Codependency: A Childhood Activated Pattern Created On A Soul Path Level

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Sabriyé Dubrie

As a mystic Sabriyé taps into the collective wisdom on a Soul Path level that she shares through the Soul Teachings. These teachings serve to stir the remembrance of your own Soul Wisdom. Never miss a new Soul Teaching again by signing up for our newsletter.

In this Soul teaching on codependency you will learn:

  • How the pattern of codependency is created
  • How codependency shows up in different relationships
  • How Anxious vs Avoidant attachment styles factor in
  • How to heal codependency on a soul path level
  • And more….

How do you recognize codependency?

Here’s a list of codependent traits that you may recognize in one or multiple areas of your life:

  • Feeling responsible for solving others’ problems.
  • Offering advice even if it isn’t asked for.
  • Difficulty making decisions.
  • Chronic anger.
  • Feeling used and underappreciated.
  • People-pleasing to be liked or loved.
  • Lack of trust in self or others.
  • Fearing rejection or being unlovable.
  • Feeling like a victim.
  • Taking everything personally.
  • Lying to yourself and making excuses for others’ bad behavior.
  • General sense of helplessness, anxiety, or depression.
  • Expect other people to make us happy, and they don’t.
  • Agree to things we don’t want to.
  • Have undisclosed expectations of other people.
  • Fear confrontation.
  • Deny or devalue our needs and thus don’t get them met.
  • Try to control people and things, over which we have no authority.
  • Ask for things in nonassertive, counterproductive ways; i.e., hinting, blaming, nagging, accusing.
  • Don’t set boundaries to stop abuse or behavior we don’t want.
  • Despite the facts and repeated disappointments, maintain hope and try to change others.
  • Stay in relationships although we continue to be disappointed or abused.

Source list: HappierHuman.com & PsychCentral.com

Whether we are codependent ourselves or we know someone who is codependent, this Soul Teaching will give you a better understanding of this pervasive pattern that does not only show up in our romantic relationships but can show up in all of our human relationships. Having one codependent trait doesn’t necessarily make you codependent, the above list can also not be used as a scale to determine your level of codependency.

But there is actually a codependency self-test that you can do. It’s called the Spann-Fischer Codependency Scale and is reported to have good test-retest reliability. You can download it through this link.

To determine your score, reverse your score for questions 5 and 7 as they are non-codependent traits (i.e.: if you circled 6 replace it with 1; 5 with 2; 4 with 3; etc.). Then sum up all your responses. Scores in the range of 16 are indicative of low co-dependency. Co-dependency increases with increasing scores – the maximum score is 96. Source: Wikipedia

What is codependency?

Codependency was originally coined as a term by Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1950s to describe the partners of substance abusers who through their behavior enabled their spouses in their addiction. Since then the definition of codependency has expanded to encompass a wider range of relationship dynamics that are considered to be dysfunctional.

In fact, codependency can also show up in our relationships with for example our parents, our friends, our siblings, our colleagues, or even our bosses which I will discuss further on, but for most of us because our intimate relationships are our biggest mirrors it will show up in our romantic love relationships the most clearly.

Although this teaching will not cover all aspects of codependency, it will introduce an often overlooked aspect of this pattern which is that it is created on a soul path level. It’s not something that only belongs to our current lifetime and once you understand what codependency is really about you will understand why the seed for codependency was already there in the psychological patterns and the subconscious programming created in previous lifetimes.

The two faces of codependency

I have found that codependency has two faces; the competent adult and the helpless child that are at odds within a person. Codependency is a pattern where we give away our power in order to be safe (it’s a survival mechanism). This is also why it is believed to be a pattern stemming from childhood because that is where our current life survival strategies are created.

On the one hand, a codependent person can feel immense emotional dependency on their partner or another person which is the child aspect where the person’s inner child can take over and make them act like a little child despite being an adult (the dependent aspect). They can often feel as if their survival depends on this person. On the other hand, there’s the adult aspect of them that often thrives on needing to be ‘needed’ as a way to prove their worth by being hyper-functional and overcompensating for the lack of input or functioning of their partner or another person they are codependent with (the enabling aspect).

