that is customised to your needs, check out ‘Freedom from Codependency’ my latest 1–1 service.
Message me if you have any questions and let’s connect over whether this is right for you.
With Love, Marlena
