For family and friends: codependence, powerlessness and the systemic view

For the people around them.

Watching someone you love and are close to lose themselves in destructive behaviour is never easy. The first feeling is powerlessness, as you juggle protecting your own mental balance against giving that person all the support you can.

You may even have noticed that the support can, paradoxically, do harm. That is what we call a codependent relationship, where you tend to put the other person's needs, emotions and problems — usually a partner, a family member, or someone living with an addiction or a dysfunction — above your own. You end up feeling responsible for their happiness or their wellbeing.

Codependent relationships are a form of emotional dependence, and they often share several features:

• Difficulty stating your limits: saying "no" is hard, so is setting healthy boundaries and voicing your own needs or feelings — which over time breeds a growing resentment towards the very person you want to support.
• Low self-esteem: your sense of your own worth leans heavily on the role of rescuer, or on your ability to control, help or care for the other person.
• Neglecting yourself: you regularly set aside your own hopes, interests and wellbeing to devote yourself to them.

It is not unusual for the codependent person to develop an addictive pattern of their own — bingeing, for instance — to compensate for all the energy poured into a relationship that is usually badly out of balance: one gives themselves entirely while the other consumes the relationship without contributing to it. So what can be done?

Some time ago a mother contacted me, having recently learned that her son, in his thirties, was living with a cocaine addiction.

What she wanted at first was support and advice on how to handle the situation, all the more so as the addiction had already done damage to his finances and his relationships.

Together we thought about the best stance to take. But above all, and quite quickly, we explored how the situation was waking up a great many old emotions in her, tied to her own past — both in childhood and in parenthood.

Why is that a rich way to look at it?

Because suddenly this mother, who had arrived with a heavy sense of powerlessness, found — through the work of exploring her own emotions — that she in fact had a whole range of things inside her that she could work on, and that would help her son indirectly.

In one of his many talks on the spiritual path, Eckhart Tolle says that if the outer world seems to have no way out, the way out you are looking for is almost certainly inside.

In other words: when there is no other way of helping the people we love take the road to recovery, there is always the option of leading by example — by starting, or continuing, that road ourselves. Otherwise we risk sentencing ourselves to a lifetime of feeling powerless in the face of the suffering around us.

In the spirit of the systemic approach (a piece of psychology jargon for how interconnected we are, emotionally above all), you could picture yourself as one cog in a clock and the people close to you as all the other cogs around it.

By making sure our own cog — our mind — turns steadily towards clarity about our emotions, our intuition, our needs, our limits, how we are with others and whether our actions ring true, we give the people around us a reassuring and inspiring reference point that helps them find the way back to their own wellbeing.

And, remarkably, her son did commit to getting support a few weeks later.

It takes courage, of course: taking your share of responsibility and facing your own discomfort. But the gift at the end of it is that the situation stops looking like suffering to be endured and starts looking like a way to grow — alone at first, inside, then together.

To quote Tolle again: you find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realising who you are at the deepest level. Where addiction is concerned, then, the first task is not to drag the person caught in it back to their senses at all costs. It is to meet and understand everything it stirs up in you.

I thank that mother wholeheartedly for her courage and for how she involved herself in what her son was going through. And I wanted to share her approach, full of love and humility, in the hope of encouraging other parents and other families to follow it.