This explains the dichotomy between on the one hand not being able to leave and on the other hand being the one that holds it all together which is so prominent in codependent relationships with substance abuse, domestic violence, or other forms of relationship abuse.

People in codependent relationships are on the victim triangle where both partners are constantly moving between the rescuer, the victim, and the bully (persecutor) archetypes.

Codependency and the victim triangle

Rescuers are the poster child for codependency and although their intentions seem noble, they need victims to rescue. But rescuers become just as easily victimized when they are pushed away for example and they can just as easily become the bully when after all they have sacrificed and everything they have given with little to nothing in return they snap and demand to have (the love, attention, respect, fidelity, etc.) what they feel entitled to.

While in a codependent dynamic, it might be difficult to see how the other person is being anything but the bully and it may also be difficult to see yourself in any other role than the victim but that is the name of the game when we give away our power. If we see ourselves as powerless (the victim) and the other person as powerful (the bully) then it can be extremely difficult to acknowledge that we are anything than powerless. That is what keeps us trapped on the victim triangle, our subconsciously disowning our power.

But there’s a reason why we are subconsciously disowning our power.

So, rather than work on the relationship we need to work on what made us disown our power to begin with. Couples therapy is not going to get you off the victim triangle, it might help you to realize when you’re on it but it won’t get you off of it.

Healing the subconscious wounds that created the pattern of codependency is what breaks the pattern. Addressing the reason why you felt it was safer to disown your power helps you to reclaim it. Once you’ve reclaimed your personal power you’re off the victim triangle in all your relationships (not just your romantic ones) and you will no longer attract codependent dynamics because you only ever attracted them to help you make conscious that you were disowning your power in the first place.

Everyone has codependent tendencies

So how common is codependency? Although there aren’t any concrete numbers, some estimates suggest that over 90 percent of the American population demonstrates codependent behavior. Source: Anne Dranitsaris, Ph.D. These are high numbers but they make sense once we realize what codependency is really about.

Just as every human being has narcissistic traits to some extent, everyone has codependent tendencies. Narcissism is a spectrum based on self-centeredness and a certain amount of self-centredness is actually healthy. Codependency is a spectrum as well in the ability to stand in our personal power, both the codependent partner as well as their spouse are in the process of reclaiming their personal power.

A client pointed out in a session that within a codependent dynamic, both partners are codependent. We usually only see the codependent person as the codependent and not for example the spouse. In fact, many people see only the woman as codependent and the spouse as abusive but they are both equally codependent.

Within a codependent dynamic one person will control overtly, while the other seeks to control covertly until they switch roles in a constant dance for power. They are the Yin and Yang, the two sides of the same coin.

Only a person who feels out of control will try to control others.

‘People who feel the need to control others don’t have control over themselves The need to control others is born out of insecurity, anxiety, fear, and low self-esteem. If someone feels out of control emotionally or mentally and cannot regulate their own feelings, they turn outward to get that sense of control and security from something external – typically another person.’ Source: MindsetMadeBetter.com

Identifying the core dynamic of codependency

Many people don’t easily self-identify as codependent and that is partially because of how codependency is portrayed in pop psychology. There are many definitions of codependency out there that fail to see this underlying pattern, they talk about love addiction or putting someone else’s needs above your own which are all symptoms of codependency but it’s not the core dynamic of codependency.

The core dynamic is about a struggle for control (power).

