Codependency Quotes

“There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?'

If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.”
― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

“Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They under-react. But rarely do they act. They react to the problems, pains, lives, and behaviors of others. They react to their own problems, pains, and behaviors.”
― Melody Beattie, Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

“Ever since people first existed, they have been doing all the things we label "codependent." They have worried themselves sick about other people. They have tried to help in ways that didn't help. They have said yes when they meant no. They have tried to make other people see things their way. They have bent over backwards avoiding hurting people's feelings and, in so doing, have hurt themselves. They have been afraid to trust their feelings. They have believed lies and then felt betrayed. They have wanted to get even and punish others. They have felt so angry they wanted to kill. They have struggled for their rights while other people said they didn't have any. They have worn sackcloth because they didn't believe they deserved silk.”
― Melody Beattie, Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

“The psyche cannot tolerate a vacuum of love. In the severely abused or deprived child, pain, dis-ease, and violance rush in to fill the void. In the average person in our culture, who has been only "normally" deprived of touch, anxiety and an insatiable hunger for posessions replace the missing eros. The child lacking a sense of welcome, joyous belonging, gratuitous security, will learn to hoard the limited supply of affection. According to the law of psychic compensation, not being held leads to holding on, grasping, addiction, posessiveness. Gradually, things replace people as a source of pleasure and security. When the gift of belonging with is denied, the child learns that love means belongin to. To the degree we are arrested at this stage of development, the needy child will dominate our motivations. Other people and things (and there is fundamentally no difference) will be seen as existing solely for the purpose of "my" survival and satisfaction. "Mine" will become the most important word.”
― Sam Keen, The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving

“I HOLD

If I could have had
him,
I could have let
him
go.

But without
the having
there was
nothing—
so to the nothing
I
hold.”
― Coco J. Ginger

“Many of us live in denial of who we truly are because we fear losing someone or something-and there are times that if we don't rock the boat, too often the one we lose is ourselves...It feels good to be accepted, loved, and approved of by others, but often the membership fee to belong to that club is far too high of a price to pay.”
― Dennis Merritt Jones

“We Are Lovable
Even if the most important person in your world rejects you, you are still real, and you are still okay.”
― Melody Beattie, Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

“If you live your life to please everyone else, you will continue to feel frustrated and powerless. This is because what others want may not be good for you. You are not being mean when you say NO to unreasonable demands or when you express your ideas, feelings, and opinions, even if they differ from those of others.”
― Beverly Engel, The Nice Girl Syndrome: Stop Being Manipulated and Abused -- And Start Standing Up for Yourself

“You’re what gives me strength. If I am what centers you, Nikki, then you are what anchors me. Every time I touch you, every time I bury myself deep inside you—Nikki, don’t you see?
You are the talisman of my life, and if I lose my grip on you, then I have lost myself.”
― J. Kenner, Complete Me

“A codependent person is one who has let another person's behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person's behavior.”
― Melody Beattie, Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

“Once they have been affected---once "it" sets in---codependency takes on a life of its own. It is similar to catching pneumonia or picking up a destructive habit. Once you've got it, you've got it.

If you want to get rid of it, YOU have to do something to make it go away. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. Your codependency becomes your problem; solving your problems is your responsibility.”
― Melody Beattie, Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

“There's always something in it for the person who is allowing to be taken advantage of." Psychotherapist David in Type 1 Sociopath”
― P.A. Speers, Type 1 Sociopath - When Difficult People Are More Than Just Difficult People

“sometimes
i love you means
i want to love you

sometimes
i love you means
i’ll stay a little while longer

sometimes
i love you means
i’m not sure how to leave

sometimes
i love you means
i have nowhere else to go”
― Rupi Kaur, Home Body

“It is one thing to know about your dysfunctional habits but quite another to change them.”
― David W. Earle LPC- Love is Not Enough

“Those highs, even if they were fake and we knew that they wouldn't last forever, felt so real when we were in them. That's where I was now. I just couldn't discern the ephemeral nature of what I was experiencing, and didn't want to. Perhaps what I had with Theo was as synthetic as what Claire had with her men, but it felt so good- how could we ever even care when we were in it?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Stepping out of other people’s drama cycles was scary, weird, and difficult for me at first. I felt guilty for keeping the focus on myself, and I wondered how anyone could possibly survive without my overinvolvement in their lives. (Spoiler alert: They all survived. And I gradually started hanging out with healthier people.)”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“I was not just sorrowful that first summer after Rayya died but also, at times, enraged. It was not only anger at Rayya’s absence that I was feeling; it was anger at myself for how much of myself I had given away—and anger at what she had left behind for me to clean up. She had assigned me the task of handling the details of her estate, for instance, which did not turn out to be an easy job. Rayya had been both contradictory and grandiose with her friends and loved ones about what her bank account actually contained and how she wished her money and possessions to be distributed. With a furiously clenched jaw, I did my best to clean up the confusion she had left behind and to manage everyone’s frustration—including my own. The financial gifts that she had promised to her friends I paid from my own account, because her own account was pretty much empty. I paid off her credit card bills, too—although people told me this was a stupid thing to do. (“Why pay the bills of the dead? What are they gonna do? Dock her paycheck?”)

