Codependency - Part 1

Well, hello everyone, and welcome. This is an episode of Transformed You. I'm Mark DeJesus. It's great to be with you here today, and I'm going to talk about a subject and break it up into a couple parts to help bring some illumination, some help, some healing, and some support to your life.

It has to do with the subject of codependency. And over the years, in my one-on-one work, in my writing, and just speaking into the lives of people's hearts and relationships, this codependency issue is everywhere. And I've been recommending a lot of people, "Hey, you need to understand the subject. You need to understand the subject." And I said, you know what? I need to do some talks and some session teaching on this and give some insight from my perspective to help people to see what it looks like and help us get some healing in this area because I find it's infected a lot of our relationship patterns. So I hope you'll experience some healing, some freedom, some awakening in this. And again, this is going to be part one of this topic, and I'm going to get into some more.

I'm also doing a live broadcast of this. So at the end of this session, I will look at some of the questions. And if you weren't available for the live recording of this, that's all right. You still get to hear everything I'm saying, and you can still send me questions. Send me a question at mark@markdejesus.com. If you know how to spell my name, you know my email. Mark, M-A-R-K, at markdejesus.com. You can send those questions to me if, uh, there's things I don't cover. But I'm also gonna have a part two in this. And if what we talk about and share on our episodes is something that's a real blessing to you, then consider a one-time donation. Consider becoming a regular partner and supporter of this ministry.

I also am highly recommending the book, "The Heart Healing Journey," to begin the process of allowing God to heal, transform, and work on areas of your heart in a deeper and meaningful way. A lot of what I'm going to uncover has to do with how you see yourself in love and how you do relationships. And of course, we've been pointing a lot of people to exposing the rejection mindset. But if you want to learn to see yourself in the love of God, then "God Loves Me and I Love Myself" is going to be a great resource. So take advantage of that.

Now, let's get into this codependency. I believe one of the greatest ways we can heal from the impact of toxic relationships, and right now we're in a series of podcasts about healing from toxic relationships, is healing the pattern of codependency in our lives. Now, this word gets thrown around a lot, gets thrown all over the place, and I find when it's used, it often goes over people's heads. They're like, "Hey, that's not me." And like, "What is it? I don't know, but it's not me." And the problem is, I, I see this as a top issue on the list of emotional and heart-healthy issues that we all need to understand. We all need to be aware of, and codependency is at the top of the list of what we need to address, I believe.

Now more than ever, God is highlighting how we do relationships. I believe He's seeking to heal us while maturing how we approach relationships because right now we're manifesting a lot of brokenness, and how we do relationships has a lot of immaturity in it. The problem is, we carry so much brokenness in what relationship even looks like, it leaves us very vulnerable to codependent patterns. Now, the more you can honestly identify codependent patterns in your life, the more you will set yourself up for renewed relationship patterns. So keep an open heart.

But the truth is, we live as broken people in a broken world, so it can be very challenging to know how to navigate relationships in a healthy way. Let's be honest, we didn't have healthy examples growing up, nor did we get training on how to navigate relationship decisions in a healthy way. Meanwhile, we all carry broken wounds in our hearts that cause us to desperately look for love in all kinds of places and distort our ability to relate to people in a healthy way. So I'd feel, and many would agree with me, codependency has become a major relationship obstacle and hindrance.

Now, you need to understand relationships are meant to be fulfilling. But if you don't have a healthy compass of who you are, you do if you don't have a sense of living in the love of God and how to live in that, you can easily be set up to taking your brokenness, lock, stock, and barrel, and investing it into another person, hoping they will fulfill the emptiness in your heart.

In previous episodes, I did a talk on soul ties, and there's going to be a lot of crossover in aspects of soul ties as well as codependency. And in soul ties, I talked about healthy connections, healthy bonds from a biblical standpoint and from a relational standpoint. I did it from a pretty extensive point of view, and you can reference that in this season, in season nine of these talks and teaching materials. My goal here is to now get into the subject of codependency. What does it look like? What do we do about it? And what can healthy relationship patterns be like?

Now, the question I'm going to ask you up front is, when it comes to this subject, are you willing to really see it? You have to be willing to be humble and teachable when it comes to the subject. You're going to need to be able to see yourself and some patterns and some neediness and where you put your identity and sense of self-esteem and worth in the wrong places. You're gonna need to be aware of some dysfunctional patterns. The number one problem I see with codependency is first, people recognizing that it's even there. I think that's the biggest battle. And until it's seen, there's very little progress that's made. In fact, you'll get distracted and be all over the place and trying to work through issues, and you're going to be misdiagnosing yourself, and you're going to struggle in getting to really what's going on, and you won't see the relationship addictions and where you process connection with other people in an unhealthy way. Many times, we just don't know how to see it, or sadly, we don't want to see it.

So you're going to need training, equipping, and resourcing. That's why I spend my life training, equipping, resourcing, speaking into these issues. But you've got to want it. And no one can want this more than you do. No one can want healing for your life more than you do. Otherwise, they're going to become codependent to you. Any time in a relationship where you want something for someone else more than they do, the codependency is going to kick in. So you have to ask yourself the question, in relationship, do I want to be well? Do I want to have fruitful relationships? And do I want to, for the long haul, manifest my full potential? Then a subject like this can be very, very beneficial.

For decades, Christianity has neglected the subject of emotional and relational health. Man, we were all charging to like, get people saved and build churches and have all these different gatherings, and we pursued a passion for God while we neglected the issues of our heart. We neglected heart healing. We neglected many of the relationship problems that we had, and sadly, our relationships have been a mess. Let's be honest. In the meantime, masses of believers have unknowingly fallen into the trenches of codependent relationships.

Now, I believe God, in His kindness, is allowing us to see our broken patterns of relationship, not to condemn us, not to shame us, but to heal us and mature how we do relationships. Jesus has destined that His church reveal the nature of the Father through how you and I interact with each other. It's got to be you and I learning how to do this the way God designed it. It's no longer just about our achievement or performance evaluations or how nice things look. We're going to move past that. We have to, because that's what our destiny is holding for us, that we as a church, we as a people of God, learn how to be healthy with each other. But folks, it takes work. This takes work.

And the stuff that I talk about, the materials that I work through, are for the hungry. And odds are, you're here simply because you want to experience more fullness, more wholeness. You want to heal from the past. You want to be aware of some of the hang-ups. Your check engine lights are going on, and you want to be aware, you're not just ignoring them and just putting the pedal to the metal like many people do. You want, you're here because of that. So I'm not interested in the pizzazz or the impressive tactics that we often use. I'm going to lay it out for you honestly. This kind of stuff is for people that want to be well. You want to live fully alive from your heart, and you want to honestly look at your relationships in the light of God, which is a light of love, not a light of shame. He's not shaming you, condemning you, but He does everything in the light. And I think it's a very healthy step to take your relationship circles, your grit of relationship, and put it under the light of God's love and look at what's going on here and how can I begin to see it in a greater sense of health.

