Codependency Explained: How Unmet Needs Shape Your Life
EP. 19
In this episode of The Mae B Mindful Podcast, host Hannah Mae dives into the topic of codependency. Sharing her personal journey and insights, Hannah explores how codependency can unknowingly manifest in our lives, leading to emotional, spiritual, and physical imbalances. From identifying the core wounds of unmet needs to understanding the complex dynamics of boundaries, self-care, and reclaiming your worth, this episode unpacks the layers of codependency. It provides clarity on breaking free from these patterns. This discussion offers both inspiration and practical guidance for healing and reclaiming your authentic self. Tune in for a thought-provoking and empowering conversation that encourages you to take the next step on your journey to wholeness.
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Episode Transcript:
Hello, this is The Mae B Mindful Podcast, and I am your host, Hannah Mae. I'm a mother of six, a conscious birth instructor and educator, spiritual growth facilitator, and certified hypnotist. This podcast is about inspiring hope, expanding awareness, and consciousness in order to revolutionize the way we live and experience our lives. You can expect thought-provoking episodes each week, spanning a range of topics, drawing from both my own journey of transformation and healing and working with others. I hope you find this podcast to be informative, refreshing, illuminating, and instrumental in your own soul's evolution and growth. Let’s jump right in!
Hey guys, welcome back to The Mae B Mindful Podcast. I'm your host, Hannah Mae, and I'm so flipping excited to talk to you about this topic today that seems pretty elusive, and a lot of people have a lot of confusion about it. People don't know what it is unless they're in active recovery from this condition, and it's codependency.
I have had a journey with this. It's been a really powerful journey that has gotten down to a lot of my core stuff. I think when people can wrap their minds around what it is and identify with it—because in my experience, more people struggle with this than they realize—it can go under the radar and seem very innocuous, yet it actually manifests pretty harmfully and can degrade your emotional, spiritual, and physical condition over time. It is really easy to be unaware of how this stuff is operating.
My introduction to this was about, gosh, 13 years ago. The person who was actually mentoring me at the time and sponsoring me in a different fellowship kept throwing out the idea. She's like, "Hey, why don't we try a CoDA meeting?" And I was like, "Why does she keep saying that? Does she know something I don't know?" Turns out, she did. That first meeting I went to, I remember listening to the list, like the laundry list of, you know, qualifications, and I just literally was jaw-dropped. I identified for the first time, and I just couldn't stop laughing. Actually, I was like, "Oh my gosh." It was resonating and pinging on such a deep level, and I just kept looking at her like, jaw dropped, like, "What in the [expletive] is going on here? How have I been operating with this problem and not knowing what it was?"
It's really powerful to identify. I'm not into labeling necessarily, or pigeonholing yourself or limiting yourself with these labels because they can be restrictive sometimes, but when you truly can identify with something, it is powerful. Especially when you see how it's been operating in your life and how it's been running the show under the surface. This really started me on a whole journey. My deeper work didn’t start until much later than that, but it set me up to just become slightly more aware. It has been a really powerful evolutionary process in getting back to my authentic self, reconnecting with myself, getting to know myself, and learning how to listen to myself and make honest choices rather than compulsive ones.
It is a largely impulse-driven state, although if one is operating in that, they generally don't realize it, in my experience, and what I've witnessed in others. It’s just part of your hard wiring. We're not born with it, however—it’s part of our conditioning. It comes from somewhere, and it is really stemming from wounding, from unmet needs, from the father wound, from the mother wound. At its core, I believe—as I've experienced it and as I witness—it is caused by these deeper wounds.
I'm going to try and unpack this and keep this relatively short. Let's see how short I can keep it and not go off on too many tangents because this is a multi-episode topic, as it has so many various manifestations, and oftentimes it's very intertwined with and can overlap with other compulsions and other addictions. It actually can get pretty complex, and it's a lot to navigate for ourselves. But, as with anything, when we get open and become willing to seek, we can get down to the truth of things, and it can be really simplified at its core. Getting there sometimes feels like kind of going through a maze, but I'm going to do my best to keep it simple and hopefully explain it in a way where you can either go, "Check. Yes, I do that," or, "No, that's not me." Whatever it is, it’s okay. You know, the only thing that really matters is honesty and truthfulness at the end of the day.
