You’re Codependent

There are many definitions used to talk about codependency today. The original concept of codependency was developed to acknowledge the responses and behaviors people develop from living with an alcoholic or substance abuser. A number of attributes can be developed as a result of those conditions. However, over the years, codependency has expanded into a definition which describes a dysfunctional pattern of living and problem-solving developed by family rules. One of many definitions of codependency is: a set of maladaptive, compulsive behaviors learned by family members in order to survive in a family which is experiencing great emotional pain and stress. Maladaptive means an inability for a person to develop behaviors which get needs met. Compulsive means acting in a way that goes against one’s conscious desires in which to behave. As adults, codependent people have a greater tendency to get involved in “toxic relationships“, in other words with people who are perhaps unreliable, emotionally unavailable, or needy. And the codependent person tries to provide and control everything within the relationship without addressing their own needs or desires; setting themselves up for continued unfulfillment. Even when a codependent person encounters someone with healthy boundaries, the codependent person still operates in their own system; they’re not likely to get too involved with people who have healthy boundaries. This of course creates problems that continue to recycle; if codependent people can’t get involved with people who have healthy behaviors and coping skills, then the problems continue into each new relationship. Generally, if you’re feeling unfulfilled consistently in relationships, you tend to be indirect, don’t assert yourself when you have a need, if you’re able to recognize you don’t play as much as others. http://reconciliationinc.com/individual-family-counseling/screenings-and-assessments/codependency/

… about people
and problems doesn’t help.
It doesn’t solve problems,
it doesn’t help other people,
and it doesn’t help us.
It is wasted energy.

Causes and Risk Factors for Sexual Addiction

No one factor is thought to cause sexual addiction, but there is thought to be biological, psychological, and social factors that contribute to the development of these disorders. For example, the intoxication associated with sexual addiction is thought to be the result of changes in certain areas and chemicals in the brain that are elicited by the compulsion. Research differs somewhat in terms of gender-based patterns of sexual addiction. For example, some studies describe males who are introverted and highly educated as more inclined to develop an Internet addiction, including sexual Internet addiction. Other studies indicate that middle-aged women using home computers were more at risk for Internet sexual addiction. Psychological risk factors for sexual addiction are thought to include depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. The presence of a learning disability increases the risk of developing a sex addiction as well. As people with a history of suffering from any addiction are at risk for developing another addiction, being dependent on something else makes it more likely for sexual addiction to occur. Sufferers of these disorders tend to be socially isolated and have personality traits like insecurity, impulsivity, compulsive behaviors, trouble with relationship stability and intimacy, low ability to tolerate frustration, and a tendency to have trouble coping with emotions. People who are sexually abused are at somewhat higher risk of developing a sexual addiction. By Roxanne Dryden-Edwards, MD and Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD http://www.medicinenet.com/sexual_addiction/page2.htm#what_are_causes_and_risk_factors_for_sexual_addiction

Just as a heroin addict chases
a substance-induced high,
sex addicts are bingeing
on chemicals — in this case,
their own hormones.
Alexandra Katehakis

Often Misguided

Slavery is at the heart of dysfunctional families. When people serve others because they are forced to do so, freedom to truly serve is lost. Slavery hardens the heart, creates anger, bitterness and resentment. On the other hand, true love often finds its expression in acts of serve. It is service freely given, not out of fear but out of choice. It comes out of personal discovery that “it is more blessed to give than to receive. Dr. Gary Chapman author of “The Five Love Languages”

Lack of love from parents
often motivates their children
to go searching for love
in other relationships.
This search is often misguided
and leads to further disappointment.
Dr. Gary Chapman