So, what it's going to start with is, we're going to start with this question. The journey of uncovering codependency is going to begin with asking, where do you place your dependence? Where do you place your dependence? So I'll ask this in a bunch of different ways. What or who do you depend on to meet your core needs? Who's got that radar that when it clicks in, it affects you? Where does your need to be loved, your identity, your sense of validation and acceptance, where does it get validated the most? Come on, be honest. At the end of the day, when you lay your head to rest at night, what gives you the ability to fall into peace and love? Maybe you say, "I don't even have that." Okay, well, it's a start. It's honest. But where do you seek to get it from? Them? How do you feel fulfilled at the end of the day? What allows you to look into the mirror, to look into the mirror and say, "I'm good with life"? Where does it depend on? What has the greatest amount of influence on your sense of love and your sense of self-esteem, your worth, and your value?

Now, here we go. Most Christians jump right into this. They go, "I get it from God." Bless God. I get it from Him. We just love to quote, you know, we shout it from the mountaintops, "From God, of course." But when we look at our relationship patterns and our behaviors, it reveals we're not really being that honest because there's codependency in our marriages, there's codependency in our church relationships, there's a lot of stuff going on in how we do relationships, and we're easily self-deceived, and we cover it up. Christianity is notorious for covering up our brokenness with Christian cliches. Statement of, "He's all I need. He's everything." And we sing it, and then we go out and we get pulled into the vacuum of dependency all over the place.

So, this is an honest question. Where do you place your dependency? When push comes to shove, what has the greatest power of influence over your day-to-day well-being? And it's going to reveal some places where codependency exists. It's one of the tough questions. And although the healing process is a journey, it will not, many times healing takes longer than it needs to because we don't have honest recognition. But if you can be honest with yourself and allow the process to take place, you can uncover some things and get a lot of breakthrough and freedom in your life. So take a moment. Look at your relationship world. What relationships seem to kick up a lot of drama, a lot of dysfunction, and they pull on your heart intensely? It may be time to learn about codependency.

Now, I want to make this clear. We are not made to be just indestructible. Because we're going to talk about unhealthy bonds and how codependency hooks into each other. I'm going to explain that and lay it out and help you gain some discernment and some freedom for your life. Now, the reaction to this is not that, "Well, I got God, and I don't need anybody." That's not it. That's not the solution. And we'll get to that in a little bit. The solution also is that, "I don't need any relationships, and I'm indestructible. If you don't like me, it won't even touch me. If you say something harmful through me and won't even do anything to me." That's not what I'm talking about here. Relationships affect us, and they're meant to, because you were meant to bond to one another in the power of God's love, to be one, to be bonded together in a healthy way. But the brokenness of sin is now infecting how we do relationships.

So, what I'm bringing to the surface is, A, we have empty, broken hearts. B, we put that emptiness and brokenness into relationships without first letting God be the source, right? And then, because of our brokenness, we don't know how to do relationships healthy. We don't even know what healthy is. So it takes learning. It takes growing. And here's the, here's another tricky part. You can't just go in a closet and fix this by yourself. I'm not even talking about fixing it, anyways. I'm not about fixing. About God loving you and healing you and transforming you. This isn't about fixing, because we do that so much. "Just fix it. You know, just do a little turns of the knob and just fix it so I can move on with my life." Now, God's interested in wholeness and healing and relationship and connection. And so I'm gonna have to learn how to get my needs met with God. But how do I relate to God? Well, my relationships have affected that. So I'm gonna need to let God heal those relationship patterns as I learned to relate to Him. But I learned to relate to Him by how I relate to others. So see why there's so many factors involved in this that we need to walk through? We need to understand, because otherwise we fall into these codependent patterns.

What I want to do is I want to encourage you to recognize it and then allow your compass to get re-calibrated, because that's the healing process. Your compass, your discernment, your patterns get recalibrated, and that's a part of the healing process. So let's first start with your relationship with God. He designed our relationship where He first satisfies our core needs. That by relating to Him in our faith walk, we are able to feel the contentment and satisfaction in Him. In fact, most of our problems stem from the fact we don't know how to get our needs met in God. Let me say that again. Before I get to that scripture, most of our problems come down to the fact that we don't know how to get our needs met in God. And we don't know how to get our needs met in God because our, we've not been equipped in love. Our references are thrown off. So we go to our brokenness. "God's left us. He's forsaken us." Or He's, He's mean. He's harsh. He's, He's disappointed in me. He's abandoned me. All that stuff. The pressure's on me. All those kind of things that we live in control patterns and and and and neediness and addictions. And all these things come out of first and foremost, not knowing how to allow God to meet those needs.

That's why I do so much teaching on helping you to understand who God is as a Father, as a Dad, what does it look like to relate to Him so that in your day-to-day, you can be in the rhythm and lifestyle of allowing His love and approval and acceptance and peace and the fruit of the Spirit to become a reality in your life. The reality is, a lot of us have not been taught on how to do that. We preach about the fruit of the Spirit but don't teach people how to engage it. We teach people about the love of God, and we are the best at theoretically talking about His love, but we feel so distant from it. And then we're so confused how to see ourselves. How do you see yourself? And then we talk about loving yourself. It's like, "Is that selfish? What does that mean?" Because love has been so distorted in our lives.

But God, first and foremost, said, "You know what? I want you to learn how to get your needs satisfied in Me." And He set as the first commandment, even the Ten Commandments, it's there. "You shall have no other gods before Me." Why'd He say this? Why would He make this number one? And why is this such a big deal? Why, why not? Why were any of the other ones put here first? Mainly because He knew in a world of sin, your and my first temptation is to find life somewhere else that isn't in Him. That's the bottom root system of so many battles that you and I have. We're trying to find life apart from God. Now, it doesn't mean you're just like saying, "God, get out of here." We're just making things a source to feed our lifeline. And the reality is, we're uncomfortable in allowing Him to heal those areas and to fulfill those areas. Our addictions, hang-ups, and relationship decisions that are dysfunctional, they stem from finding life somewhere other than God. And that's the summary of what sin is. Trying to take it into our own hands and finding life in places it's just not fully rested in Him.

God knew we would be tempted to allow all kinds of people, activities, and stuff and things to get in the way of our ability to receive total satisfaction, love, acceptance, approval, validation, and fulfillment in Him. That's why the Bible talked a lot about idols because these idols got in the way. And our modern-day idols may not be actual statues, but they are things, people, and relationships that get us wrapped so much into them, we can't see God. And James put it this way. He said, "You have not because you ask not." In other words, you have needs in your life, and you're not even asking God to meet them. Think about that. You have not because you ask not. Secondly, he says, "When you do ask, you ask amiss." Means you ask off the target. You don't, you don't even really know what you really need. You think you do, but when you're asking, you're asking off target. And then he says, "You ask amiss." He says, "When you ask, you're asking to spend it on your pleasures." Meaning your addictions, your lust issues, these these passions that come out because you haven't been loved. And every place there's an addiction is a place where love doesn't take residence. So we talk to God, our addicted needs. "Ah, this is what I need, God. I need this relationship to work. Would You help them get better?" And we're all wound up in it because we haven't learned to go, "God, You are the all-sufficient Father to satisfy the needs of our heart."