So, I believe—and the way I define it, at least in this moment, and I’m probably going to go back and want to redefine it another way as soon as I listen to this and be like, "[Expletive], I didn’t say this"—codependency is a core, basic need to know your value and worth. But in having lost it, having disconnected from it at some earlier time through prior conditioning, you don’t know it. In not knowing it, and not being able to access it, as a result of the pain experienced in that disconnect with your true self, you end up seeking validation and well-being in others, seeking to get these core needs met from others, which are dictated by our natural social instincts and security instincts. There’s nothing wrong with them, but the unmet need for the child is a setup. The wounding that is created from that, and the pain that comes from that, is a setup to take those needs to be met by the world forever more, until you find a way to meet those needs. And the person best equipped to meet those needs is none other than you.
You are the person that is perfectly tailored and designed to meet those needs for yourself so that you no longer have to take them to the world and to others outside of you. When you take your needs for validation, approval, love, and wholeness to those outside of you—which most likely, if it’s an unmet need, you’re going to be taking them to that template of individual that created that wound in the first place by not meeting them—you end up setting yourself up to have them continuously unmet. This compounds the issue and ends up resulting in a loss of self, a further disconnect, a further divide within, and it becomes more and more painful.
Because if you’re living in this way, you’re not living authentically, you’re not living in alignment with your true self. And we are just not designed to thrive and function in that mode for very long. That is an incredibly painful way to live, and then that further drives these impulses and needs to fix this problem for ourselves. Albeit oftentimes, the person who’s suffering from that is pretty unaware that they’re doing it. Once they start to become aware, then it’s oftentimes a situation where you’re like, "Wow, I’m really overextending myself here," or, "This didn’t feel very good," yet you might still find yourself doing it anyway because, at this point, these grooves are pretty deep, and these patterns can be very difficult to shift and change.
Part of the problem, in the first place, is that you don’t feel you have permission to change them. There’s this sort of automatic rule book. If you actually were to look at those rules and go, “Where did these rules actually originate from? Who wrote this rule book? And hey, if you really take a look at it, how come those people over there don’t follow the rule book? They do really well not following the rule book. They seem to get all their needs met just fine. In fact, maybe they’re on the other side of the spectrum from you.”
If you’re living in this way, you’re overextending yourself because, guess what, people who are—I'm just going to call them takers, okay, and there’s a whole spectrum here of takers. There are people that, and not to judge them—although it’s hard not to sometimes, if they’re particularly careless—the way they operate is by just doing what they think they need to do to get their needs met, without considering you, because they’re operating out of their pain and their unmet needs. Then, you are in fact the perfect person to meet those needs because if you give tirelessly, endlessly, impulsively, without thought, without regard for yourself, and you don’t say no, well, you’re a great person to know for somebody that can’t hear no. Not to mention, for somebody that doesn’t like boundaries set for them, that’s another great reason why they’re going to like you—because you’re not going to have a boundary with them most likely.
That would be a very healthy thing to do. So, once you start getting healthy and well, and you understand and know that’s actually how you recover—that’s actually how you self-care, by having these boundaries for yourself—then these people are going to continue to steamroll over you. So, most likely, you’re going to attract those people, and those people are going to attract you. It’s an unfortunate setup. I believe it’s designed that way to hopefully bring things to our awareness to create balance, so that we can then recognize our problem when it becomes too painful and become willing to make changes. Because nobody else is going to make these changes for us. These are the things we have to step into our power and agency with, and that takes courage.
some trademarks, characteristics, traits, or examples of codependent behavior are, and I’m going to just give you a few: taking responsibility for things and ownership of things that aren’t actually your problem, that are not your job to handle or address. Yet, you find yourself maybe even volunteering just organically to take them on, at the expense of yourself, at the expense of your own energy. Even problem-solving, fixing things, or taking ownership of tasks or duties that aren’t yours to take on, that maybe you haven’t even been asked to take on, yet you’ve impulsively found yourself offering to do them and taking that role on for somebody as the fixer in some way.