Controlling Anger

Close, trusting relationships with others help you avoid depression after life stresses and help prevent illness, speed recovery, and promote longevity. But a bad relationship can cause depression and make your life seem like hell. In the best relationships, the partners calmly and tactfully talk about irritations, disagreements, and conflicts without blaming each other and then problem solve, negotiate, and compromise. Occasional arguments with yelling can feel good when it unearths important issues and leads to problem solving, but it often results in hurt feelings, sabotages problem solving so that problems become chronic, damages trust and closeness, and may lead to a partner feeling very justified in lying or deceiving by omission. Research shows sharing feelings is much more important to closeness and happiness in relationships than the sharing of facts. Work on recognizing anger early, before it escalates. Point out when voices get louder, faster, more tense, or more demanding. Use unkind sarcasm or failure to follow through on commitments as a clue to anger. Once you recognize your anger, make a polite request. If it works, you don’t even need to express your anger. If it doesn’t work, use your anger to tactfully insist on negotiation, compromise, and problem solving. The anger will pass if you accept it and express it respectfully. Anger often covers up feelings of hurt, insecurity, inadequacy, or fear. Use “I feel (an emotion) when (this happened)” statements, but not “I feel you …” or “I feel (an emotion) when you …” statements, which often lead to critical, blaming comments. From “Controlling Anger in Relationships ” by Chuck T. Falcon http://www.sensiblepsychology.com/improving_anger.htm

Relationships don’t
always make sense.
Especially
from the outside
Sarah Dessen

Male Dependence on Women

A healthy functional human relationship is one that is based on exchanging value for value with another person. Think of your close male friends. You respect and admire their character based on their virtues. You derive satisfaction from spending time with them in response to the values they hold in common with you. In contrast the average modern relationship a man has with a woman is one that is very twisted and corrupt when observed from a rational standard. “The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption… …the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of love.” -Howard Roark “The Fountainhead” Frequently we discuss the idea that women are parasitic by nature and very often in practice in our modern society. What is rarely discussed is how the majority of men in marriages and relationships are also parasites but in a different way. Hence forth in this post I will refer to these men as Coppertops because they serve as the store of energy and resources that women and society feed off of. The coppertop spends his entire life in pursuit of this one addiction he values more than anything, even sex. He gets it wherever he can, from friends, family and society but most often in a romantic relationship with a woman. This visceral need is exactly what turns him into the slave of the spirit that Roark discusses. Once he has it he will go to any lengths to keep it coming. He will offer up his complete subservience and enter into a marriage even when he knows it to be rationally against his interests. Once he has become her slave he will tolerate nearly any abuse and hardship in the name of his love for her, but in reality it is done out of his desperate need for her validation. In order to feel himself a “real man” he has to feel needed by someone. He has to feel useful and will gladly be a utility for her while at the same time she is in fact useless and feeds off his hard-earned resources, offering little to nothing in return. Only her non-existent “love” which he accepts in the form of him being validated as a useful being. Once the female parasite has finished feeding off her host and gives in to her natural hypergamous needs, she will dump him and move on to the “bigger better deal”. To the hardcore coppertop, this event will utterly destroy him. It will annihilate his spirit. The one thing he needed from her more than anything has been completely revoked and rejected. http://www.mgtowforums.com/forums/gyow-general-discussion/19758-male-dependence-women-leads-mutual-corruption-parasitism.html

Life is like a game of poker,
you are dealt a hand,
and only you decide
what to keep
and what to throw away…
Unknown

A Beaten-Down Man

A codependent man is a man who is often a high functioning husband with a wife who has a physical, mental, and spiritual need for a mind-altering substance, such as alcohol or drugs. His wife’s extreme need for her substance has caused her for years to manipulate this man by every means known to a woman who has stood up before institutions full of relatives, a respected preacher, and God pledging his total allegiance to her for life “…till death do them part.” Almost all of the literature on codependency is written by women for women, leaving the codependent man basically unstudied. This is for a very simple reason. He is under everybody’s radar screen because he has to be! …the twin diseases of alcoholism and codependency have isolated him. His preoccupation with an alcoholic wife has robbed him of the time and energy to form trusting relationships with other men, and he pays a tremendous internal price for that missing element. It is not only his lack of time to develop relationships with other men that isolates this codependent man. His various defense mechanisms such as perfectionism and over-achievement serve to make other men shun him. There is also his underlying anger, mostly born of fear. Other men sense this. He is so obviously not at ease in his own skin. He over-reacts, especially to any slight criticism. So his ears are either perked in constant high alert, or flattened with anger and frustration. His frustration, though constant, cannot be voiced for an important reason; he cannot identify it! It is called denial. Denial is his most immediate and user-friendly shock absorber against the painful emotional shocks delivered at random from his first family during childhood. Studies show that most codependent men came from highly dysfunctional families that included at least one alcoholic or addicted parent. All he ever knew was this existence, so that feels normal. He just went out and found a wife who would treat him in the same way that the people who were supposed to love him unconditionally always did. A little boy can’t win against big parents, and a beaten-down man can’t win against an abusive addicted wife. http://www.articlesbase.com/mens-health-articles/we-codependent-men-we-mute-coyotes-629880.html