So God put it this way, "You're going to be tempted to put other gods before Me." And we think, "Oh, I don't have, I don't have like a a golden calf I bow before. I'm good." Violate this all the time. I'm not saying this to shame you. I'm saying this to say God has a provision to meet your needs because you and I are no good to other people if we don't know how to be satisfied in God. Because then we will bring our need to every person we talk to, and we will need them to be something for us because we don't know how to receive it from God. We don't know how to gain it from Him. And so codependency is fueled when we put an expectation on for that person to fill a core place in your heart that only God can fill. That only God can heal. At the end of the day, your Father in heaven is the one who can satisfy the deep core longings of your heart.

Now, I got to be clear though. So this isn't, this isn't solved in just a you and God. But God needs to be set first and foremost because many times the breaking of codependency is recognizing, "God, I need You to satisfy the needs of my heart. I need to learn how to receive love and how to relate to You." And then I practice that by how I do relationships. And I learn. And then as God leads healthy people into my life, I allow what they have to bless me. But in when you're codependent, you don't know what healthy relationships look like. So teaching, mentoring is needed to recalibrate what you look for. Codependent people often need recalibration of who they're attracted to because you will attract the same kind of people because of codependent hooks inside of you that look for and bring in others who can hook onto that and keep you into these dysfunctional cycles.

Now, you have to realize that we learn to relate to God through how we relate to each other. So if you have codependent relationships, you're going to have a dysfunctional relationship with God. And if you look at God through a codependent way, you're going to be a needy victim who never gets healed and can never be well. God's up there, and I'm just a hurting victim down here. And you won't see the empowerment you have because He loves you and He's empowering you to make strong decisions, and you actually can take back your life through your decisions and making healthy, strong decisions. So we practice this by how we interact with others.

Right now, Jesus said this. He said it this way. He said, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." So God is saying the true sign that you are walking with God is how you operate in love in your relationships. Notice here, it's not how great you pray, how spiritual you look, how many verses you can quote. A true representation is your ability and capacity to carry love.

Now, if you notice in this scripture, pause and think, because sometimes we don't stop and think. "Yeah, love. We gotta love each other. Love, love, love, love, love." "As I have loved you." Jesus is showing here, you've got to receive His love. You love other people through what you've received from God. Now, I teach so much on this on the flow of love, that we love God because He first loved us. So we see here, time and time again, in the scriptures, there has to be a receptivity. Jesus saying, "As I've loved you." Okay, guys, what He does is He pulls up the reference. "See how I've loved you? Now love each other." What we're doing in church is we're going, "Love God, love each other," and we've, we're accessing a lack of reference. What does it even mean to love each other? What does it even mean to do that? So we go, "Okay, God, we're gonna love You. We're gonna love You." We become performers. We try to love God. We try to love God without knowing how to receive His love. And we try to love other people without being loved and knowing how to be loved by God and loving ourselves with that and giving out, "Loving your neighbor as you love yourself." We don't even know how to do that.

You know what that looks like? Jesus says, "As I've loved you." Guys, that's the reference He's pulling from. The reference. "I remember those times I talked with you, how I've acted, how I've responded to you, how I've treated you. You see this model? Now do that to each other. What you've received from Me." And this is what we lack, folks. How to receive. I have to learn first how to receive God's love. I have to make it even more down to simplicity. I need to learn what love is. I need to get into First Corinthians 13 and understand the aspects of love, of what it is. What does it mean to be loved, to be accepted, validated, affirmed, to live in the power of His love? Love is not lust. Love is not just a rush. It's not a dopamine hit. It's not an addiction. Love is patient and kind. And it's, I learn the language of love. I learn what compassion is. I learn how to love is a choice, as it's a decision. I gotta learn what it looks like so that I even know what's coming to me when it arrives. Because most people, when love arrives to them, they reject it because they don't know how to be loved. And many co-dependents are so busy helping other people, they don't pay attention to themselves. And a classic line they say is, "Don't worry about me, I'm okay." And translation: "I'm uncomfortable with you loving me." Oh, I just love cutting through Christian cliches. It's so much fun. "It wasn't me, it was the Lord." Yeah, it wasn't that good. "Don't worry about me." "Don't you even think about me." Translation: "I'm uncomfortable with love. I'm uncomfortable with being loved."

I have to learn, folks. We've got to learn how to first be loved by God. That's why I spent so much time talking about that. To see myself with that love. And then I need to love you because I will love you out of how I see myself. I will. So this is the tricky thing. Is I have to learn in the process of growth and transformation, I have to learn what does it look like to be loved and to receive that love. And we learn this in our interactions with each other. We learn this in how we process relationships.

Now, people say, "Well, I'm learning how to, how to relate to God, and I struggle with relating to God." Here's the problem. It's not God. It's how humans have misrepresented God to you. And I say this all the time. People say, "Well, I feel like God is distant. I feel like God is angry." No, how God was represented to you needs healing. A human being disappointed you. A human being misrepresented God to you. The problem is not God. The problem is how He was presented. And I deal with so many people that had a very legalistic, religious, judgmental, "You better get it right" kind of God, and they have lived under the clutches of that and under the chains and bondage of that for so long that they find a lot of encouragement as I'm getting them back into love, back into grace, back in what God did for you, back in what Jesus did for you, back in, "Right now, He passionately, unconditionally loves you." But it's been so misrepresented. And then we add on to it traumas and dramas. And then we get into relationship with people in the body of Christ that we're all just so lost in our brokenness, we don't even know how to relate to God.

So this leads me to this question. How are you taught to relate to God? Because the healing process can unfold as you learn to understand how you related to God and discern how you learned about God. Many believers don't even ask themselves this question. And I ask them, I said, "Who are the influential teachers in your life? Who are the people?" Because it gives me a grid and a sense of maybe what their foundation and emphasis is. "Who gave you the pattern that you live in and how you relate to God?" Oh, we say, "I got it from reading God's Word." That sounds so spiritual, but you're influenced by people in your life. And what you need to understand is your story goes back to your parents, your father and your mother's relationship there. They were designed by God to be the first taste of His nature. God wanted to show Himself through how parents raise their children. It sets the template. So whether you were born again as a child or not, whenever you became born again, part of your parental upbringing influences how you see God. Do you understand what I'm saying? All codependency leads back to what you experienced and did not experience with your parents, where they equipped you and did not equip you.