Another one: accepting blame for things, being overly accountable or overly apologetic for things that are actually not yours to take ownership of. Sort of like the endless martyrdom of being accountable for something that’s not truthful, and that ends up resulting in an imbalance in a relationship.
This is a really big one: not giving yourself permission to take care of your own needs. Not giving yourself permission to put yourself first—the belief that doing anything for yourself is selfish. There’s this inner dialogue that goes along with that, an absolute dictator in regards to it. It’s a stringent master, like, “No, you self-sacrifice. No, you give up the front seat. No, you don’t get your needs met. No, you don’t take time for yourself, even if that’s what you’re emotionally deeply in need of.” You disregard yourself, you spend yourself, you spread yourself thin, and only you pay the price. Only you pay the price.
Then, most likely, what happens is you end up really resentful. You end up feeling victimized and resentful. This is an incredibly painful way to live, because you are compounding any abandonment issues or unmet needs you already have by further abandoning yourself in this process.
I’ve talked about this a lot, but we are designed to thrive in connection, and connection is the antidote to all disease. When we abandon ourselves—the one person we are wholly responsible for, the person we are supposed to listen to the most, to all the subtle nuances that nobody else knows—nobody knows you like you do. Nobody else can fully understand you, even the person who knows you best, who may think they know you better than you do or notices things about you that you don’t even notice about yourself. At any given time, you are the perfect person for the job of understanding yourself. So, when you fail yourself in that and abandon yourself in that, you lose access to your authenticity, and essentially, you knock yourself out of alignment. It’s almost like you’re walking around outside of yourself all the time.
And it’s actually a way to, I found, dissociate a lot of the time. It’s a huge distraction from self, from having to be present with your needs and your pain, ultimately your pain and your wounding at the core.
So, until we really start to wake up to this stuff and have an open mind to say, “Hey, maybe there’s another way to do it,” maybe this rule book, this dictator in my head, is not the voice I should be listening to. Where did that voice come from? Was I born with that voice? Is that really how I perceive higher power or God? Does God want me to just not consider myself?
I’m very much in alignment with the death of self, death of the ego, death of the lower self. But the higher self actually calls for a very high level of self-care, right? Like, even Jesus would pull off the crowd. He had to step away from his healing work, the miracles, and ministering to others. He would have to take breaks in order to refuel and fill up. He was constantly setting that example of taking time to be alone in prayer to get refueled. What is that if not self-care?
Until we break this cycle, we stay disconnected. We continue to set ourselves up in this rigged game of disappointment because it doesn’t ever meet the deeper need in us to lose ourselves to other people. The real pain in it is that usually we lose a connection with who we are, with what we love. Sometimes—and this is not uncommon—people get so lost to who they are, they become so disconnected that they don’t even know what they enjoy anymore. They don’t know what they like, they don’t really even know what they think. They just align with what somebody else thinks in order to feel a part of something, to live through that person.
A lot of times, this happens in relationships, but it can also manifest in just this idea of groupthink and mentality. This is a real bummer when that happens because we really owe it to ourselves to rekindle that joy of the child within. Most children, even if they have traumatic lives, when they are operating from a place of play and imagination, are very connected with themselves, and they are joyful.
I know for me, as a kid, there were certain things I did that I loved, that gave me so much joy. I would get so lost in them that it didn’t matter what was going on in the outside world. It didn’t matter what pain I experienced or what disturbance was happening. In those moments, in my joy, in my authentic flow of whatever was happening in that moment of play and creativity, I was in my bliss. I was so happy and content. When I started to shut those things off for myself—and when people start to disconnect with those things that bring them back to themselves—that’s when someone can lose themselves. That’s when they need to start becoming something for the external world to feel different inside.
The codependent kind of needs to get to a place, in my opinion, where they say, “[Expletive] everyone. [Expletive] you. [Expletive] you. [Expletive] you.” There are people out there who are going to hear that and be like, “That is so selfish, and that’s very unchristian,” and blah blah blah. But I don’t believe that. If I’m a child of God, here walking around with all of you, I don’t believe I’m inferior to any of you. I believe I am your equal. Therefore, I owe myself the same respect, kindness, and consideration that I would give to you.
