Codependency
I recently got into an active debate with one of my recent LJ Friends about the definition and application of the term Codependency, and how it applies to interpersonal relationships.
This discussion largely fell to the back burner and almost was left on the wayside until I was reading a posting going into some depth on the Heart Chakra (Sanskrit ( Read more... )
This discussion largely fell to the back burner and almost was left on the wayside until I was reading a posting going into some depth on the Heart Chakra (Sanskrit ( Read more... )
That would be the primary definition.
I also agree it is not healthy.
Where I disagree, is that our culture not only encourages this but the mental health community tends to be way too conservative in their diagnosis, and at the same time over the top in their treatment.
Co-dependence in my experience is much more prevalent in our society. But it can be a useful behaviour trait.
That does not negate it as co-dependence, by that I just mean there are functional levels of it common in our culture.
I think most women who have recovered from June Cleaver syndrome, see that more clearly today. It is at the heart of issues that are still unresolved in our culture of inequality of jobs/pay, sexual predation numbers, marital rape that goes seriously unreported, divorce numbers, not just physical abuse, but mental abuse that goes mostly undetected and unreported, as well as much more subtle behaviours that until recently were overlooked as sexual abuse in the work place.
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Further, I don't disagree with the statement that codependency is prevalent in our society, in fact I wholly agree with it. Our society is very image conscious and we are socially trained at an early age to base our images of ourselves on how other people respond and react to us rather than listen to our inner selves and have a core identity of our own.
Also, I would further attest that the bumpy road to recovery of codependency is fraught with a huge amount of contention, but it requires at least one person in the relationship to have the iron clad will to never allow enabling behavior patterns to return and to promote a healthy relationship of independence and/or interdependence. The person who offers resistance to codependent behavior will ALWAYS be met with with some sort of accusation, aggression, or manipulation and further controlling behaviors on the road to recovery.
But the relationship is not fixed until both can come together in loving understanding and equal partnership on an equal footing (even if the division of labors are distinctly separate).
The part that I openly disagree with are the following statements:
"I disagree that all of them are dysfunctional..."
"There is nothing wrong with co-dependency, the question is does one partner use the roles to manipulate or abuse the other person."
"Co-dependency does not necessarily "rob" the other person of anything."
For there to be a co-dependency, there HAS to be a partner that is trying to either manipulate or control the other. That is one of the defining characteristics of what it means to be codependent. This is why they are always dysfunctional.
The role change from June Cleaver entering the work force and Ward Cleaver moving to stay home to be Mr. Mom is a transition of an equal division of labors in a healthy interdependent relationship, and not an illustration of a codependent relationship.
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In striving to do this, many of them tried to become the super-mom ideal and basically tried to shoulder everything without delegating any of the other responsibilities back to their partner. These women were now doing the same work as their male counterparts, at a devalued rate of $0.59 on the $1.00, and came home exhausted and were expected to then maintain the household and children and the husband as well. This created a very unfair division of labor, for which we are still recovering from as a society.
But I digress, this is topic is more about the concept of codependency in general, and although I highly respect and support the women's rights movement, that is a whole other topic in and of itself which would involve at least as lengthy of a posting as this one. However, this problematic transition did result in some enabling codependent behavior as more independence and responsibilities were taken on by women and men in these situations largely found themselves with not having to put as much effort in and began to develop needy, controlling, and manipulative behaviors to keep this new division of labor unbalanced, or to resist the movement altogether.
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I mistyped earlier. I intended to say it appeared to some that in the early years of my children's life I appeared to some of our friends to be in a June Cleaver role, which could not have been further from the truth.
"The role change from June Cleaver entering the work force and Ward Cleaver moving to stay home to be Mr. Mom is a transition of an equal division of labors in a healthy interdependent relationship, and not an illustration of a codependent relationship."
Sorry I mixed my metaphors.
Mr. Cleaver would never have been able to turn into Mr. Mom.
That would be the whole point. And my children's father was an avid feminist or as he called it an equalist.
It always mystified him how anyone could witness the act of birth and then call women the weaker sex.
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Ahhh but see it is at the heart of this problem.
The American culture breeds co-dependency and calls it normal and healthy.
Though granted our culture has nothing on many other cultures which take it to levels of borderline slavery and enshrine it in religion.
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First of all, although there were a few people who tried to fit the "supermom" description, by and large the feminist movement was championed by single women, lesbians, and women in less long term relationships; the single women were not worried about the wife's role, the lesbian couples were generally both feminists and couldn't fit the unequal division of codependency, and the "less long term" relationships had very little commitment (and definitely not enough for codependency).
Furthermore the "hero" in a codependent relationship is likely to be either a male or a female, not the always female that would be expected if feminism were to blame.
Furthermore, how many feminists do you know who would be happy with doing all the work while their husband sat around doing nothing? How many would yell something about slavery and then kick his useless butt to the curb instead?
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If you really want to figure out where the rising rates of codependency have come from (as well as abuse, divorce rates, etc.) than ask yourself: what does the word "love" truly mean and what do people think it means. When you are done with that you could also ask yourself what kept this stuff from happening as much before (assuming you don't wrongly believe that raping one's sisters (and the like) was a normal part of colonial america).
Try it if you don't believe me, even if you ignore the second thing, just looking at the definition of that one word should tell you everything you need to know about why this stuff is happening.
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I am not blaming Feminism for the rise in co-dependency.
Right the opposite in fact.
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This particular movement was directly related to the move from the Ward and June Cleaver mentality to present day more equality based mentality. During this transition, there were some very obvious growing pains.
"Furthermore, how many feminists do you know who would be happy with doing all the work while their husband sat around doing nothing? How many would yell something about slavery and then kick his useless butt to the curb instead?"
