In a cleanout of boxes I absolutely don’t regret hoarding, I came across a letter my father sent to me when I was in college in the 90s. In his typically data-focused pre-internet style, it consisted of a photocopy, some highlighting, and a handwritten Post-It note. The photocopy was of my report card from the previous semester, when I’d been at school and he’d been at home caring for my terminally ill mother. My grades were baaaad, to an extent I actually had forgotten and sort of can’t believe now. My father had highlighted them.
The note on the Post-It read:
Are these grades yours? How many credits do you need to graduate? Should I pay tuition?
Oof.
I was overcome with shame and hastily shoved the offending missive back into its envelope and the box from which it had come.
But then came the consideration.
How sad I was for my young self. For my broken family. For how bad we were at handling the emotional crisis of my mother’s illness and death. It was so unnecessarily prolonged and discordant and awful. And yes, of course it is terrible that my mother died, ravaged with cancer, so early. But that is also a thing that happens sometimes. We were not the first people it ever happened to.
What that letter unearthed was something older and more specific than grief. It brought back the experience of how transgressive it was for me to be inconvenient to my father. I talk about this often, and not as only my singular experience. In so many families, and in a way I particularly recognize as a girl raised in the 70s and 80s, so much of the reproach, the admonition, the punishment delivered upon me came not because of any conscious transgression on my part. It came because my parents were inconvenienced by my immaturity. My need. The mystery of me. My existence.
This is not to reproach them. Parenthood is nothing if not inconvenient. My parents were products of their experiences, their own families, the prevailing perspectives and resources of the time. But it has taken a lot of work to mine and cultivate compassion for my imperfect humanity. Finding that letter reminded me how far my family and I had come. And how much that journey matters for the people I work with every day.
So Where Does Codependency Actually Come From?
It starts here. In moments exactly like that one, or in the accumulation of so many previous to it that the harshness of this interaction only struck me upon this revisit, 30 years later.
Codependency doesn’t necessarily originate in devastating trauma or abject neglect, though those things matter too. Often it starts in something quieter: the slow burn of learning that your needs are an inconvenience. That your feelings are too much. That the way to stay connected to the people you love is to stop being a problem for them.
And so you take it upon yourself to adapt, whether you were told to or not. You get very good at reading the room. Learning to anticipate what people need before they ask. You make yourself useful, easy, low maintenance. You stop taking up space and start holding space for everyone else.
That is not a character flaw. That is a role, an ability, a value system taking root. And it made complete sense at the time.
What Causes Codependency in Childhood?
It is our job as children to learn how to manipulate the world to our advantage. That word, manipulate, sounds harsh, but it is accurate. We are born completely dependent and we spend our early years figuring out how to get our needs met. Ideally we learn to use our innate positive qualities, charm, humor, connection, over negative ones like tantrums, to navigate the world around us.
This is healthy. This is development.
It goes sideways when we learn, inevitably, that our every need will not be met. When we have experiences, frightening or confusing or simply lonely ones, that teach us the world is not entirely safe and the people we depend on are not entirely dependable. When that happens, we dig deeper. We observe more carefully. We become exquisitely attuned to the emotional states of the people around us, because reading them accurately feels essential.
As we grow up, that attunement grows with us. And it can culminate in codependency: anticipating the needs and wants of the people we love and meeting them preemptively, in order to stave off the possibility that they might be disappointed, which often registers in our young minds and hearts as far more risky than a momentary experience. We worry that they may leave us. That they might withdraw. That we might find ourselves alone with needs that nobody is going to meet.
What Does Codependency Look Like in Adulthood?
You probably do not think of yourself as someone who is afraid. You are capable. Competent. The one people come to.
But underneath all that competence is often a very old fear: that if you stop being useful, stop being needed, stop holding everything together, the people you love will not stay.
So you keep going. You overfunction. You give past your capacity without even registering it. Feeling resentful when it does not come back, but you cannot stop because stopping feels more dangerous than continuing.
And you end up, often without meaning to, in relationships where you are doing most of the giving. Not because you chose badly. But because the dynamic you learned in childhood is the one you keep recreating, because it is the one that feels familiar. The one that feels like love.
Can You Heal From Codependency?
Here is what I want you to take from this.
You did not become this way because something is wrong with you. You became this way because you were a child doing your best to make sense of the world with the limited maturity and sophistication that you had. Learning to manage the environment because managing it felt safer than not managing it. You learned to put other people’s needs first because your own needs felt like too much of a risk.
That was smart. It was adaptive. That was you, surviving–and also, succeeding. You probably got pretty good at it. You may have amassed a lot of power in the process. It may look or feel like you vanquished the vulnerability of being human.
But that’s not possible, or even desirable. You need care also, and you might even be able to enjoy receiving it.
The work now is not about blaming the people who raised you or excavating every painful memory. It is about recognizing the pattern, understanding where it came from, and deciding, maybe for the first time, that your needs are not actually an inconvenience. That you are allowed to take up space. That being human, messy and needy and imperfect, is not going to cost you everything.
It did not have to then. And it does not have to now.
If you want to understand how this pattern shows up in your relationships today, What Is Codependency is a good place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions about Codependency
Is codependency caused by childhood trauma? Not always in the most intense sense of the word trauma. Codependency often develops in response to subtler experiences: learning that your needs were inconvenient, that keeping the peace was your job, that love felt conditional on your usefulness. Big T trauma can absolutely be part of it, but so can the quieter, accumulated experience of never quite feeling safe enough to just be.
Can codependency develop even if you had a loving family? Yes. Well intentioned parents can still, without meaning to, send messages that a child’s needs are too much, that emotions should be managed rather than felt, or that being good means putting others first. Codependency is not always the result of neglect or abuse. Sometimes it is the result of love that was expressed in ways that did not leave room for your full, mysterious humanity. Likely, your parents had never met someone quite like you before. Raising a brand new human through their emergence in the world is a tall order.
Is codependency more common in women? It is more commonly identified in women, and there are real cultural reasons for that. Girls are often socialized to prioritize relationships, to be accommodating, to put others first, while in men this often looks like “rescue” or “heroism.” In a classic case of cultural gaslighting, the same behaviors that get labeled codependency in therapy get labeled kindness or selflessness everywhere else. Men can certainly be codependent and suffer the consequences. Women have often had more practice being derided for it and therefore flagging it as a problem. Have you been called bossy, controlling, or–gasp– *narcissistic* for behavior you enact out of care? For picking up the slack you don’t see anyone else moving to pick up? Boom. You might actually be codependent.
Can you develop codependency as an adult or does it always start in childhood? The roots are almost always in childhood, but certain adult experiences can activate or deepen the pattern. A relationship with someone who is unpredictable, a partner who struggles with addiction, a family crisis that puts you in the caretaker role. These can reinforce patterns that were already there, or bring them to the surface in ways you had not noticed before.
How do I know if my childhood experiences caused my codependency? You probably cannot trace it to one specific moment, and you do not need to. What matters more is recognizing the pattern in your present life. Do you feel responsible for other people’s emotions? Do you give past your capacity and feel resentful? Is it easier to care for others than to receive care yourself? If yes, the where it came from matters less than the what do I do about it now.
Work With a Codependency Therapist in New York
If reading this brought something up, that is not an accident. These patterns are old and they run deep, but they are not intractable. Understanding where they came from is one of the most powerful first steps you can take.
I work with high functioning adults across New York who are ready to understand what is underneath the pattern and start relating differently. To themselves and to the people in their lives.
The first session is free. You can reach out here.
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