And this is the major, major hole in the hearts of humanity is the lack of equipping. How do you do relationships? Do you remember your parents walking you through how to process a bad day at school? How to process a relationship that was tough? How to process maybe somebody that was being a bully? How to process through thoughts that you're struggling with? How to process through emotions, feelings? No, most of the time, parents are too busy trying to just survive, trying to just get by. They didn't get equipped, so they had nothing to offer. The equipping part is incredibly important. If you're not equipped on how to process relationships, you're prime target to take your broken heart to someone, hoping they're going to satisfy the ache in your heart. You add to that some traumas, you add to that some more broken experiences, and you fuel yourself for codependency.

Now, what is it from a simple standpoint? And I like this definition from a Mental Health America. I put the link there in the slide. You can, you can, I'll try to link to all this in my show notes as well, too. Codependency is a learned behavior that can be passed down from one generation to another. Many times, when I talk with people about struggles and battles, they'll say, "Well, is this a generational issue or did I learn it? My upbringing?" It's both. Most of our battles are a combination of both. Now, it gets empowered because most of our struggles and issues, battles are inherited in the generations. They just are. They just are. And sometimes Christians get locked into these theological arguments that we go back and forth. It's just a reality that I, a child does not even need to meet the biological father and will manifest many of the same sinful patterns. It's just a fact of life. I've worked with, I've worked with adopted kids where I knew the story of the adopted father and knew the story of the adopted child who I was talking to, and they were mirroring the sin patterns, and they'd never met each other. So did I say an adopted child and the biological father? So the child was being raised by adopted parents, but I knew the story of the biological father, and the child never met the biological father, but their patterns matched each other. So a lot of our struggles are inherited.

But codependency also becomes what we glean off of our upbringing, how we respond, especially to brokenness. Because here's the thing, when you're a kid, you don't look and go, "This is a dysfunctional family. I need to make sure I develop good coping skills." No, you just respond with survival in the best way possible. And the problem is, when there's issues in the home, a child's first response is often, "I did something wrong. I am wrong." All that shame and guilt. And then we respond out of that. There's something I got to do to fix this. So maybe we become the helper. We become, try to become the grown-up. We try to fix things. We try to gain approval. We, we achieve. We fall into all these patterns, and then we replicate that in our future, right?

So, let me get back to this definition. So it's, it's passed down from one generation to another. It's a heavily learned behavior. It's an emotional and behavioral condition that affects an individual's ability to have a healthy, mutually satisfying relationship. It is also known as relationship addiction because people with codependency often form or maintain relationships that are one-sided, emotionally destructive, and or abusive. And I have to, I have to often call this out in many different circles, in many different settings.

Now, I believe that codependency is on like a spectrum. So it's not like you have it or you don't, kind of like black and white. We're using on a spectrum of intensity, and we can find ourselves in all kinds of different areas seeing these manifest in our life. Now, I find my, that in my journey, this just becomes really challenging. It, it, um, recognition is the struggle. I've mentioned this already before. Recognition is the tough part. And it takes a lot of work, usually, for somebody to first get, because our relationships are so formed around addictions, and there's a lot of denial, there's a lot of resistance, there's a lot of twisting of scriptures. In fact, I find people in codependency, Christians in particular, they can't receive revelation. Like you dump on them amazing insight, and it's like it just doesn't land in context because their grid is laced with the toxicity of codependent addiction-based relationships. So it clouds their view. It clouds their ability to see. They're numbed out by the hypnosis of codependency. That's why even friends go, "Do you need to break up? Or you need to get out of this ratio? Or this is not good." They can't hear it, and they can't receive it. And then if they do leave it, they go into another one just like it. They're so wrapped up that they're blinded. It's like they're under, like they're under a spell in many ways.

And even when they share, here's what I noticed too. When they share, "Here's what I feel God's doing in my life." It doesn't bear witness. You know, they'll be like, "Well, you know, I'm just waiting on the Lord because I feel like He's doing..." And as they shared, like, "What do you mean by waiting on the Lord?" Like, "Share a little bit." And you're like, "Wow, this person's in massive denial. They're not really willing to see." And it reminds me of a scripture, and I'll put it up here, where Paul said in 2 Corinthians 6:12, "You are not restricted by us." And this is where he was talking about being unequally yoked. There was all these like sexual patterns and stuff, and just all kinds of Corinth was a place of like a lot of sexual bondage, relationship issues. Paul had to, like, he was dealing with a spider web of messes. He said, "You're not restricted by us. You're restricted by your own affections." That word restricted means like distress. You're narrowly compressed in, or you're cramped. You're strained in yourself, right? He's like, "You're all cramped up and you're all restricted, not by us. This is not something we're doing and putting on you." And and to be honest, this isn't God. It's your affections. And that word affection is like, it can be translated like bowels, my inner world, the deep areas of passion and emotions. Which that place in there is the deep inner man. That's the stuff that I, I work on and want to encourage you, allow God to work on the heart, those deep inner places. But when that gets fueled by and driven by addictive patterns, it's always going to take center stage. It's always those rushes, those urges, those things you become addicted to them. And then when you try to stop them, you have withdrawal symptoms. People like, "Well, I'm not codependent." Well, step away from the relationship for a little bit, and you'll see the withdrawal symptoms kick up quick. And you're checking your phone, and you're checking texts, and you're having dreams, or you're having like, like daydreams come to you. Like, "Oh my goodness." Or or something tragic kicks up because drama keeps it going, right? You go, "I gotta go back into. I gotta help them."

And Paul says, "You're not restricted by us. You're restricted by your gut." That gut rush. And people, they follow. They say, "Follow my gut's telling me this. My intuition." Well, your intuition can get really, really off track if it's driven by addiction patterns. And many relationships are driven by addictions. So he said, "Man, you, you get in line with what we're sharing, you're gonna really get some freedom." But you're all not. And I feel the same way too. And it makes coaching very difficult. Makes coaching very difficult if somebody is in codependent patterns because the addiction clouds their ability to see even what you're saying. And even the health. And I want to encourage people, if you see the codependency, you share, give your insight and your input. But be careful. It's going to want to wrap you in. People that coach or counsel other people in these areas, it's going to want to wrap you in. "Help them, help them, help them." No, no. They got to be able to see it. And if they're not willing, and they don't want health more than you do, this thing's going to go codependent fast.

Now, let me explain the dynamic of codependency. I'm going to do that, and then I'm going to get to the signs and symptoms today. And then next time, I'm going to go a little bit further in the dynamic of codependency. Most of the time, there's a dynamic of the needy one and the one who is needed. Okay? That's what we're gonna call them for the sake of illustration. Codependency plays off of our natural, God-given needs and it distorts how we go about meeting them. Now, you were born with needs. They were meant to be met by God and met through earthly relationships in a healthy way. Codependency is going to create a twisted dynamic. In the codependent dynamic, you'll have one person who seems to be the strong one, that's the one who is needed. And the one who seems to be weak, that's the one who is the needy one. They both need each other to keep this dysfunctional relationship in place.

