I grew up without a road map, stumbling through a childhood that felt more like survival than innocence. The lessons I learned were rarely about joy and stability, but more about bracing for the next unexpected turn. Now, as an adult, I can trace the shaky lines between those early years and the challenges I still face. Thanks to ongoing therapy (and one life-changing self-help book), I can now identify the traits I once thought were personal flaws or uncontrollable quirks were signs of something deeper…codependency. Here are five reasons you might find make you a codependent just like me.
The book I’m about to share with you, Codependent No More by Melody Beattie, isn’t just a recommendation, it’s part of my story. It’s one of the tools that helped me understand myself in ways I didn’t know I needed. Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means if you choose to buy the book through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. But please know this: I’m sharing it because it made a real difference in my life, and I believe it can make a difference in yours too.
A Hapless Childhood, A Dysfunctional Home
As a child, the “home” I grew up in was dysfunctional at best. It was a place where addiction, abuse, neglect and constant conflict was the norm. Looking back on my childhood, I realize that when such is the environment, you run on survival. Your emotional needs and connection, no matter the age, always come last to the chaos at hand. Instead of learning that feelings are safe to express, you grow up learning how to assess for danger. You become hyper-aware of others’ actions, their moods. You are suddenly able to read subtle changes in tone or body language because those are the signals that tell you whether you’re safe or not. I think some people call this an “emotional-radar”, but rather than be wired in you for genuine affection, it becomes self-protection.
In many dysfunctional homes, children are forced to step into caregiver roles before they’re ready. They might end up in a reverse role of being the caregiver of their own parent or protecting younger siblings. I remember caring for my younger brothers and resenting them for it because I couldn’t just be their sister. I felt responsible for their happiness and didn’t have the opportunity to just be a kid. In my mind I thought, if I fix this, maybe things will stay calm. If I take care of them, maybe someone can then take care of me.
You might be able to relate to a childhood like this, even without the alcohol and abuse. If you can, I’m sorry. This isn’t how it should have been for either of us but it was the hand we were dealt. Fortunately, we aren’t children anymore and can change how we want life to look. We have the ability to have complete control over our own happiness, we just have to let ourselves have it.
Unmet Emotional Needs
Safety, unconditional love, validation, acceptance…these are all things I over-stress about now that I have my own kiddos. When a child’s emotional needs aren’t consistently met, the absence leaves damage that you can’t always see. Over time, unmet emotional needs can lead to a belief that our feelings are burdensome and our role in a relationship is to give rather than receive. In a healthy home, love and attention are given freely. In others, they’re earned. If you grew up in a place where your feelings were ignored, mocked, or used against you, you may have learned early that your emotions were a problem to be hidden away. You learned to smile when you wanted to cry, to say “I’m fine” when you were anything but
You didn’t stop having needs, you learned to stop showing them.
In my own childhood, affection was rarely unconditional. It was something to be earned. I learned to behave just right and to meet the emotional needs of the people who controlled my life, desperate for stability. I learned to suppress my own emotions so I wouldn’t trigger anyone, to work tireless for scraps of approval, and to confuse being needed with being loved.
As a teenager and young adult, this manifested into discomfort in receiving love or care. It made me uncomfortable to be cared about, cared for. I gravitated towards one-sided relationships because it was easier to focus on someone else’s needs than to try and properly identify my own. I became the girl who somehow thought she could “fix” the other person in my relationships. I poured myself into them, hoping they would return the favor. Sometimes they did, but most of the time I was left feeling empty and still running.
If you’ve lived this, I see you. We both know how deep the longing goes when it’s been starved for years. But here’s the good news: we are no longer powerless children waiting for scraps. We can give ourselves the love and validation we always needed, without waiting for anyone else to decide we’re worthy.
Fear of Abandonment
When you grow up never knowing if the people you love will stay, the fear of being left becomes a constant hum in the background of your life. Maybe it’s the kind who was there in body but checked out in every other way. For me it was a parent I didn’t know who left and never came back… and then it was a parent I thought I knew, who left anyways and also never came back. Either way, you learn to cling to people hard. You bend, mold, and shape yourself into whatever version you think will keep them from leaving.
Here’s the problem. You lose track of who you are underneath all that accommodating. You might even tell yourself that love is about sacrifice, so you prioritize the other person’s needs and neglect your own to try and keep the relationship secure. You feel like you’re walking on a tightrope and one wrong move means losing everything. That anxiety and paranoia makes you obsessed with changes in the other person’s moods, their words, their actions, and you become an over-analyzer…You become someone who subconsciously manipulates the results of every interaction you have because that’s become your defense mechanism.
