Alcoholism or other addictive diseases not only affect the addicts themselves. The lives of relatives are also massively overshadowed by this. Especially the life partners and the children suffer – sometimes more than the patient himself, who can escape into addiction. But even friends, acquaintances or work colleagues can develop a co-dependency.
Quick Overview
- Definition: Co-dependency affects relatives of addicts whose lives are overshadowed and addicted to addiction. They develop strategies for dealing with the disease that harm them.
- What to do? Do not support the addiction, but help those affected to exit, take responsibility for themselves and seek help for themselves.
- Tips for dealing with addicts: To appeal to the addiction, to stay with oneself, to give up reproaches, to signal helpfulness, but not addiction support, to remain consistent.
- Signs of co-dependency: Resetting one’s own needs, covering up the illness, assuming the tasks of addicts, trying to control and preventing consumption, feelings of shame and guilt
What is co-dependency?
Co-dependency means that a person is involved in the addiction of a close person. The addiction of the opposite is often the dominant theme – the co-dependent itself takes a back seat. He develops strategies for dealing with the disease of the addict, which harms him.
This can happen in many ways – such as the co-dependent tries to protect the addicted from the consequences of his addiction, which stabilizes the addictive behavior unintentionally. But also by controlling the addicted and trying to keep him from consuming with all his might. In any case, a co-addict becomes so caught up in addiction.
Ways out of co-dependency
Getting rid of co-dependency is not easy. Straight loyal and facing people quickly struggle with guilt feelings to abandon the patient. But getting rid of co-dependency does not necessarily mean abandoning addicts and dropping them.
The following measures will help you out of co-dependency:
Accept the disease
Addiction is a disease. It can only be overcome if the person concerned accepts to be sick, and his suffering is great enough to take up the struggle with dependency. You can support him, but you can not relieve him. The first step is that you acknowledge that the person is addicted to addiction.
Stop protecting your loved one
Show readiness to help the patient on his way out of addiction. But make it clear that you do not support him in his addiction. If you protect him from the consequences of his addiction, you prevent him from seeking help. They only prolong the disease process in this way.
Seek help
Seek help to free yourself from co-dependency. Contact a counseling center and seek the support of a support group for relatives of addicts.
Take responsibility for your own life
Do not let the addiction of your relative become your center of life. Take responsibility for yourself, not for the addicted person. Take care of your own needs and interests, be nicknamed.
With your increasing dependence on the addict, the worry of losing you may even help him seek help. This hope, however, should not be the main motive of your cut-off.
Say goodbye to guilt
Even if things did not go smoothly in your relationship, you have no responsibility for the addiction of your loved one.
Tips for dealing with addiction
Addictions are a taboo. It is therefore difficult to address the topic. One fears to shame the other, to unjustly suspect and offend others. And in fact, people whose consumption of intoxicants is problematic often reject and thin-skinned.
Doing nothing and looking away is still not a good option. By itself the problem will not be solved. Only when someone holds the mirror up to the person concerned does he receive an impulse to deal with the problem.
- Be brave: If you feel your friend, colleague, parent, or partner is overconsuming or developing addictive behaviors, speak to it.
- Stay with yourself: Describe to the addict how the consumption or the addictive behavior affects you and how it affects you.
- Refrain from allegations and teachings: An addicted person will only block them. Addiction is a disease that takes time and strength to overcome.
- Signal that you will help him on his way out of addiction. But make it very clear that you do not support him (further) in his addiction.
- Do not expect too much: do not expect immediate improvement from a conversation. However, your honest feedback can help the person concerned to deal with his problem.
- Be consistent.
How is co-dependency expressed?
Co-dependency has many faces. If at the beginning it is still in the foreground to apologize for the behavior of the addicted person and to protect him, this is often followed by a control phase. In this the co-dependent tries to prevent the patient from drug use or addictive behavior – usually unsuccessful. His failure leads to anger or resignation and then often turns into blame, threats and rejection. These individual phases may or may not be consecutive.
To protect
A first impulse is usually to protect addicts from the consequences of their consumption. For example, one apologizes to an alcoholic at the employer for being ill with the flu, although he is actually severely hungover.
