Codependent relationships with siblings, parents, partners or friends

People fail to identify that they play dysfunctional roles of rescuers while neglecting their own well-being.

Codependent relationships intensify emotional distress. They escalate feelings poorly and they make people forget their own well-being.  Rescuers can’t feel good about themselves, build healthy self-esteem or balanced relationships. Mostly they don’t know they are in codependent relationships until emotional distress grows into feeling very poorly.

Involvement in codependent relationships escalates dysfunctional because it is not the rescuers who has to face the consequences of doing wrongly.

Rescuers personalize problems of others, keep trying to help or resolve; absorb responsibilities and “forget” that their partners are adults who make their own (good or bad) choices. Codependent attachment to people who can’t take care of their problems invites rescuers on the scene to fix. The full blown of codependency blinds rescuer’s ability to distinguish, prioritize, set boundaries or say goodbye to codependency in relationships. Rescuers believe that their worries and involvement protects the needy (codependent) partners. Rescuers maintain codependency because they fear that once they withdraw they cause harm, while the other partner in a codependent relationship expects the rescuers to smooth their problems out.

Codependent relationships go too far from emotional health of both parties. They make people impaired because rescuers can’t do enough to ease negative consequences of partner’s poor behavior or prevent their doing wrongly in the future. Thus, while rescuers alleviate problems the needy parts of codependent relationship never experience the full impact of their poor choices, immature behavior and they never learn or change.