Frankly, many femenists at that time were man-haters and it wouldn't matter if they brought the moon and the sun on a silver platter, there would still be fault found in anything they did. But again, like I said, a lot of growing pains to transition from then to now.
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Right the opposite in fact."
"I don't think either of us were blaming the equal rights movement, however social and political uphevals (although often healthy in the long run) tend to shake things up and make dysfunctional patterns more redially apparent."
You both seem to be operating under the assumption that the dysfunctional patterns were always around (if slightly repressed) and only became more apparent (or were only dealt with, or were only expressed) after feminism. If you look at, say, the World War II era and see what happened when most of the men went off to war, it becomes obvious this isn't the case. If it were the case then the dependent women would have fallen apart when the men left or the dependent men would have been kicked out of the army for dereliction of duty (or else whipped into shape). Neither of these, on the whole, were very common so we know that the thing that would have unavoidably led to these was not around either.
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But lets step back and take a look at this. A lot of women stepped into the workforce at this time because their significant others were no longer around and the hardships of the time forced some very hard choices and lifestyles.
Codependency tends to fall apart during a war because the codependent parties separate from each other and are no longer able to coerce/control/manipulate and/or placate/serve each other.
But lets take a look at the social upheaval when the war was over and the soldiers returned home from the war expecting the women to leave the workforce and them to return to their jobs in what was considered a largely male dominated working class society.
All sorts of dysfunctions and contentions and drama unfolded.
Did it start here? Sherman, set the way back machine to 1290 AD, England.
King Edward (Plantagenet) I, Edward Longshanks, the English Justinian, Hammer of the Scots.
In an effort to subjugate and control the entire northern Scottish territories (who largely co-existed peacefully with England prior to this until the death of King Alexander III of Scotland). It was planned that Scotland and England would be united under one rule when the daughter of Alexander III of Scotland was set to be betrothed to the son of King Edward I of England. She unfortunately fell ill and died in Orkney when returning home from Norway during the Autumn.
Now, King Edward I displays all the classic symptoms of the dominating/controlling codependent personality. Especially when considering his history of subjugating and controlling anyone and everything around him that plunged England and Scotland into warfare that would last more than 300 years after he died. His cruel and callous disregard for anyone who stood up to him (and in particular the Scots) earned him the title of "Hammer of the Scots"
Did he feel anxious, angry or upset when people didn't do things he wanted them to do, or do things the way he wanted them to do them? * Check
Was he involved in activities that demanded all of his time and energy and neglected his family or himself? * Check again
Did he believe that most other people were incapable of taking care of themselves? * Absolutely, a big check here
Did he attempt to convince others of what they "should" think and how they "truly" felt? * Does beating torturing and killing and ravishing an entire society to illicit compliance count? Check again.
Did he become resentful when others did not let him help them? * In a very big way. Check.
Did he freely offer others advice and directions without being asked. * Often by way of royal command and decree. Check.
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"You both seem to be operating under the assumption that the dysfunctional patterns were always around (if slightly repressed) and only became more apparent (or were only dealt with, or were only expressed) after feminism."
Dysfunctional patterns HAVE always been around, shall we cite the Inquisition? The Crusades? How about nailing a man to a cross and jabbing him in the sides for preaching about love and kindness some 2000 years ago? Should we look at slavery? Or perhaps how Muhammad had wrote in the Koran that women were less than cattle and were the property of men to be bartered and sold?
Just because we are now making labels for them and defining them and studying them, does not negate the fact that they have always been there to varying degrees throughout history. Just because we have volumes of case studies now does not mean that they didn't exist when they were largely being ignored or swept under the rug. You recall the origins of the word 'hysteria'?
Granted, a lot of these are random dysfunctions and not specifically codependency, but remember that creating and defining a word to describe a codependent relationship did not conjure this dysfunctional relationship out of thin air, rather the terminology was developed to describe dysfunctional patterns that were observed in codependent relationships.
But lets look on the smaller one-on-one personal relationships of the European middle ages and the renaissance periods. Out of the dark ages and the age of chivalry, it became customary to put women on a pedestal in a knightly or courtly fashion. In so doing, it robbed the women of their ability to independently function in society and one n one. All of a sudden, their suitors, after putting them on the pedestal would never let them leave it.
Soon after that, women became largely objectified and deemed little more than children in mentality to be ordered about for their own good and having all their choices dictated to them by their fathers, and after that, their husbands when they wed.
This set up a precedence of the husbands taking the controlling parental provider role while the women fell into the subordinate child housewife role.
This was the expectation of this time period, and women that tried to express their independence were met with harsh reprisals from their family and from society at large.
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My whole point was that things are getting worse, which can easily be seen by any number of statistics ranging from academic, to divorce rates, even to crime rates. Have people been people who can choose to do wrong? yes. But have people been choosing to do wrong in the recent past as much as they are today? No.
That's all I was saying and to ask why this was happening (and to say that it wasn't feminism). Seeing a problem only makes people whiners. Giving a solution without understanding the problem only makes more problems. Accepting the problem is the first step to real change.
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I am in agreement that Feminism was not the 'cause', what I was trying to say was that any stasis of social unrest or upheaval can help to make dysfunctional situations more readily apparent by providing tension and stresses that has a tendency to illuminate the problem areas.
I only used Feminism as a recent example as it was directly related to the June/Ward Cleaver example that vicki_sine was using and the discussion surrounding the transition from then to now.
As to why it is happening, I can only speculate. However, as you pointed out, codependency is a 'socially learned dysfunctional response', and does not develop naturally. So I can guess, since the core nature of codependency is largely centered around how other people 'perceive' to codependent individual, this may be related to social pressures of conformity and putting high importance on image (how we present ourselves to others).
But like I said, that is merely speculation on my part.
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