Many co-addicts also perform tasks that the addict himself can not do – children of alcoholic mothers take care of their little siblings, parents pay the debts of their addicted child, the wife eliminates the devastation her partner has been causing in the intoxication, colleagues take work off the alcoholic who does not master it.
Hide
Add to this the shame – addiction is a disease that is highly stigmatized. The problem is also downplayed and hidden in the circle of friends and family. The co-addict is ashamed of being addicted to alcohol or being addicted to gambling or being constantly stoned by the partner, daughter or mother.
To apologize
It is also common for co-addicts to apologize for the addiction. Stress, a difficult childhood, a job loss – all the reasons why the addict can not cope without the addictive substance. This can go so far that co-addicts provide the addict with his addictive substance.
Whether protecting, concealing or apologizing – the alleged help makes the problem worse. Since the addict does not feel the full effects of his illness, the suffering remains bearable. As a result, he can crowd out the extent of his illness. The person concerned will seek no help and carry on as before. As hard as it may be: addictive diseases do not help anymore in the long term.
Check
Another strategy of alleged help is the attempt to prevent addictive drug use through control. Many co-addicts throw away the alcohol, control the breath and pockets of the addicted, try to monitor him closely. However, even this strategy is doomed to failure. The addict will only find ever more sophisticated ways to consume his addictive substance and to deny and conceal consumption.
Accuse
Even a confrontation usually causes little. The addict is pushed into a defensive role by allegations, making promises to improve, and breaking those promises again and again. The disappointment is followed by renewed accusations: a vicious circle.
Consequences of co-dependency
The consequences of co-dependency are serious. The quality of life, which suffers anyway due to the close contact with an addicted person, is thereby additionally strengthened. The life of the co-dependent is essentially about the addiction, own needs are neglected. Stealth and shame overshadow life. The co-addict is in a grueling alternation of love and hope, disappointment, anger and disgust.
Fear of the next excess brings financial worries when the addict spends too much money on alcohol, drugs or gambling – especially if he loses his job as the main earner due to his addiction. To the mental overload comes the burden of tasks, the co-dependent on the addicted person must take.
Co-dependency makes you ill
Not infrequently, a co-addict becomes ill himself. He is exploiting his forces and neglecting his health. Exhaustion and despair promote psychosomatic symptoms such as headaches or heart problems and can lead to depression, eating disorders or even a specific addiction.
Particularly serious are the consequences of drug addicts in intoxicated condition tend to violence or sexual assault.
Children are victims
Children suffer most from alcoholics and other addiction patients. They take on tasks they are not yet capable of and live in an environment that is shaped by fears and worries. The fear of the next excess of the addicted parent overshadows life. Add to that the shame and stealth – they can not talk to anyone about their situation, friends can not be brought home for fear that the addiction will be publicized.
Especially disastrous for children is that one of the first and most important relationships in life is shattered: that to their own parents. Security, attention, support are left behind. The trust in the parents is repeatedly disappointed. Such experiences can shape life and undermine future relationships.
Not infrequently, what they have learned as children, continues in adult life: 60 percent of women who live with a addicted partner, have grown up in a household with a parent with addictions.
If a parent is severely addicted to illness, it is often necessary to get the children out of the spell of addiction, for example by the healthy parent moving out of their shared flat with them for the sake of the children.
Who is at risk?
Especially women run the risk of becoming co-dependent – they represent 90 percent of those affected. In part, this can be explained by the fact that addictions often affect men.
Another reason could be that it is still part of the role of the woman to sacrifice herself and to hold a relationship together. In self and other perception, a woman leaves her alcoholic partner “in the lurch” when she leaves him. A man, on the other hand, is socially an addicted partner “unreasonable”.
Particularly at risk are also people who grow up in families with addicted parents. In principle, families are also problematic in which problems are swept under the carpet.
Co-dependency: therapy
With a strong co-dependency, psychotherapy may be necessary. The goal is to bring the person back to himself. He learns to re-perceive himself and his own needs and to put them at the center and to feel guilty. The goal is to build healthy distance.
As the co-dependent loses his entanglement, so does the depressing sense of powerlessness. He can do something again – for himself – and regains control of his own life.