How to Handle Codependency Issues in Friends and Family

Handling codependency issues with friends and family requires you to recognize why and where the codependency is coming from. In lay terms, codependency is I feel better when they feel better, I feel worse when they feel worse. When you’re attached to somebody at that level, you’re not helping them and certainly not helping yourself. Feeling a certain way based on how another person feels is a very unhealthy way to live, and what ends up happening is you start to forget who you are as a person. You start allowing yourself to let other situations—people, places, things, and relationships—suffer. The more time you spend trying to make somebody else feel better, the less you care for yourself.

How Our Interventions Help Codependency

Based on Family Systems Theory and the  CRAFT Model, our S.A.F.E.® (Self Awareness Family Education®) intervention model is the understanding that you don’t reward negative behavior—you reward positive behavior. One must be careful about how and when positive behavior is rewarded. Many families have made the mistake of rewarding their loved one too soon, which has caused an adverse effect and compromised the loved one’s recovery. When you are codependent on somebody, there will inevitably be enabling. When you are codependent, and you enable, you can and will send the message that their negative behaviors have something called positive consequences. Behavior is not defined by whether or not the behavior is good or bad; it’s defined by the outcome of what you get from the behavior. So, in other words, the more you get a positive result, regardless of the behavior being good or bad, the more of that behavior you will engage in. You won’t change that behavior until there’s a negative consequence versus a positive one. 

How Codependent Enabling Behaviors can turn into a positive reward for Family and Friends

When you’re codependent or enabling, whether you’re a friend or a family member, you create a scenario where the other person learns that negative behaviors, or acting out negative behaviors, bring a positive outcome. For example, if your loved one were always to get what they wanted when they lied or manipulated to achieve something, and it worked every time or most of the time, they will continue to lie to seek the reward of obtaining what they want by lying. When you let your loved one live in your home consequence-free with no accountability, their negative lifestyle achieves a positive reward for them. At first, this would be a negative consequence for the other people living in the house, such as the parents or spouse. Over time, codependency, enabling, and acquiring dysfunctional family roles turn into a positive reward. How is that? What happens is that the people living with the substance user or loved one with mental disorders start to feel needed in the relationship and begin to develop a purpose for being their loved one’s caretaker. Over time, the family begins to believe they are keeping the person alive and safe, and if they were to do anything else, they would worsen the situation. When the codependent enabling behavior of friends and family shifts to this unhealthy perspective, it allows the intended patient to excel in their addiction, their mental health, or their dysfunctional behaviors, which hurts the whole family; now, everyone in the family system is receiving a positive reward for their negative behaviors.

The shift goes against everything the CRAFT model of intervention and addiction treatment says. Now we have the family feeling a positive reward for negative behavior, and the substance user being rewarded for their negative behavior, and the whole family system implodes on itself. When you’re codependent, you’re sending the message of rewarding negative behavior, and that doesn’t move people through the stages of change. All the while, you believe your loved one has to want help, ask for help, or hit bottom, and your actions are preventing that from happening. When you’re a codependent enabler, you think it’s all about your loved one, and it’s not. It’s all about you. 

Detaching From The Addict or Alcoholic

Until the intended patient’s family and friends learn detachment, they will continue to send the message of validation for both their loved one and themselves. Nobody should need to feel better based on whether or not someone else does. At no time should somebody else’s demise make you feel worse and in some cases, feel better. As you read above, dysfunctional family shifts allow this; you feel better and make them worse simultaneously. These are not necessarily your intentions, and this is what happens over time. If somebody we love is sick, we can get depressed. If somebody’s happy, we can and should be glad for them. We are saying you do not need to feel a certain way based on someone else. You do not have to do things for others to make you feel better; at its core, that is called selfishness. Families start to engage in negative codependent enabling behaviors because they think it is helping their loved one. Over time, the family continues to do it because it makes them feel better. It turns from thinking you’re helping your loved one to hurting everyone.

Codependency is not a disorder according to the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—published by the American Psychiatric Association. The disorder in the DSM-5 is dependent personality disorder. The most significant difference between codependency and dependent personality disorder is the nature of the relationship. A person with dependent personality disorder is codependent in all relationships; somebody who is codependent has the same behaviors, but it’s specific to one individual. In other words, in addiction and mental health, you are codependent on the patient, and you enable them, making both them and you worse. 

Both codependency and dependent personality disorder take away your ability to be who you are. It takes away your values and your morals. And it doesn’t help the other person, and it isn’t helping you or others, even though you may think it is. When we look at friends and family members in a family system, and we look at someone with a substance use or mental disorder, it’s challenging for them to accept that their negative behaviors have adverse outcomes. People often state that the person has to want help and hit bottom, or nothing will change. Although there is truth to that, codependency and enabling prevent it. Our intervention program helps families see where their codependency and enabling are coming from. It is not so much what it’s doing for your loved one but what it’s doing for you.