7 Actionable Steps To Overcome Your Codependency - Now
If you are a codependent person then you are using your energy to focus on others - their problems, needs, feelings, and wants - forsaking or ignoring yours. And do you feel exhausted from doing this? No doubt.
Because your focus on others helps you feel loved, important, and worthwhile. Here are 7 actionable steps you can start to take right now - from making a commitment to yourself, practicing healthy selfishness, to setting healthy boundaries - should you choose to do the work.
Signs That You Are Codependent
There are several signs that make you codependent. Most of these signs are based on external validation - simply needing others to validate you, tell you that your thoughts, feelings, opinions are valid, and you are good enough.
You depend on others for your identity. When you need people so much, the ingrained belief is that you are unlovable and people will never be there for you.
And because you need people so much, you find you settle for so little - the cookie crumbs - though, deep down you wish you could have the whole cookie. Unfortunately, this creates a cycle of dependency on others for your self-esteem and self-worth.
So everyday you have to start over again, and depend on others to ‘fill your tank’ - to make you feel good about yourself.
If you want to become less codependent you have to be willing to:
Make a commitment to yourself to do the work and hold yourself accountable.
Feel initially uncomfortable, before you start to feel comfortable.
Expect that not everyone will be happy with your changes.
Recognize and accept that you need to change your life to be healthier and you are the only person that can do that.
Be willing to explore and understand how you became codependent and let go of old and outdated narratives that have a significant and profound negative impact on you.
It’s all up to YOU.
There are steps you can start to take to overcome your codependency on your own - now. It is important to learn not only what it means to be codependent, but also how you became codependent so you can unlearn your unhealthy behaviors, and create a healthier relationship with yourself and others.
Ultimately the goal is for you to create the necessary behavior changes so you can accept more personal responsibility for your actions and your life - moving forward - and put the past in the past and stop blaming others (your parents).
Interested in living a more intentional and purposeful life? Check out my new interactive workbook that has 40 thought-provoking questions to help guide you here!
Taking these steps has the potential to help you become more independent and less codependent.
1. Make a commitment to yourself
In order to start your healing process means that you want to learn how to become less codependent. It has to be more than just reading about and hoping things change. You must be the person to take the steps to get to a better place and build a healthier relationship with yourself.
No one can do that for you.
This means rebalancing yourself and your life with more focus on you and what you need rather than others. Yes, this will be challenging but is possible. It is removing yourself from the victim and martyr role and recognizing what your needs are.
This doesn’t mean you cannot help others, but they are no longer a priority, and you and your needs are important too, and often more important.
Actionable step.
Decide to take one small step to take or one small change to make in your life so that you can hold yourself accountable and keep the commitment to yourself. You will do what you say you will do. For example, if you decide to read about codependency, then set a date and time you will do this.
Start to journal about your process. Purchase a journal and set aside time - every day - to journal about your process. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you own it and remain committed to it. If you forget to do it one day, just pick it up the next day.
2. Understand the impact of your family of origin - your first family
We all come from somewhere and your first family or our family of origin has a significant impact on your values, who you become, and how you esteem yourself and feel worthy.
It is also a place where you are influenced by your parent’s or caretaker’s relationship and how you became codependent. That first chapter in our life is that important and influential. This is not a time to continue to blame your parents but to understand that they had their own first family, too.
And because parents are not perfect and often have their own internal struggles they have often not worked through, they will pass on inappropriate and unhealthy behaviors to you, often resulting in codependency.
When this dynamic is established, you learn early in life that your needs are not important, so you put them aside and become laser-focused on your parent’s or caretaker’s needs. This pattern is reinforced over time.
Actionable step.
Find a place in your journal or computer or phone and write about your first family story.
Ask yourself these questions:
How were you raised?
How would you describe your parents/caretakers?
Were you able to be yourself growing up?
Based on your upbringing and how you were raised, what were the factors that contributed to you becoming more codependent?
What behaviors that you engage in that you want to no longer do? Do you say yes too often? Do you have a hard time saying no? Do you automatically think about another person’s needs before yours?
Choose 3-4 articles about how a person’s family of original influences their upbringing. When you read these articles, what comes up for you? What are the things that you relate to?
3. Identify red flags
Being codependent means you lack a healthy self-esteem and depend on others to help you feel better. You rely on their opinion of you to feel worthy and loved. And because you depend on others, you miss or ignore some of the glaring red flags in your relationship.