If I treat you
the way you treated me,
then you would hate me.
Sushan R Sharma

She Hit Me

According to a Penn professor who studies these things, every American man has about a 28 percent chance of being struck by a woman at some point in his life (in related news, the number of girls ages 10 to 17 arrested for aggravated assault has doubled in the last 20 years). And yet no one seems to take the phenomenon that seriously. Maybe it’s because men, generally speaking, are bigger and stronger, and we assume there’s a real limit to the physical damage women could actually inflict. We don’t picture these scuffles resulting in bloody noses and black eyes or a trip to the station house. Furthermore, pop culture has made the idea of a pretty girl whaling on a guy a wacky comedy staple — Angelina Jolie smashing wine bottles over Brad Pitt’s head in Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Cameron Diaz cold cocking Edward Burns in The Holiday were both played for laughs. But the reality of getting hit by your girlfriend isn’t so sexy or hilarious. A male friend of mine — let’s call him Tom — was hit several times by his. “We’d get into these exhausting fights,” he tells me. “Like, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., where nothing would turn the volume down except sex and sleep. With her, everything was fine in the morning, but I was upset for days. She actually seemed to think it was sexy. I remember her showing me finger-shaped bruises on her arms where I had restrained her from swinging at me — and she raised an eyebrow, made a saucy comment. But I was petrified. I was doing stuff like putting the knives up on the very top shelf. For me, it wasn’t fun at all.” But what, really, does it feel like for the guy? First, there’s the shock of betrayal and a palpable urge to hit back. Second, there’s outrage at the presumption that this won’t happen. This is all perceived through a haze of humiliation at the fact that, yes, you got hit by a girl — and it hurt. The experience tends to bring some deep-tissue change to the relationship. “The second time [she hit me], I started to feel threatened by what she could potentially do,” says Tom. “Not just physically but emotionally. I started not trusting her.” In the end, the best reason not to hit your guy is also the most empowering: You don’t have to. You can hurt us way worse with a withering glance and some choice words. Or by banishing us to the couch, where we sometimes belong. From an article by Chris Norris http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/abusive-women

All violence is the result of people
tricking themselves into believing
that their pain derives from other people
and that consequently those people
deserve to be punished.
Marshall Rosenberg

When Your Relationship Worries Get to You

There are always times when you worry about whether or not your relationship is going well. You fret over something that your partner said to you, or are convinced that you said the wrong thing to your partner. The concerns may fleet through your mind and you figure you misunderstood…or you may become so preoccupied that you can hardly concentrate on anything except why you haven’t heard from your partner. People high in what psychologists call attachment anxiety chronically assume the worst about their relationship partners. They fear being dumped at any given moment, and as a result, may seem overly needy and clingy. This behavior, of course, only makes their situation worse unless they have a patient and understanding partner. Israeli psychologist Guy Doron and a team of researchers from the School of Psychology in Herziliya in a December 2013 publication believe that attachment anxiety is only part of the picture when it comes to explaining the fears and worries that people develop about their relationship partners. Doron and colleagues propose that some people fall victim to double relationship-vulnerability in which they are not only anxiously attached, but also rely heavily on their relationships to define their feelings of self-worth. The doubly vulnerable may be particularly prone to another set of relationship concerns in which they become obsessed or preoccupied with doubts and fears about the future of their relationship. The combination of double relationship vulnerability with obsessional worries can spell emotional chaos to individuals with these psychological tendencies. Start by identifying the triggers that set off your worries, whether it’s a missed phone call or just something thought or event that makes you wonder whether your partner truly loves you, or vice versa. Once you get past that first step, then you can work on changing those troublesome thoughts. Next, see if you can reduce your urges to act on your thoughts. Compulsive behaviors often do follow obsessional thoughts. From an article by Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201312/what-do-when-your-relationship-worries-get-you

