Breaking up and rejection are especially hard for codependents. Breaking up triggers hidden grief and causes irrational guilt, anger, shame, and fear. Working through the following issues can help you let go and move on.
Codependents often blame themselves or their partner. They have low self-esteem, and any rejection triggers feelings of shame. Relationships are of primary importance to them. They fear this relationship may be their last. They haven’t grieved their childhood. Past feelings of loss and trauma from their childhood are triggered. Working through these issues can help to let go and move on.
Poor boundaries are one of the main symptoms of codependency. Codependents have difficulty seeing others as separate individuals, with their own feelings, needs, and motivations. They feel responsible and guilty for others’ feelings and actions. This accounts for high reactivity, conflict and caretaking in codependent relationships. They perceive their partner’s need for space or even to break up or divorce as their fault. Even if they were blamed by their partner, it still doesn’t make it so. There may be instances where a person’s addiction, abuse, or infidelity precipitate a break up, but if you look more deeply, those behaviors reflect individual motivations and are part of a bigger picture of why the relationship didn’t work. No one is responsible for someone else’s actions. People always have a choice to do what they do.
Anger and resentment also can keep you stuck in the past. Codependents blame others because they have trouble taking responsibility for their own behavior, which might include a failure to set boundaries. They may have been blamed or criticized as a child, and blame feels natural and protects them from their overdeveloped sense of guilt.
Low Self-Esteem and Shame
Shame is an underlying cause of codependency and stems from dysfunctional parenting. Codependents develop the belief that they’re basically flawed in some respect and that they’re unlovable. Children can interpret parental behavior as rejecting and shaming when it’s not meant to be. Even parents who profess their love may behave in ways that communicate you’re not loved as the unique individual you are.
Shame often is unconscious, but may drive a person to love others who can’t love or don’t love them. In this way, a belief in one’s unloveability becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy operating beneath conscious awareness. Some codependents have a shaming, “I’m defective” or “I’m a failure” script, blaming themselves for anything that goes wrong. Low-self-esteem, which is a cognitive self-evaluation, leads to self-attribution of fault and personal defects to explain why someone else wants to end a relationship. For example, if a man cheats, the woman often assumes it’s because she’s not desirable enough, rather than that his motivation comes from his fear of intimacy. Learning to love yourself can help heal shame and improve self-esteem.
Relationships are the Answer
In the dysfunctional and insecure family environment in which codependents grow up, they develop strategies and defenses in order to feel safe and loved. Some seek power, some withdraw, and others try to win the love of their parents by adapting to their parents’ needs. Stereotypical codependents keep trying to make relationships work – usually harder than their partner – in order to feel secure and okay with themselves. A close relationship becomes the solution to their inner emptiness and insecurity.
It’s not unusual for codependents to drop their friends, interests and hobbies – if they had any – once they’re in a relationship. They focus all of their energy on the relationship and their loved one, which helps neither them nor the relationship. Some couples spend their time talking about their relationship instead of enjoying time together. Once it ends, they feel the emptiness of their life without a partner. The adage, “Happiness begins within,” is apt. Recovery from codependency helps people assume responsibility for their own happiness. Although a relationship can add to your life, it won’t make you happy in the long run, if you can’t do that for yourself. It’s important to have a support network of friends or 12-step meetings as well as activities that bring you pleasure regardless of whether you’re in a relationship.
Grieving the Past
Codependents find it hard to let go because they haven’t let go of the childhood hope of having that perfect love from their parents. They expect to be cared for and loved and accepted unconditionally from a partner in the way they wished their parents could have. No partner can make up for those losses and disappointments. Parents aren’t perfect and even those with the best intentions disappoint their children. Part of becoming an independent adult is realizing and accepting this fact, not only intellectually, but emotionally, and that usually involves sadness and sometimes anger.
The Last Hope
Losing someone can be devastating, because codependents put such importance on a relationship to make them happy. Fear is the natural outgrowth of shame. When you’re ashamed, you fear that you won’t be accepted and loved. You fear criticism and rejection. Codependents fear being alone and abandoned because they believe they’re unworthy of love. They might cling to an abusive relationship in which they’re being emotionally abandoned all the time. These aren’t rational fears. Building a life that you enjoy prepares you to both live single and be in a healthier relationship where you’re less dependent upon the other person to make you happy.
It’s a psychological axiom that each loss recapitulates prior losses. You may have had other losses as an adult that compound grief about the current one. Yet often, it’s abandonment losses from childhood that are being triggered. Closeness with a parent was either blissful or you may never had it, or didn’t have it consistently. The intimacy of a close relationship reminds you of intimacy you once had or longed for with your mother or father. Either way, it’s a loss. Codependents may have been neglected, blamed, abused, betrayed, or rejected in childhood, and these traumas get reactivated by current events. Sometimes, they unconsciously provoke situations reminiscent of their past in order that it can be healed. They also may incorrectly perceive rejection, because they expect to be treated the way they were previously.
Grief is part of letting go, but it’s important to maintain friendships and life-affirming activities in the process. Blame, shame, and guilt aren’t helpful, but working through trauma from the past can help you sort out your feelings and know what you feel about the ending of the present relationship. Do you miss the person, what he or she represents, or just being in a relationship?
Letting go and healing involve acceptance of yourself and your partner as separate individuals. Usually, relationships end because partners have individual issues with self-esteem and shame, are ill-matched, or have needs that they’re unable to communicate or fill. Shame often causes people to withdraw or push the other person away. Healing trauma and losses and building self-esteem help individuals move forward in their life and take more responsibility for themselves.
Sign up for a free copy of “14 Tips to Letting Go,” on my website, and get my ebook, 10 Steps to Self-Esteem. Look for my forthcoming book, Conquering Shame and Codependency.