The one who appears strong is the helper. They're the ones who's needed. They're the ones who show up, you know, they're dignified. "I'm here, and I'm doing something to help this. I'm going to solve this." They find themselves drawn to relationships where they're needed, though in a superior way. Now, I'm going to pause here for a second because I find people in that category, they have a sense of, "Oh, I'm needed in this." Now, the person in that position, like the strong position, they don't go to relationships that are higher caliber. They don't look for people that will challenge them because it will cause them to face their deep neediness and insecurity that causes them to look at this dysfunctional relationship that makes them feel better and realize what it is. Because in many ways, hold on, I gotta get a get a tissue. In many ways, they don't feel good about themselves. So they try to find someone who is lower than them. Okay? If they find someone who's walking high, no, I'm not trying to compare anyone's better than anyone else. You know what I'm talking about. Somebody who's being healthier, has good boundaries, good standards. They can't hang with those people. Not because they're disqualified, not because those people are better, because their inner self-hatred disqualifies them in their own heart from ever going near them because they don't want their dysfunctional patterns being exposed. So they need this relationship. They get a high off of it. "This person needs me." Am I making sense? So because if they went to relationships with a higher caliber, the people in the higher caliber be like, "Well, you know, they're not going to be so impressed with this codependent helping relationship you have." And they're going to challenge your insecurity, your low self-worth, and your unwise decisions.

Now, the one who's needed, they get their hit and their burst out of being needed. So they got to keep this dysfunctional cycle in place to control, to keep it working. They got to keep their image intact. Many people in the one who is needed role are absolute narcissists. Not always, but many times they're narcissists because they gotta keep this thing in control to make themselves feel better. And this creates a very damaging relationship. Okay? Just gonna kind of let this sink in a little bit. People in the, the one who is needed category, they don't know what to do with themselves if they're not needed. Because the needy one, if they break free and go, "You know what? I got to stop this codependency stuff. I need to get my needs fulfilled and God, make better decisions." Ooh, the one who is needed is going to get so mad. "I've been here with you. I've helped you. How dare you? You ungrateful." Right? Because you're changing the dynamic and changing the pattern.

So the, the one who is needed, the strong one, quote unquote, I'm putting that in quotes because they're really not strong, it's just a false front. They, they have to have something they put their attention to of helping someone. So then there's the needy one. This person may be an addict. Maybe your wife, maybe your husband, maybe a friend, maybe somebody you're helping, someone in your church, someone at work, a co-worker. It could be someone you're working under as a boss or a friendship. They have a lot of unprocessed baggage. They recognize they got a lot of problems. But instead of getting healing in a humble, teachable way, the only way they know how to relate is neediness. We have a lot of this in the church. The only way we know how to relate is through neediness. And that neediness is never satisfied. I talk about this in the rejection mindset because when we have rejection issues, we become needy and we suck the life out of other people around us in the body of Christ.

Now, I'll say it. We don't, we don't say it enough. I'll say it. You ever have those people in church you just kind of, when you see them, you want to walk down the other aisle? Not because you don't like them, because you know they are going to suck the living life out of you when you are around them. You can't ask them, "How are you doing?" because you're going to get a novel for 30 minutes. They're the people that call the church. I personally believe that about 10% of the church takes about 90% of the resources of the body of Christ with their neediness because they don't know how to relate in a self-empowered way. It's like, "You gotta help me. You gotta pray for me." "Oh, thank you so much. You're so loving. You're so wonderful." The next day, they're knocking on your door again. "Hey, can you do that again?" And then, and then if you're codependent, you'll feed that because it'll feed your neediness. And in the church, we've all got this need. "I'm ministering to this person. I'm ministering to that person." No, you're codependent. Who am I yelling at? Take your Superman cape off. You are not called to fix anyone. There's one Superman. His name's Jesus, and He already paid the price. You're just a vessel available, but you're not responsible for other people's choices.

What would the church of Jesus Christ look like if we broke free of codependency? What would it look like? Because we feed codependency in church leadership. Somebody calls, "Pastor, I need you. I need you." Oh, I gotta be like Jesus. They need me. No, you're empty and insecure, and it feeds that part of you to make you feel needed because you don't know how to not feel needed. You don't know what to do with yourself. Because many times people go, "Jesus, I need something." You go, "No, I'm over here." "Jesus, where'd He go? Where'd He go? Where'd He go? Jesus, please." Many times He'd reverse. He wouldn't feed everything that came to the table in demand. We do not know how to do that. Come on, pastors, be honest. Be honest. Be honest. Because that's what I'm about. Gracious, merciful, loving honesty. When people call you, you feed it. Many counselors, they call you, you feed it. You don't have boundaries. You don't know how to have boundaries. You have those friends that call you, you just avoid them. You don't know how to set boundaries. At the end of the day, them coming to you, the needy one coming to you, feeds you as one who's needed because your identity comes from being needed.

[Music]

This good. This is good. I'm encouraging myself. The person who's a needy one, they don't love themselves, and they don't know how to ask for help where they're doing the work, but they're receiving the blessing of the support around them. They conduct themselves in such a way where they need other people to do the work for them. The needy one creates a guilt-ridden trip, self-pity trip, tie for to people, and they, they just pull and pull and pull and pull. So a wife can do this to her husband. A husband can do this to his wife. And men, let me say this. Let me just speak to the men for a second because many men are codependent with their wives, and they approach their wives in a needy way. And I'll be honest with you, it's a turn-off to your wife because your wife needs you to lead and initiate. And what you're doing is you're needing heard. And beware of this. I had this pattern early on that I had to confront because I would come to my wife with a sense of.

Not not healthy. Need to connect and work together. Neediness. I need her to do something for me. There's a difference in posture when you grow and mature. You recognize, "Okay, I got an issue." You share it, but you're doing the work. So now, as I've learned, I can share something with my wife, but I'm doing the work. She's not doing the work for me, and I don't have any expectation that she needs to be something for me. I share, but I'm doing the work, and we're being vulnerable. And as she brings her healthy self to me, I bring my healthy self to her. We support one another. But as she's coming to me, she has to do the work, otherwise I become codependent in how I respond to her, or she can become codependent in how she responds to me.

I hope you're catching this, because, because men, here's the thing. We cannot expect our wives to heal the father wound in our heart. The woman cannot heal that place. Only the father can. Now, we can operate in codependency with our children because our unfulfilled needs are wrapped up in them. They're grown adults, and you're still rescuing your child. You say it's love, but you are preventing the adult child from having their own consequences, from facing their life, facing the storms of life, and growing. It's unloving.

Counselors can respond to neediness in people. In fact, I encourage anyone who's a counselor, coach, one-on-one work, one of the biggest things you need work on is codependency. It's one of the biggest investments I've had to make is breaking those patterns in my life because it will hinder and get in the way of your counseling, coaching work, because you'll get, you know, they call it countertransference. There's all kinds of terms and things, and it'll trigger things in you and, you know, distort how you're relating. And it pulls on those needs, and then you're, you're, you're, you're tied to the outcome and all that stuff.