If someone has this rule book that they’re following in their head, like, “I have to do this, this, and this. These are the rules I have to follow to be a nice person, a selfless person, or a giving person,” then I have to know I should be doing those things for myself, too. And if I’m doing something for others at the cost of myself, then that is incredibly dishonest, and it’s a disregard of self. If I am a child of God, what right do I have to disregard myself for someone else? I don’t believe I have that right.
I have the ability to. I have the free will to do that, just like somebody can do something incredibly harmful or hurtful to someone else. It doesn’t mean it’s okay or should be condoned. It’s operating from a place of unconsciousness. As long as we continue to operate from that unconscious place and don’t question the rhetoric in our minds, we’ll most likely stay in that pattern.
It’s incredibly helpful to get support from recovered people who really understand it, who have lived it, and who are on the other side of it. Because otherwise, everyone just has an opinion. And opinions are like [expletive]—everybody’s got one. You don’t need everyone’s opinion on this. You need to know, “Who has freedom around this? Who can help you nurture yourself back to wholeness?” If you’ve abandoned yourself, you’re alone, you’re sad, and you’re trying so desperately to meet these needs for yourself through others, the goal really needs to be nurturing and nourishing yourself back to health.
To do that, it’s helpful to run things by someone regularly, because opportunities will start to present themselves as you step onto this recovery path. You’ll have lots of chances to work this stuff out, and it’s incredibly helpful to have people who can say, “What the [expletive] are you talking about?” I’ve had people be like, “Wait a second, hold on. Do you know how crazy that sounds?” And I’m like, “Oh. Oh, thank you.” Because that crazy is the kind of thinking I need to get away from.
This is not just stuff you bring to anybody. When we’re healing and moving forward, trying to get clarity and rewire and recondition our thinking and change behaviors to protect and safeguard ourselves as we heal, the deeper work is getting down to the core wounding driving it. When we do that, we no longer have to operate from our pain unconsciously and be driven by it.
I don’t want to operate in my pain, do you? If you’re operating from your pain and seeing things only through the filter of that pain with a very narrow view, focused only on fixing it, that’s not how we want to live. We need to recondition, rewire, and set up parameters as we heal, so we don’t keep rewounding ourselves. This is critical as you step onto the path: create a container for yourself where you’re not going to get re-wounded as you go, because that can lead to setbacks.
There will be situations where, to properly and adequately self-care, you’ll have to advocate for yourself. You’re going to have to set boundaries. You may need to take space from people or sever relationships. That’s so challenging, because if you operate this way and think this way, you likely don’t believe you have the right to do that. A lot of times, people convince themselves they don’t have the right to let someone down or cause harm.
The best thing I can say to that is, you are of equal value. If your healing is important to living a fulfilled, meaningful, purposeful life, and you need to know yourself and come back to yourself to do that, then your role and responsibility to yourself is crucial. That is your first and foremost responsibility.
It takes incredible courage to do this, to step away and create boundaries. A boundary is not for the other person; it’s for you, to safeguard your recovery and healing process. And if you do, really powerful things will happen. When you start showing up for yourself, paying attention to yourself, you’ll feel very different. You’ll start to meet those needs, mend those wounds, and reconnect those parts that were severed within you. You reestablish a connection with yourself.
Parts work is really powerful and helpful for this. IFS, parts work, and hypnosis are powerful for this deep, connective work. Inner child work is about getting right down to the core of that wounding. There are incredible journaling and writing prompts, like non-dominant hand writing and inner child writing, that can open up a dialogue with yourself, really hear yourself, and meet your needs.
When you open up that dialogue with your inner child, she or he will respond. They may be shut down, but over time, and it won’t take long, just a little persistence and willingness to sit with them in discomfort, they will start to open up. You’ll rebuild that trust. This is how you reconnect within yourself and come back online. You get to come back into alignment—all parts of yourself in harmony. That’s just a beautiful way to live, for hopefully obvious reasons.