You might find you tolerate toxic and abusive behavior, justify and make excuses for the abuse, and avoid any type of conflict. If you have a fear of being alone or having your relationship end, boundary lines will be blurred and stepped on and stepped over.
You become more clingy if you feel the relationship might end. You are overly dependent on them and want to spend all of your time with them. You can not rely on them. They are deceptive. They gaslight you.
However in order to change and become less codependent, learning what the red flags are in a person - and yourself - that reinforce this pattern is key to helping you change and grow.
Actionable step.
Write down the red flags you can identify in yourself and your relationship.
When you meet someone who has red flags, what will you do when they have some or many of these red flags? Come up with a plan to acknowledge the red flags and not continue to engage.
Write down the steps will you take to put yourself first.
Write down the green flags that are important to have in a relationship. When you meet someone who has red flags, come up with a plan to acknowledge the red flags and not continue to engage? What steps will you take to put yourself first?
4. Start to create healthy boundaries
When you are codependent, you naturally say yes to people and do things you don’t always want to and find that saying no is very difficult. You worry about disappointing people and wonder what they will think of you if you say no. You will feel guilty for saying no. You might think, will they still like me? Will they be mad at me?
The goal is to create healthy boundaries and learn through trial and error how to say yes - when you want to - and no when you don’t.
Healthy boundaries mean:
You and your partner or another person are supportive of one another.
Helps you begin to recognize and implement what you will and will NOT tolerate in a relationship.
You are able to communicate your needs clearly and also respecting the boundaries of others.
Working on issues but they don’t consume you.
When a line has been crossed, each person feels they can communicate that and enforce their boundaries.
Remember: boundaries are essential for healthy relationships to thrive and also provide you with a sense of independence.
What will happen when you initially start to set healthier boundaries:
You will initially feel uncomfortable and guilty. You might even backslide a bit. Give yourself some grace. Start small and set a boundary you feel close to 100% that you will be able to follow through with.
Experience some pushback from others that they are unhappy with your boundaries. They will attempt to ‘needle you’ into going back to the person you were before - saying yes to everything, to them, and putting them first. Don’t.
Sit on your hands and bite your tongue. Sit in the moment of feeling uncomfortable and anxious. It will eventually dissipate and you will feel better and more comfortable - over time.
People might also try to prevent you from setting healthy boundaries with them.
Actionable step.
Write down the things you have said ‘yes’ to that you didn’t want to do. Then decide on ONE thing you can do differently next time when you are asked to do the same thing or something you don’t want to do.
Every time you are asked to do something say, ‘i will let you know in 30 minutes.’ During this time, think about why you would say yes (besides saying you will feel guilty) and why you really want to say no.
Think about how you would feel if you said yes when you didn’t want to. It could be as simple as saying no to eating a certain food. The simpler the better in the beginning as this will help you sit with the uncomfortable feelings that will come up for you.
Learning how to set and communicate healthy boundaries is a skill. It is learning how you can identify the feelings that come up when you start to put yourself first, sit with them, and move through them.
Eventually, the negative feelings change to feeling empowered and good about the decisions that you are now making for your life, for your emotional and mental well-being, and worrying less about what other people think or feel about your decisions.
5. Learn the signs of a healthy relationship
Being codependent often means that you have been or in an unhealthy relationship. Many of these relationships could also be toxic or abusive. When you are codependent in a relationship, you forsake your own needs and thus put up with behaviors that someone who is healthier, would not.
This often happens because if you were raised in a dysfunctional household, you came to expect or accept certain types of behaviors that are red flags, toxic, or abusive.
Unfortunately, it’s just a product or result of being raised in this type of household. You are not to blame. You did the best you could with what you had.
We live what we learn, until we decide to change the course of our life and unlearn negative behaviors.
There are several signs of healthy relationship beyond good communication, respect, trust, and safety. Both people make time for one another and themselves, they have relationships outside of their romantic relationship, they demonstrate love and affection, and have equality.
They recognize relationships take effort, intention, and attention to show up for one another on a regular basis. They are both emotionally available for one another and know that their needs, wants, and desires are just as important as their partners.
Actionable step.
Write down the red flags that you ignore or ignored and the toxic, abusive, or unhealthy behaviors that you continue to tolerate. This isn’t to blame you but help you understand some of the behaviors you continue to tolerate against your best judgment (even if you don’t believe that in the moment).
What thoughts and feelings come up for you?
Write down what you believe are characteristics of a healthy relationship.