It was funny because in the early years, when, when I was doing coaching work, I just started doing prayer sessions with people. We were just sitting down, doing some prayer, maybe some repentance or announcement, just some, some stuff. And then I realized, wow, people really need to be taught. Like they're coming in wanting prayer, but then they're going out, the grid needs a lot of work. So I responded to that by teaching. And I would, I'd be in sessions with people for a couple of hours because I'd have to teach them, and I'd have to redo that with everybody I was meeting with. And so I started getting some, some more in-depth training and stuff. And in one training in particular, all it was talking about was codependency. And I was like, "When are we going to get into, like, the, you know, techniques and stuff like that?" You know, it's like, "Nope, you got to get codependency out of you." Because otherwise, you're going to go in, and you're going to have a pressure to produce all these results. You're going to get pulled by people coming to you and say, "I need you to help me in this area. I need you to be something for me." You're going to tie your self-worth to the outcome and how well you, all this stuff that's just going to distort your ability.

Now, you may not be in an official help role capacity, but as a brother and sister in Christ, are we allowing and enabling behaviors of people around us in the name of grace and love? Something to think about. It's something to think about because codependency will distort love, grace, and mercy. It'll distort those things, define them in ways that are dysfunctional. I hope this is helping you to get some illumination. And so people end up remaining in codependent cycles, never dealing with the issues of the heart they need healing, never confronting the truth of their relationships honestly. Like, like, is it Jack Nicholas? Jack Nicholson said in the movie, "You can't handle the truth." Why? Because codependents, you got to hear this, because deep shame covers our hearts, so we can't look at those issues because shame covers them. It's a nightmare to even look at it. Even though that's not God's heart, he's not trying to shame you, he wants to take shame off you. But the enemy keeps us bound under shame. So therefore, we can't look at the issues, take responsibility, and move forward.

So as I began to understand codependency, I saw everywhere it occurs. Most often in relationships where an addiction is in play. It's a top problem in the world of addiction recovery. An addiction to a person can be greater than even a drug addiction. Now, for addicts with substance abuse addictions, if you don't deal with codependency, it's going to keep you relapsing into drugs and alcohol, into whatever your addiction is. If you have anyone in your family where they have addictions or addict personalities, you're going to have to understand codependency so you don't fall into it. Because otherwise, your relationships are going to be addiction-based. And many of you are going to recognize your addiction issues and you may need an all-around relationship detox. I've recommended that for a number of people that I've, like, "You need to get out of these relationships because you can't make sense of right or left and how to make decisions." Many times it's unsuccessful because it gets sucked back into the old relationship patterns.

I talked about marriages and the codependency that can be there. And many, much of my marriage work, we're breaking those things out. People are first going, "You know what? I need to get my needs met with God. I am hooking my brokenness on my spouse, expecting them to fulfill something only God can fulfill. I gotta go to God. I need to go get some help so I can learn how to fulfill those areas of my heart. So I come to my spouse to give, not to come to always take and then be mad because they're not meeting those needs." And heal the excessive neediness. Families can live with entire codependency, enabling sin in fake love and fake, uh, kind of compassion. It's really just guilt-ridden. And parents becoming codependent will never serve the life of their child. Maybe your child has, has even has a mental illness or a struggle or something, but you enable the bad behavior and don't teach them the power of love and equip them. And then you have twisted relationship patterns.

Families, I feel one of the greatest places of codependency besides family is the church. We teach people to be very codependent and we don't establish healthy boundaries and respectful ways that we interact with each other. Our workplaces. In my own life, in my early years of transformational ministry work, now I was pastoring for about 12, 13 years, and then when I had my own emotional, mental health breakdown and began to really seek for help, it changed my whole life. It changed my grid because I, I realized the whole church is broken and we, we need more teaching and resourcing of how to walk in greater wholeness because honestly, we're all a hot mess and we need, we need to stop ignoring him. And so, and I, my early work in helping people, I noticed so many relationships had bonds and attachments that were not healthy. There was unhealthy expectations, unhealed needs. We were taken to these relationships. One person was needy while the other person seemed to wield control as the more powerful. And I'm like, "Oh, I kind of see this codependent pattern over and over again."

What I saw first is I was saying relationships seem to be more addiction-based than love-based. In fact, the word love was unclear, the definition was distorted. So they didn't know how to apply love or look for love. They just went to what they knew, which had a lot to do with their upbringing and the models of what they saw. And then on top of it, the church just said, "We need to love each other." And they're like, "Yup, that's what I'm doing. I'm loving." And they couldn't see their codependent patterns. So there was a lot of reteaching and a lot of retraining that I noticed people need. I also did a lot of ministry with, with addicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, pornography addicts. And codependency ran across all these situations in relationships and people even married to them. Many addicts were chasing symptoms. They were, they were focused on getting delivered from the drug, and they were often avoiding the brokenness of their heart and their, and their broken relationship patterns. So they were not getting to the root issue, and they were not getting to the real things that they needed healing in.

But I gotta be honest, I recognize codependency in my own life. I saw as I first approached marriage, I saw it in how I approached people that were helping me. I saw it in how I talked to other people. I saw where I got angry at people because they didn't fulfill the codependent expectation I put on them. I got irritated when people would put up good boundaries. At times, I had to shite, I had to, I had to shine a light on how I pastured people because I would people-please and respond to their every wish and whim and demand and expectation. It took me years to realize this, and I had to really work at this in my coaching work because I would get hooked in and then I'd be like, so exhausted and drained, and then I'd be like, "Oh God, I'm so tired, and I'm doing work for you, and oh God, help me." And I, it took advantage of my empathetic and sensitive heart. And today, I serve in compassion work, and I've had to learn in breaking free from the chains of codependency, whether I'm giving counsel, feedback, coaching, mentoring, or consulting, to not have those codependent hooks on me, or else it's going to open the door to a lot of dysfunctional patterns.

I realized this in even ways I dealt with relationships and my hypersensitivity and obsessive tendencies kicking in. I real, I remember years ago too, a church that I pastored, we were riddled with codependent patterns. So during those pastoring years, I stumbled across a book that I found very helpful for me, and I'm gonna recommend it. I'll put it in the show notes. And it's a book called "Love is a Choice" by Robert Hemfelt and some others there, Frank Minirth, I don't know if I'm saying their names correctly, and Paul Meier. I found this to be a very helpful book. And in fact, I'm going through some of it again because I think there's some great observations there.

In the book "Love is a Choice," he says codependency was first recognized several decades ago as counselors endeavored to help alcoholics and their families. In the vanguard of this movement was Alcoholics Anonymous. The founders of AA observed several things about alcoholics. They were deeply embittered towards God. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting that at the bedrock of people's addictions, there's an anger towards God? There's a hurt, there's woundedness. They were also rebellious and independent. So there's the disconnect relationally, right? They're on their own. And at the same time, they were childishly ah, there it is. There's the childhood wound. There's the immaturity. There's the undeveloped part of you that needs healing and maturing. They were childishly dependent upon those around them. That's the neediness I'm talking about. Okay, those childlike areas.

