Codependency

Codependency looks like closeness but feels like loneliness. When your sense of self requires another person to function, you are never truly with them — you are managing them.

Codependency is one of the less-discussed paths to profound loneliness. You can be deeply enmeshed with another person and still feel desperately alone — because the relationship is not between two whole people but between a person and the anxiety of losing them.

Codependency is a pattern in which your emotional wellbeing is primarily regulated through another person's state — their approval, their presence, their needs.

When someone is codependent, their own emotions are largely determined by the other person's emotions. If the other person is upset, they are upset. If the other person is happy, they can be happy. Their sense of safety depends on the other person's stability. This creates a relationship that is intensely focused on the other person — which can look like love but functions more like survival management.

The loneliness of codependency is that you lose track of who you are outside this dynamic. Your interests, your opinions, your needs — all of it has been subordinated to managing the relationship that provides your emotional regulation. When the relationship is gone, or even when it is simply difficult, you feel completely empty because the relationship was providing the self.

Codependency tends to narrow the world. Other relationships get neglected. The codependent person becomes increasingly dependent on the one relationship they are managing.

Other friendships drop away — you are too preoccupied, too anxious, too focused on the primary relationship to maintain them. Over time the social world shrinks to one person. When that relationship becomes difficult or ends, the isolation is total.

Building a broader social world — maintaining connections with multiple people, developing a sense of self that exists independently of any one relationship — is part of recovery from codependency. It is slow work, and in the meantime the loneliness is real.

Part of recovering from codependency is rediscovering what you actually think and feel, separate from another person's reality.

Talking to someone who has no stake in you — a stranger — can be a useful practice in discovering your own voice. There is no one to manage, no approval to seek, no relationship to preserve. You can say what you actually think and notice what comes up.

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