I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately and talking a lot with others about the idea of being of service. Specifically, how do we assist those who come to us looking for advice or help of some kind, especially within the context of their own emotional recovery or spiritual healing? Where do we draw the line on our own involvement? When does “help” turn into “enabling”? When does our desire to assist turn into our own need to fix, save, or rescue the person that’s come to us?
If you’d like to see more, please check out my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
Codependency, counter-dependency, and the inability to receive…
It’s been said that you can’t pour from an empty cup. It’s also been said that you can’t receive in a cup that’s filled. For a cup to be of true value, to be truly serviceable, it doesn’t remain full or empty; it transitions between those states as necessary:
I’m thirsty, so I fill a cup. I drink from it. The cup empties.
My friend is thirsty, so I fill a cup. I give it to my friend. They drink from it. The cup empties.
When we’re healthy, we learn to become both the full and empty cup as required. In the sickness of codependency and counter-dependency, however, the truth of the matter is that cup is never empty. It’s always filled with one thing: my own need for safety, for love…
If you’d like to see more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube.
As a kid, you walk into a room and you feel anger there…well, you feel angry, so you must be angry. You feel sad, so you must be sad. We learn to internalize those things, to take them on, and to come at the world from the perspective of those things that we’re feeling – believing that they’re our own.
As we get older and lean a little heavier into our work, hopefully, we begin to sort some of that stuff out. We begin to learn what’s ours and what’s not; what we can let go of – what we can hang onto.
And this can be incredibly difficult when we see people we really love going through a tough time. One trap in particular that it’s easy to fall into as someone who’s empathic, is the fix, save, and rescue trap. We see someone suffering, and we want to fix the situation. We want to save them from it; to rescue them from their peril.
Sometimes our motivations aren’t as unselfish as they seem, whether we’re aware of that or not. Part and parcel of growing up in a house full of emotional instability is often the dance of codependence: “I love you because of how you make me feel.”
In the presence of suffering, especially when it’s the suffering of those we care for, we don’t like the way we feel when we see them suffer, and so we want to rescue them; to stop their pain in order to stop our own.
If you’d like to hear more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube…
One of the great blessings of my own healing work has been that I have found myself in the presence of teachers who, consciously or unconsciously, have never been afraid to show their humanity. Some of it has been extremely noble, and some of it hasn’t. But the wonderful thing about that, is that I have learned lessons along the way that I could not have learned any other way.
I have gotten to see people being completely human in my presence, and that has opened up space and allowed me to do the same…
Amongst the things that get passed down to us from our families – the things that continue to support us, like family traditions or pictures or stories, heirlooms like China, wooden spoons, or upholstered rocking chairs, there are other things that can continue to structure our lives, like fear, shame, and guilt, and some of the darker, more intense stuff like hypervigilance, codependence, or toxic self-reliance.
When you’re raised with dysfunctionality, you learn very quickly how to read the territory. You learn to check the temperature of the air around you. You look for changes in expressions, changes in tones of voice… the slightest clue can give you a read on the environment.
And you learn how to adapt, how to adopt certain behaviors like people pleasing or hiding, never speaking your own opinion but constantly copping to the opinions of others. Or you learn how to constantly challenge authority, to yell back in order to make yourself bigger, so that the threat becomes less.
That was a favorite tactic of mine for many, many years.
These patterns provide a sense of structure and carry us through difficult situations. They can cause us to pick certain types of romantic partners, or repetitive dead-end jobs. They can drive us into reckless spending or self-destructive lifestyles.
Left unchecked, these things can continue to shape the way we live our lives. And so, in their own way, they, too, become family traditions…
When we grow up in difficult households, sometimes we feel like there’s nobody else in the world that understands us. We spend a lot of time feeling alone. So, when we find another person or people that seem to get us, we tend to cling to that – we put a lot of value in it. Sometimes, we can jump into those relationships full-bore. We can move in, spread out – take up more space than the other party is really willing to allot to us.
We tell ourselves stories about the relationship, about the depth of it. And we build on that, just as we have in the past. And then we operate not from the perspective of the relationship as it really is, but from the relationship as we wish it were – as we perceive it to be because of our need for it to be something else. And that’s a lot to ask of another party.
Sometimes this can be worked out if the person that we’re dealing with is pretty solid. But if not, sometimes these relationships can blow apart because the person – or people – can’t live up to the expectations that we have of them.
Bonja the Bodger 