Now, for me, I had to realize there were areas in my life that were like beyond my years. And people even say this to me, "Oh, you, you live beyond your years." Oh, it's great. But there were areas that were still in adolescence, that were, that were never developed, touched in your life, in their life. And I really believe this is true. Look at your life. There are parts of you where you may be right where your age is at. There are parts of you where you're beyond your age, where there's so much investment in that area, you're like, maybe 10 years, you know. And there's areas of your life that are 10 years, 20 years, 30, however old you are, it's still back. You could be 55 years old, and there's a part of you that's still back at 12 years old. And what I mean by that is there's parts of your emotional makeup that are undeveloped, not equipped.

So I recognize when it came to church ministry organization, I was, you know, 20 something going on 40 something, could organize, lead people, whatever. But relationally, intimacy, connection, moving towards marriage, even considering those things, I was still 12. Needing to be mentored, but never having it. And in the, in, in a lot of our circles and cultures, we're performance-based, so we don't pay attention to those things. I was just watching a message from a pastor, a well-known pastor, considered a very successful writer and author, who struggled with a lot of guilt because he said during his deep research years, he was told, "Hey, make sure you don't neglect your kids." And he said, "I did. I neglected them during that whole time." And why? Because in, in, in life, we tell people, "Put your family first," but it's just something we say, and then there's no application for it. So people lack the mentoring they really need. So I had these glaring issues, but no one, no one in my world of mentoring and input sat down and said, "There's some things that need equipping here." No one. Now, I didn't say people didn't try to help or or give, you know, helpful feedback, but it was more on my symptoms. It was more, "I got anxiety," or "I got this thing," and it's kind of chasing. And my heart needed equipping. And so this is a very, very key thing that we need to recognize in our healing.

Because we live in a pandemic. To use the pandemic term, you want to know what a pandemic is? Fatherlessness. Fathers not equipping their children. And so we're, we jump into marriage, we jump into life with no relationship equipping. So in "Love is a Choice," they document Alcoholics Anonymous. AA was successful in rescuing alcoholics, but there was serious fallout. The families were coming apart within a year after the alcoholics dried out. So that they're no longer drinking, but the family is ripped to shreds. And workers realized that just as the alcoholic was dependent upon his or her alcohol, the family very frequently had become just as dependent upon the alcoholism. They had adjusted, not only their whole lives, but also their whole way of perceiving life to accommodate the alcoholic. Now, how often do we do this in life? We adjust our whole life around a person's bondage. Hear me. We adjust our whole life around a person's bondage. They enabled that person to keep the habit up. They denied, they ignored, they circumvented it. In a codependent relationship, you're going to adjust your, your life around the problem.

Now, to quote the book again, to the kids, especially this warped life with an alcoholic parent was normal. It was all they knew. If you grew up with an alcoholic, you're going to have codependent patterns, and you're going to have more mood issues or emotional ups and downs, anxiety. You're gonna have struggle nurturing yourself because living under the present, I don't care if it's a raging alcoholic, a functioning alcoholic, whatever, it will affect your emotional well-being, and you'll need to process through the healing of that. And you'll be prone to pro-codependent tendencies. Okay, the family was co-dependent upon alcoholism along with the alcoholic, the issue, the struggle. And thus was born the term codependency to help put a name to this. The concept of dependency and codependency is no longer limited to alcohol. So listen up. It takes in the rest of the chemical spectrum, coke, pot, tobacco, heroin. Beyond the beyond includes nearly any obsessive compulsion. How many OCD relationship people are out there? The beyond includes nearly any obsessed, obsessive compulsion, a thing or behavior carried to excess. And I find that we live in a growing obsessive world, addictive culture. To quote the book, eating disorder, sex addiction, rage-a-holism, workaholism, the compulsion to spend and spend, an extremely rigid and legalistic approach to living, the compulsion to wash, wash one's hands 50 times a day. These and other addictions have been placed in the same class as alcoholism. These disorders and others affect the family and close associates, the co-dependents, who may suffer as severely as the dependent, or more so.

Codependency often involves a one-sided relationship. You're gonna rely on the other person to meet all or most of your emotional needs. And it can describe a relationship where their issues, their struggles, their stuff are enabled. So to quote the book again, it can be defined as an addiction to people, behaviors, or things. Codependency is the fallacy of trying to control interior feelings by controlling, I'm going to put in there, outside things, people, things, and events. Right on the outside. To the codependent, control, or lack of it, is central to every aspect of life. The codependent may be addicted to another person, and this interpersonal codependency, the codependent has become so elaborately enmeshed in the other person, their sense of self, their personal identity is severely restricted and crowded out by that other person's identity and problems.

So I'm going to give you some symptoms and signs that you can work through, and then this is going to be the close of part one. When I talk about these subjects, I take my time and walk through it. You can pause it, take a break, and come back at other times. Don't worry about it, but I just like to speak to your heart and speak about these issues. And I'm teaching you, but I'm also just conversating with you, right? So in order to understand the symptoms and signs, we've got to first, oh goodness, my slides got out of order. They always do this. The good news is I don't have to have this all perfect, right? So let me give you some, some key things you're gonna have to look at.

The first one is low self-esteem and low self-worth. This is what's at the foundation of all codependency because deep within the heart of a codependent is feelings of not being good enough. When you strip away all this stuff, deep down is an empty and broken heart. Doesn't know how to feel loved, nor does he or she know what love is. They don't love themselves and struggle to even receive true love when it's sent their way. Our hearts desperately seek for another person to heal their pain because their hearts are saying, "I am constantly looking for someone or something that's missing and lacking in my life." So I seek to heal my heart by immersing myself into this relationship.

Number two is there's confused responsibility. Our brokenness leads us to a lot of confusion as to what is our responsibility and what is another person's responsibility. We take on so many things we don't even need to take on. For many codependents, they feel responsible for other people's feelings, thoughts, actions, choices, wants, needs, and well-being. You take responsibility for other people's actions. You worry for and carry the burden of other people's problems and issues because your heart is saying, "Your struggle affects my peace." I don't know the difference between doing things in love and in guilt. I feel responsible for too much. I don't know what is mine. I don't know what is yours.

The third is excessive neediness. The great danger of our broken and empty hearts is when we develop an expectation for our deep needs to be met in another person. You end up plugging your neediness into someone else, creating an unhealthy tie, an expectation to someone in a way that only God can fulfill. The relationship becomes more based on neediness than mutual respect because codependency relies on another person as their source. Right, I've been saying this a lot. The codependent behavior shows my feelings about who I am stem from being loved by you. "You need to be something for me." My good feelings about who I am stem from receiving approval from you. "I need you to be something for me, or I'm not going to be at peace."