But martyrdom is a central characteristic of codependency, and so of course I paid her bills—not generously, mind you, but angrily. Victimly. “Why am I still down here serving you,” I remember shouting at Rayya in the woods one day, “when you get to float off into heaven and become fucking music?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“You can’t give an addict a plan because we can’t follow a plan—not even our own plans. (Especially not our own plans.) Until the miracle of recovery happens, we addicts only ever have one plan: Use.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“People often talk about crawling into the rooms of recovery on their knees, but when I turned to twelve-step for the second time, I felt more like I was walking in there with my hands up—like a career criminal turning herself in, ready at last to give up the game.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“As I listened to the other addicts share their life experiences, I began to hear the story of my own life, told in a hundred different voices.

I heard from people who’d had some of the same painful childhood experiences as me, which had led them into the same unmanageable behaviors and compulsions.

I heard from people who, just like me, had blown up marriage after marriage—their own marriages and the marriages of others.

I heard from people who’d lost their jobs, their sanity, or all their money and belongings because of their obsession with some person or another. (“I took one look at that guy from across the bar and said, ‘I would follow that man straight to hell’—and then I did!” said one woman, while the rest of us nodded in quiet understanding.)

I heard from people who had been living in desperate yearning for decades with partners who were emotionally unavailable, or who had lived their whole lives in degrading servitude to people who did not respect them or love them back, or who were pining in fantasy about relationships that had ended years earlier. I heard from people who had traded sex for love, or love for sex, or both for money.

I heard about insecure attachment style and avoidance and unconscious compliance.

I heard about emotional anorexia and cortisol addiction.

I heard terms I’d never heard before but that immediately made sense to me (because I’d been doing those things for years but didn’t know they had names): love bombing, trauma bombing, attention pulling, ecstatic recall, digital stalking, insta-macy.

I heard about assigning magical qualities to others and making them into your higher power.

I heard about mistaking pity, lust, or loneliness for love.

I heard about sexualizing our feelings of guilt, shame, fear, rage, and grief.

I heard about rape, abuse, pregnancies, venereal diseases, pornography, prostitution, suicide, violence . . .

I did not hear a single thing in those meetings that I could not identify with at some level. In fact, to this day, I have still never heard anything in any twelve-step meeting that shocks me. Whenever I hear people talking about their most self-destructive behaviors, I’m either like, “Yeah, I’ve done that” or “Yeah, I would probably do that” or “Yeah, I can see why someone would do that, given the chance.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“It was difficult to know where to find comfort, especially since I could no longer medicate myself with my oldest and deepest fantasy: that someday in the future a magical person would show up, fall in love with me, and fix everything.

Nobody would be showing up now.
There would be no fixing of anything.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“It was becoming evident to me that addiction is addiction is addiction—that all the ways in which people binge, hoard, numb, act out, control, and self-medicate are just equally desperate attempts to cover up the same deep spiritual pain. In fact, I don’t think there’s a single room in the twelve-step universe that I don’t relate to or qualify for, at some level or another, because my anxious mind never stops looking for ways to escape its host of human dilemmas.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“My own sober dating plan is approximately three pages long, and it includes such items as “NO WEEKLONG FIRST DATES.” My plan also forbids me from texting obsessively between dates, dropping any existing plans or projects because of a new relationship, falling into fantasy with someone I have met in my travels (aka not in real life), moving virtual strangers into my home, trying to rescue unrecovered alcoholics or drug addicts; buying expensive gifts for new lovers; or sharing bank accounts with anyone, ever.

If all this sounds boring, or feels like it removes the spontaneity and intensity from romance, that is exactly the point. Spontaneity, for sex and love addicts, is exceedingly dangerous, and intensity is something I am wise to avoid.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“My ultimate goal in recovery is not to end up in a healthy relationship with the perfect partner, my ultimate goal in recovery is to end up in a healthy relationship with myself.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“Like all sex and love addicts, I can feel someone’s attention and attraction from a hundred yards away—hell, I can feel them from the other side of a continent.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“My mind was spinning around this inflaming and infuriating thought: Why can’t I be a normal person who does normal things like normal people?

That’s when I heard Rayya’s voice.
“Because you aren’t normal, babe,” she said. “You’re an addict. And addicts can’t do normal things like normal people.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“I read today that all addiction is a form of misplaced worship.
I get that.
And I’ve certainly done that.
I’ve mistaken the delivery device of heavenly pleasure for heaven itself.
And thus I have worshipped so many things— and so many people, too.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“I find these days that all I want for Rayya anymore—if you can be said to want anything for somebody who has been dead for more than six years—is that she be free. Utterly and totally free.

“True love always liberates the beloved,” says my friend Martha Beck, and only now do I feel that I understand the generous, unfettered spirit behind these words.

I want Rayya to be free from the need to take care of me or anybody else—even from beyond the grave. I want her to be free to vanish into the eternal mystery with all her ancestors, and to become music—because that is what she always wanted to be.

And I can feel that Rayya wants me to be free, too. She wants me to live autonomously and happily and peacefully on this side of the divide— in a world that I have finally come to accept as my own, and from which I am no longer trying to escape. (It’s not such a bad world, actually, once you surrender to reality, and once you finally start showing up for your own care.)”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“There is a prayer that we recite in those rooms that I love very much. It simply says, “Dear God—thank you for all that has been given, for all that has been taken away, and for all that remains.”

Like many gratefully recovering addicts, I stand in amazement at all that remains—astonished that I was allowed to keep anything, after all my many years of madness and acting out. By all rights, I should have lost absolutely everything in the course of my various and sundry maelstroms and upheavals. Many people with minds as disordered as mine have indeed lost everything.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

“Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.”
― Kirsten Bonaventura, Psy.D