Website: https://www.codependentmind.com/
Even after largely healing from the trauma that started Brian down the path of codependency, he was still left with the behaviors that formed in response to that trauma. So although the source of the codependency had been removed, the symptoms, the habituated behaviors, lingered and kept showing up in his relationships in the form of a default sense of powerlessness. In this episode, we discuss what he is doing to finally kick the powerlessness habit.
Transcript
0:00  
Hey Hello, this is Stephanie and this is Brian. Welcome to our podcast the making and the remaking of a codependent mind.
Brian  0:13  
This is season two, episode four. And we've kind of come full circle at this point to back to the topic of codependency itself.
Stephanie  0:21  
So this episode entitled healing codependency, breaking the powerlessness habit, we are going to discuss the specific behaviors, again, that make up the phenomena of codependency, behavior habits that form in response to trauma, abuse or neglect, and how you are trying to break those codependent behavior habits,
Brian  0:47  
right for me, those behaviors were formed in response to that five year childhood friendship that we talked about several times throughout this series from when I was about four years old to when I was about 10. And how those behaviors were reinforced, or really kind of amplified by my family dynamic, specifically, my dad's behavior.
Stephanie  1:05  
And then as you moved into adulthood, you brought those behaviors into pretty much every interpersonal relationship you had, you would assume responsibility for meeting other people's needs to the exclusion of acknowledging your own needs or feelings. And when the other person had a disordered personality, for instance, a narcissist or narcissistic tendencies, it had especially disastrous results. Yeah.
Brian  1:30  
And although, you know, even when I was trying to relate to so called Healthy People, the behaviors didn't really serve me well, then either. So let's go back
Stephanie  1:40  
to episode one of season one, that list of behaviors that you read out, in the very first episode that form this phenomena of codependency.
Brian  1:54  
Yeah, okay. There is the feeling of responsibility for the emotions and actions of others. There's caretaking, people pleasing, struggling to set boundaries with other people. There's low self esteem and self worth, usually kind of a denial of autonomy or even identity. There's a trouble expressing emotions, kind of a fear of emotions really, or again, it's kind of back to this denial of autonomy. Did I have emotional autonomy and notional autonomy in this in this case, yeah. And then there's denying big picture or even situational problems like so there's where the storytelling and the dishonesty and compartmentalization come in. And then finally, enmeshment. In relationships with personality disordered chemically dependence or other codependence are really impulse disordered individuals. So people who trigger all these above behaviors, or at least somehow don't challenge them, when I come in contact with these people.
Stephanie  2:52  
Hearing that list, again, it strikes me that the previous three episodes of the seasons of the first three episodes of this season really dealt with what you did to address the last four items on that list. So that's again, low self esteem, like denial of identity, trouble expressing emotions, fear of emotions, denying big picture, you know, it's developed, as you said, storytelling and normalization, and then investment in relationships. So these first three episodes, we talked about how you recognize and remove yourself from abusive relationships, how you repaired your emotional system and got over your fear of certain emotions and reconnected to your emotions, and then how you rewrote the stories that were keeping you in denial, and keeping you in meshed really, with disordered people, even when they w