If you know this feeling, I’m sorry. It’s exhausting to live on edge, always guarding against loss. The truth is, we’re allowed to love people without tying our worth to whether or not they choose to stay. We can stand on our own two feet and still let people in. And not because we need them to complete us, but because we want them beside us.
Conflict Avoidance
Living in a volatile home means conflict isn’t just a disagreement. It becomes a trigger for fear, chaos, and in my case violence. Arguments aren’t safe spaces to work through differences, they’re ticking time-bombs. A raised voice often meant pain (physical and emotional) and as a child, I learned that any confrontation is dangerous. I learned that keeping the peace, no matter the cost, was safer than speaking up. So I agreed when I didn’t agree, stayed silent when I wanted to protest, and tiptoed around other people’s moods to keep them from detonating.
You learn that the safest option is appeasement. Stay quiet, stay agreeable, and don’t provoke. That learned behavior is called conflict avoidance. Over time, this way of survival hardens into a deep-rooted fear that speaking up or setting boundaries will always have a negative outcome. You become hyper-aware of yourself, your tone, your posture, every word so you can better adapt to the environment and maintain stability.
I didn’t realize the adult consequences until I started therapy. For me, it looks like avoiding hard conversations even when they are necessary, staying in unhealthy relationships because leaving feels too confrontational, and even saying yes to things to avoid causing someone hurt or discomfort, even when doing so caused me discomfort. Even minor disagreements filled me with anxiety. What I thought was “keeping the peace” was actually creating resentment, burnout, and shallow, unstable relationships.
If this sounds familiar, you know how tempting it is to keep swallowing your words just to avoid the fallout. But peace at the expense of honesty isn’t really peace. You are slowly erasing the things that make you, you. We can relearn that conflict doesn’t have to mean danger. Sometimes, it’s the doorway to something better.
Low Self-Worth
When you grow up in an environment that chips away at your sense of value, you start to believe you are only as good as what you can give. Praise and affection become tied to performance. How useful are you, how quiet you can be, how much can you handle without complaining? Over time, you stop asking, Am I loved? and start asking, Am I enough?
As a child, that low self-worth showed in the way I constantly sabotaged myself before anyone else could. If I thought I might fail, I’d pull away early. If I felt unwanted, I’d act out or withdraw to confirm it. It felt safer to control the loss than to be blindsided by it. This behavior continued into my adulthood. I have worked endlessly in some relationships to earn approval that never lasted and affection that was just transactional. I learned to measure myself by the weight I could carry, which never amounted to much because of an unrealistic expectation I made up in my brain.
If you know this pattern, you also know how quietly it steals from you. Here’s the truth, your worth isn’t measured in the problems you fix or the size of space you take up. It isn’t measured by how “useful” you are in someone else’s life. It’s not even measured in your ability to hold everything together when you’re falling apart. This is what I still have to tell myself everyday:
“You had value before you ever lifted a finger for anyone else, and you still have it now. You deserve to value yourself.”
Codependent No More By Melody Beattie
If you’ve seen yourself in any of this, you’re not alone. You aren’t “too much” or “too broken”. You have learned how to survive in a way that made sense at the time to keep yourself safe. But you don’t have to just survive anymore.
I didn’t even know the word codependent until therapy and one book changed the way I saw everything. Codependent No More By Melody Beattie gave me so much insight of myself, it was freeing. It made me realize there was nothing “wrong” with me. It made me aware that there were just patterns and behaviors I could unlearn.
If you’re tired of bending, fixing, over-giving, avoiding, shrinking yourself just to keep the peace, or resentment in your relationships, read it. Not because I said so, but because you deserve to feel safe and secure in your own mind. You deserve to know your worth without measuring it against what you do for someone else. You deserve to finally give yourself the love you’ve been giving away at your own expense for years.
I can’t recommend Codependent No More by Melody Beattie enough. It’s not just a book, it’s the one that helped me see myself clearly for the first time, and give myself the tools I still use today.
You can find it in whatever way works best for you:
Paperback – to hold in your hands, underline, and dog-ear the pages you’ll come back to again
Kindle – to keep with you anywhere, so you can read when the moment hits
Audible – to listen to in the car, on a walk, or while you’re doing life
However you choose to read it, I hope you let it do for you what it did for me. I hope you let it remind you that you’re not broken, you’re not alone, and it’s never too late to take your life back.
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