Worrying is like a rocking chair;
it gives you something to do,
but it gets you nowhere.
Glenn Turner

You Just Don’t Understand Part II

Independence vs. Intimacy: Since women often think in terms of closeness and support, they struggle to preserve intimacy. Men, concerned with status, tend to focus more on independence. These traits can lead women and men to starkly different views of the same situation. When Josh’s old high-school friend called him at work to say he’d be in town, Josh invited him to stay for the weekend. That evening he told Linda they were having a house guest. Linda was upset. How could Josh make these plans without discussing them with her beforehand? She would never do that to him. “Why don’t you tell your friend you have to check with your wife?” she asked. Josh replied, “I can’t tell my friend, ‘I have to ask my wife for permission’!” To Josh, checking with his wife would mean he was not free to act on his own. It would make him feel like a child or an underling. But Linda actually enjoys telling someone, “I have to check with Josh.” It makes her feel good to show that her life is intertwined with her husband’s. Advice vs. Understanding: Eve had a benign lump removed from her breast. When she confided to her husband, Mark, that she was distressed because the stitches changed the contour of her breast, he answered, “You can always have plastic surgery.” This comment bothered her. “I’m sorry you don’t like the way it looks,” she protested. “But I’m not having any more surgery!” Mark was hurt and puzzled. “I don’t care about a scar,” he replied. “It doesn’t bother me at all.” “Then why are you telling me to have plastic surgery?” she asked. “Because you were upset about the way it looks.” Eve felt like a heel. Mark had been wonderfully supportive throughout her surgery. How could she snap at him now? The problem stemmed from a difference in approach. To many men a complaint is a challenge to come up with a solution. Mark thought he was reassuring Eve by telling her there was something she could do about her scar. But often women are looking for emotional support, not solutions.When my mother tells my father she doesn’t feel well, he invariably offers to take her to the doctor. Invariably, she is disappointed with his reaction. Like many men, he is focused on what he can do, whereas she wants sympathy. by Deborah Tannen http://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/you-just-don%E2%80%99t-understand-by-deborah-tannen/

The way we communicate
with others and with ourselves
ultimately determines
the quality of our lives
Anthony Robbins

Spanking Makes Kids More Aggressive

Though almost three-quarters of Americans believe spanking a child is good for them, I’ve never been able to understand how we figured that hitting a child could teach a child not to hit others. Catherine Taylor at Tulane University and her colleagues reviewed data from a 20-city study that took place between 1998 and 2005. Data from almost 2500 children shows that 3-year-olds who are spanked twice a month are one and half times more likely to be aggressive at age five than children who are not spanked. What’s particularly interesting is that Taylor and her group were able to rule out the confounding effect of factors like the mother’s own history of maltreatment, intimate partner violence in the home, or the mother’s substance use, depression and stress. They even ruled out whether the parents considered aborting the child before birth. Though any one of these factors might create a home environment that makes a child more likely to be aggressive, none of these factors explained the difference between the children who were spanked and those who were not. On most issues I follow the lead of the parents with whom I work. I can be convinced of many things, from bedtimes to mealtimes. But tell me that spanking a child teaches them discipline and I have to shake my head. “Do your child a favor,” I say. “Teach them discipline through words and actions that are neither violent nor degrading.” Your child is much more likely to succeed… From an article by Michael Ungar, Ph.D. in Nurturing Resilience http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nurturing-resilience/201009/spanking-makes-kids-more-aggressive-the-research-is-clear

Spanking and verbal criticism
have become, to many parents,
more important tools
of child rearing than approval.
Phil Donahue