The fourth is people-pleasing. Codependents are not connected to love within their hearts. They look to what other people say and expect as their radar. Therefore, they end up following people-pleasing patterns like a magnet to the point that they don't even think they have a choice. They feel pulled and dictated by it. They've placed their compass on how they feel about themselves on pleasing the needs of others. Their behavioral daily focus is, "My mental attention focuses on solving your problems, pleasing you, and protecting you." And so because of that, number five, they lack boundaries. Codependents have no idea how to say no. They do not make time for themselves. They do not know how to cultivate healthy boundaries because boundaries are great. They help us know how to discern what is ours to carry, what someone else to carry. It helps us know where to say yes, where to say no. Helps us to be clear on decisions we make. Codependents get lost in this. They don't even know where to begin. By the way, many codependents will come to me and ask me, "What boundaries should I have?" And it's really not the first question to ask. The first question to ask is getting deeper into what led me into this relationship. What broken, empty areas of my heart need healing? Because I could give you all the boundaries in the world, you won't be able to make the decision because you don't love yourself, and B, you won't stick with it because of the lack of love and respect for yourself.

Six is hyper-reactivity. A lack of boundaries leads you to react and overreact to what others say or the drama around you. So your life becomes very reactive versus you just making solid choices and decisions every day. Your sensitivity soaks in what other people say in a way it causes you to be defensive, or you get sucked into believing what they say about you. So here's the picture. You're directed more externally. You need what other people say, or what you think they think, to drive your life versus you cultivating inside, "What do you believe about yourself?" And so this hyper-reactivity just feeds the addiction profile. It feeds the addiction lifestyle.

Number seven is distorted caretaking. You plunge into helping other people to the point that you ignore yourself and the needs of your own heart. Now, here's the truth, folks. Can we, can I just continue to be honest? It's easier to ignore yourself and just serve the demands and needs of others. Can I say that again? It's easier to ignore yourself and just do for others. That's been the mode of Christianity for quite a long time. Ignore yourself, deny yourself, use those kind of terms, right? It's harder work to actually look at myself, face myself, and become more aware. Man, I do serving to get people's approval. I serve in the name of the Lord, quote unquote, as a way of feeling validated when I don't feel validated by God. You see, we have to get honest because it's harder work to actually face the issues of our heart, to face the things that we need to face. It's easy to just ignore it and look at everyone else and keep the show going. Codependents will help others to the neglect of themselves because you want change for the person more than they do. But codependents will often feel deeply rejected when the other person doesn't want their help. Why? Because their radar is set on them. I'm not aware of what I want. I am only aware of what you want.

And codependency control is a major issue. Codependents, they deal with their lack of self-love and lack of safety by manifesting high levels of control. You attempt to feel safe by controlling people and circumstances, which also allows manipulation because you got to manipulate too, and you're exhausted. Control freaks always attempt to resolve their lack of safety and fear by exercising intense control, either of a person or a circumstance. No healthy relationship can be experienced with control dominating the picture because fear takes over, and there is no fear in love. People with control issues, they avoid themselves. They stay in a controlling activity. They keep the veil of busyness. Now, codependency often starts off with someone feeling they deeply care for another person, but then they compulsively react and try to control, and they get enmeshed in the other person's world and identity. The control says, "You are a reflection of me. I'm tied into this, and so I need to control the outcome." And many times, the serving and giving is a cover for control.

Now, number nine, there's a disconnection to your emotions. Codependents do not have a connection to how they really feel. In fact, they ignore how they feel. And part of the healing process is you getting in touch with how you feel, what do you want, what's going on inside of you, how can you grow in being loved, what needs in your heart need healing? But codependents don't know how to do that. They don't take care of themselves, and they don't make decisions based out of respect for themselves. They get run over all the time, and they lack the ability to make the strong decisions they need to make, which leads them to number 10, enabling. Because at some point, codependent relationships enable destructive behavior. We turn a blind eye to what is going on that's unhealthy. They refuse to make the tough decisions, set tough boundaries, establish consequences, or they refuse to just say, "I need to walk away from this relationship" because they have a veil over their eyes. They enable the bad behavior. They end up bowing to evil and say, "It's okay in the name of love." A codependent avoids argument. It keeps quiet so it's not to rock the boat in any way. Their behavior says, "My fear of your anger determines what I say or do. My fear of rejection determines what I say or do."

And then the relationship also has obsessive patterns. You spend a lot of time ruminating and obsessing over the relationship, leading to anxiety and intense emotions regarding the relationship. You obsess over what you should do, or what you shouldn't have done, or what you think should happen, or maybe how you should fix it. Sometimes you could live in a fantasy world of of a dream of what this relationship could be, and that's the reason why you're in this addict-based relationship because the potential is amazing, and this person has such a sensitive heart, and they're so wonderful. You worry about these things a lot, and you try to change what you can't change, and your life is punctuated by extremes.

I'm going to close with this. The biggest part of codependency is the denial. So talking to them about it creates a lot of resistance. They almost can't even take in the truth because they're, they've been so bewitched with codependency spell. Many times they think the problem is everyone else and everything else. Here's what I notice is that when you talk to a codependent, I've said this in a way already, they're constantly misdiagnosing themselves and they're like, "Over here, this is what I think I need to be doing." And you're looking and going, "No, this is codependent, plain and simple." And it's like, "Over here, what should I do about this decision?" Like, or they'll come for parenting advice, "What should I do about this?" Wait, how old is your son? "Oh, he's 37." But he's got this thing going on. "What should I do?" Let him go. It's codependent, right? But the codependent, deep down, they want good relationships, but they stay in bad ones, and they sabotage the good ones. And if they leave the relationship, they form bad ones again, and they're just in denial.

Now, this is going to set the foundation because next time, what I'm going to get into is, I'm going to get into a little bit about Christianity and codependence. I'm going to get into some of the complex traumas and things, and I'm going to talk through how do we start breaking free? How do we really start breaking free? I've shared some of it already inside, looking at some of the aspects and some of the things that, that many of us go through. But I think this is a really important issue. I'm going to talk about interdependence. What it looks like to be in a healthy side of things. And I appreciate the comment that's put here. "So many of us desperately need to stop and understand how we function." Well said. It can save so much time and greatly minimize emotional pain that unfortunately continues generationally. Well said. Thank you for that comment. Thank you for that feedback because what I'm hoping to do is encourage you to establish new patterns for future generations. But we gotta first align where we get our dependency from. And I want to encourage you to just stop and ask yourself a question, "Where is codependency influencing certain relationships in my life?" It's a great question to ask. Use the things I brought out, the manifestations, the symptoms, the patterns, and see if that's some of what's happening in your life and in your journey. And next time, in part two, I'm gonna get into this further. We'll talk about it some more, and I pray you'll be experiencing some, you'll experience some more healing in your life as a result.

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