Ask how many of these I have in my current or past relationships. If you are not sure what the signs of a healthy relationship are, then you can read about them here.
Ask, what makes it hard for me to find a healthy relationship.
6. Learn how to take care of yourself
For someone who is codependent, taking care of yourself is something you never learned how to do because you were too busy taking care of your parents to satisfy their emotional needs. Self-care is all about a mutual respect. It means living your life responsibly and taking responsibility for the things you have to change.
And self-care is more of an art and something you never learned - how to give yourself what you need. You never learned how to do this and never asked for things that you needed. You probably haven’t given much thought to what you want and need. But it’s time to change that.
Learning how to take care of yourself, is a critical piece in becoming a more independent person and less codependent.
One of the first ways to take care of yourself is to begin the process of learning how to place more value on yourself. What does this mean? This means spending time doing the things that bring you joy - whatever those things are.
It means making time for yourself and doing things that make you feel good and includes healthy physical, emotional, and mental health.
It means taking responsibility for your health and happiness. It means learning how to focus less on other people and more focus on you.
Actionable step.
Close your eyes and envision this kind of life you want to live and the type of person you want to be. Ask yourself:
What do you look like?
What do you do?
How do you want to act? Break down those behaviors into simple steps.
Write down all the things that make you happy and the kind of life you want to live. When you write these things down, you can return to them often and make updates and changes. Don’t hold back. If you had no barriers, what would that list include? Dare to dream!
Learn to understand what your true needs are. What does this look like? False self vs true self? When we have a false self, which we often create when we are raised in an environment and with parents who put their needs before us, we live our lives for others, forsaking our own needs.
Ask what do I like? Do I like that? Do I want to do something?
Learn to set time aside for yourself each day to read, journal, or reflect. It could also include taking a walk outside.
7. Learn to practice healthy selfishness
Being codependent means that you probably have no idea what brings you joy and happiness. You are unsure how to embrace personal growth and freedom. What it actually means to put your emotional and mental health first.
Often when we hear the word selfishness, we think of someone being selfish, which is a negative trait. However, there are absolutely times when being selfish is key to growth, healthy boundaries, putting our needs first, and embracing the life we want for ourselves.
Healthy selfishness means you have respect for your own joy, happiness, growth, freedom, and health. It means setting healthy boundaries and learning how to refocus your energy on yourself.
This could include taking on new responsibilities that help you grow as a person or learn a new skill to become more independent and self-reliant.
Taking on new responsibilities helps you become more confident and improves your self-esteem and proves to yourself that you are capable of setting and achieving goals.
You eventually learn that doing things that add to and do not take away from your life, helps you learn and understand that you are just as important as other people. You deserve to do things that reinforce the positive effects of healthy selfishness.
Actionable step.
Write down 2-3 ways you can start to make yourself a priority - such as healthy eating, meditating, journaling, exercising, and establishing healthy boundaries.
Write down all the ways that would help you start to pay attention to yourself and do things for your own well-being. And then decide how you can start to implement 1-2 of those things - to start - and then add more as time goes on.
The goal is to have self-care, boundaries, and healthy selfishness become a lifestyle, a way of living.
How Working With a Professional Can Help
There are several ways that a professional can help you overcome your codependency. There are a few main areas of focus of therapy:
Therapy might focus on helping you set small boundaries and learn how to say no and process the thoughts and feelings that come up for you.
Help you focus on learning how to tolerate uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.
Challenge your irrational thoughts.``
Help you understand the impact of your family of origin and why your parents or caretakers were self-focused.
Help you create a different vision for your future.
Target the thoughts and feelings that contribute to your unhealthy relationship patterns. This can be done by doing a relationship inventory and identifying the triggers and the thoughts that come up that reinforce your unhealthy relationship patterns.
Final Thoughts
Despite being codependent, there are ways to make sustainable changes in your life and become the person you really want to be - your authentic self - someone who is strong, empowered, in control of your life, and independent.
By putting healthier habits into place, you will help create the systems you want in your life which reinforces the lifestyle and the way of being you envision for yourself.
Take the time to put into place actionable steps to become more independent.
Interested in working together? let’s chat!
Looking to live more intentionally? Check out my new journal here!
Embark on a transformative journey with our workbook featuring 40 thought-provoking questions designed to guide you toward a more intentional and purposeful life. Explore your values, clarify your goals, and cultivate greater self-awareness through engaging exercises that empower you to make mindful choices and create a life aligned with your deepest aspirations.
