Codependency: A Guide for Family Members Trying to “Save” a Loved One

Do you live with one eye on your phone in case they call? Have you paid their debts, lied to their boss or canceled your own plans to look after them? Do you feel that your mood depends entirely on whether your partner, your child or your relative is “fine” or “not fine” that day?

If you recognize yourself in these questions, you are not the only one. It happens to a lot of people who try to help someone they love and end up organizing their whole life around that person. That way of being in a relationship is often called codependency, even if the word on its own does not say what is happening to you.

At PsicoDiversa Málaga we know that addiction and emotional dependency affect the whole family. Often, relatives suffer as much as the identified patient or more, but they do it in the shadows. Today we want to talk to you, the tireless caregiver.

What is codependency? (When saving someone becomes the center of everything)

Codependency is not a diagnosis: it does not appear in any clinical manual. It is a way of naming a pattern that repeats itself in relationships, when worrying about another person’s problems ends up taking almost all the room. It is sometimes described as getting hooked on trying to control or save the other person.

• The logic underneath: “If I keep it under control, they will be fine, and then I will be able to relax.”
• What usually happens: what the other person does is not in your hands, and the attempt does have its price for whoever makes it — time, health, plans of your own that fall away one by one.

The Savior Syndrome: helping or enabling?

This is the most painful and the most necessary distinction we work on in family therapy. There is a very fine line between supporting someone and enabling them.

• Helping: you do things for the other person that they cannot do themselves.
• Enabling: you do things for the other person that are theirs to do, and that responsibility ends up being yours.

If you always rescue them (you pay their debts, you forgive without any real change, you make excuses for them), you end up carrying a responsibility that is not yours, and that has a cost: in time, in money, in health and in the things of your own that get left behind along the way. This is not an invitation to step away or to stop helping. It is an invitation to look at what holding it up is costing you, which is the question a boundary gets decided from.

What usually happens to the person holding it up

This is what comes up most often when the person sitting in the room is the relative. Recognizing one thing on the list does not mean anything on its own; it is there so you can put a name to what you have been noticing for a while.

• Obsession: you spend more time thinking about their problems than about your own goals.
• Lack of boundaries: you say “yes” when you want to say “no,” out of fear that they will get angry or relapse.
• Built-up anger: you feel that you give everything and get nothing back, and that leaves a deep resentment.
• Self-neglect: you have stopped looking after yourself, seeing your friends or enjoying things, because you feel guilty when you do.

Why healthy boundaries matter

Setting boundaries does not mean you stop loving your relative: it means counting yourself in too. A boundary (for example: “I will not give you any more money,” “I will not put up with shouting in this house”) says what you are going to do, and it holds up because of what you need, not because of what it might provoke in the other person. The difficult part is usually not deciding it: it is keeping to it when the other person gets angry, and that can be worked on.

Family therapy in Málaga: healing the system

Addiction and dependency do not happen in a vacuum; they happen inside a system. That is why at PsicoDiversa we offer family and couples therapy.

It is not about looking for someone to blame, but about:

• Improving communication: learning to speak from the emotion and not from the reproach.
• Breaking roles: so that each person’s part stops being so fixed and the responsibility is not always carried by the same person.
• Support for the caregiver: giving you a safe space where you can let it out and get your strength back.

You deserve help too

If you are exhausted from trying to hold up someone else’s world on your shoulders, it is time to put down some of the weight. Remember the rule on airplanes: “Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.”

We are here in Málaga to help you breathe again. Ask about family therapy, or about guidance as a relative whenever you need it.