To sum up, here are some questions to ask yourself. If you find yourself taking responsibility for other people’s problems or well-being, taking on responsibilities that drain you, yet still find yourself doing it again, and not being able to listen to yourself and say no—having that boundary—this could be a sign. If that’s a pattern for you, or if you find you’re able to be indignant and outraged on someone else’s behalf, but don’t give yourself permission to feel the same way for yourself, that’s something to think about.
If you find yourself accepting intolerable behavior, sweeping how you feel under the rug, continuing to put yourself in harm’s way as a result, that’s another big one. Not giving yourself permission to take care of yourself, to honestly listen to yourself.
For example, there's a family event. You may not be able to tolerate it or want to go, yet you go anyway because of family obligations. This can get complicated in your mind because you think, "It’s my family, I have to show up." But if you genuinely don’t feel good or right about going and still disregard yourself, this is important to listen to.
Once you’ve identified some of this stuff, and you move into recovery and attempt to self-care and heal these things, you owe it to yourself to safeguard that process. You’re working hard to build that trust. That’s all I’m going to say about that for now.
Another thing: feeling really high, in an imbalanced way, when giving. Feeling your best when you’re giving can feel gray because we are most aligned in divine purpose when in service. But there’s nuance in what service looks like. If you’re operating impulsively with service, not checking in with yourself, disregarding yourself, putting yourself in harm’s way, not listening to your inner guidance system, or giving recklessly, that’s not appropriate service.
I recently spoke to another healer who was overextending themselves, giving time to someone in a way that stemmed from their own need. They realized halfway through a conversation that they were doing something they charge clients for, and it was actually selfish. They were doing it to satisfy some unmet need in themselves. So, maybe it was helpful to the other person, but sometimes, you’ll notice overextending yourself can suck you into a vortex.
Maybe you're overgiving advice, and people rely on you to hold space so they can pour their self-pity into you. You nurture them, because most likely, you’re kind, nurturing, and have healing energy. But then they just continue their same patterns, and it’s not serving them.
Sometimes, showing up in service with truth and honesty, even if it disappoints someone, is more helpful than holding space for something that isn’t creating change. These are all questions to ask yourself.
Codependency can show up in any relationship—partners, spouses, friendships, coworkers—even with children. Motherhood is such a beautiful, high calling and vocation, but when we over-identify and lose ourselves, it happens often. I see it in moms who lose themselves. I believe that’s part of the process of motherhood. To really immerse yourself fully, especially if you have multiple children, it can feel like you’re in the trenches.
I’ve experienced it too. There was a time when I felt like I totally lost myself. I was fully immersed in the job and responsibility, wanting to do it well, but losing myself in the process. I eventually realized, "Where is my joy? Who am I?" It was pretty easy to reconnect with that because I knew what used to bring me joy. I had shut that off for a time.
I’m so grateful I started reconnecting with those things and gave myself time to do them. It was a necessity. I was four kids deep, in seven and a half years I had five children. So, I don’t know how many years that was, but it felt like a lot. As I rekindled that joy, I woke up those parts of me.
Interestingly, my husband noticed the change. And this wasn’t something anyone enforced upon me. That’s the thing with codependency. You may find yourself in relationships where someone enforces that on you due to their selfishness, choosing people who align with the narrative in your head and reinforce it. Those situations can be abusive and harmful.
But you can also be the only person expecting this from yourself. If you don’t give yourself permission and start to see the flaws in that thinking, nothing will change.
In my case, my husband was super supportive. But I had to get to my own place of pain with it, realizing, "Wow, I need this." When I reconnected with dance—hoop dance—it started to unlock things I had shut down. It was a doorway into deeper healing. It’s all connected.
We need to listen to our passions and make them a priority. Codependency can show up in any relationship. In the future, we’ll talk specifically about codependency in romantic relationships because there are added dynamics and complexities there. I look forward to that conversation.
Until next time, I hope this created a little more clarity. As always, if you have questions, DM me. Love you guys. Bye!
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