Generally, people in a codependent relationship give control to the other person and subsequently desire to get that control back. The person being helped feels no control over their own life, so exerts power over the helper by making demands on their time and energy. And the helper is controlled by the behavior of the person being helped, which leads to a need to re-exert power and control over them. The struggle for power and control in relationships was previously viewed as a predominately female issue. But research about codependency has since revealed that both men and women engage in the struggle for control in relationships.‘ Source: TheRightStep.com

The above descriptions shows us why codependency falls on the victim triangle and a quick Google search will teach you that the victim triangle is also often called the codependency triangle. It also explains why codependents and narcissists are drawn to each other like a moth to a flame because a narcissist’s main priority in a relationship is gaining power and control. They carry the exact same subconscious wounding.

Because codependency is about subconsciously giving away our personal power we are all on the codependent spectrum to some degree in different areas of our lives. Just think about where you are giving your power away in your relationship with your parents, friends, and siblings, in work settings, or even in society at large. If we have a pattern of disowning our personal power, it will show up everywhere in our lives and not just in our romantic relationships.

How the pattern of codependency is created

Currently, the consensus among experts is that codependency is created in childhood through:

  1. Overprotective parenting
  2. Under protective parenting (neglect)
  3. Parentification (also called emotional incest)
  4. Abuse whether mental, emotional, sexual, or physical
  5. Permissive parenting (not setting boundaries)
  6. Parental substance abuse, mental illness, etc.

In short, almost ALL childhoods carry the seed for codependency in them. Or more accurately the fertilizer for codependent behavior as the seed for this type of pattern originated on a soul path or past life level.

The reason why patterns of codependency are often retriggered in childhood is that we especially in dysfunctional home environments often have to give up assertion of our personal power to stay safe. This is best seen in our ability to draw healthy boundaries, when we are able to assert our power in a positive way we are capable of creating healthy boundaries.

Yet, when we look at the above list of parenting gone wrong we see that this is the crux because they either impede on our personal boundaries or there’s a lack of boundaries which can create a huge sense of unsafety in children as well. Children need boundaries, but they also need their personal boundaries respected which is where most of these parenting styles fail as they severely violate the personal boundaries of the child.

Boundaries protect and define our sense of autonomy (personal power) when our boundaries are violated in childhood, it not only creates a sense of unsafety it creates an inability to know how to create healthy boundaries later in life. When we look at this list of how damaged boundaries shape us, we see that much of what has been named codependent behavior is actually a result of violated boundaries in our childhood. One of the reasons we aren’t often able to assert our boundaries even if we wanted to is because as children we depend on our caretakers for survival.

Doesn’t that then mean that codependency is created in childhood by the violation of our boundaries as this is what creates the codependent behavior? It would certainly appear so, except when we look deeper and see the bigger picture. Codependent patterns are often already present in our parents’ relationship with each other and because codependency is actually a struggle for control, we see a new pattern here which is again personal power.

A child being overly restricted in its autonomy cannot assert its personal power. In fact, the abuse itself can make the child feel powerless. Feeling powerless more often than not leads to a need for control in order to feel safe and you’ve got yourself a vicious circle that loops back into itself.

Codependency and family patterns

From an ancestral healing perspective, we know that families often come together to work through mutual soul themes that they have individually been struggling with over lifetimes and lifetimes. Power vs. powerless is such a soul theme that Earth families can come together around to help them heal their individual wounds around these themes.

This is not to say that children are to blame for being born into families that are healing wounds around powerlessness. Children should obviously at all times be protected and given the most optimum environment to develop themselves. However, on a soul path level, we bring into each consecutive lifetime the wounds that we inherited from our soul predecessors – the past life incarnations of our soul.

When we carry unresolved wounding around power and feeling powerless on a soul path level what better way to work through them than to incarnate into a family that leaves us no choice but to live that wounding from the get-go? It’s therefore not the child that chooses such circumstances, but the higher self that seeks such circumstances to restore the wounded ego – our gaming avatar back to our soul blueprint.

So, yes on this current incarnation level codependency seems to be created in our childhood, but when we look deeper we see that what happens in childhood is actually a reactivation of a deeper soul path-level wound that we brought in from other lifetimes. Read this Soul Teaching on childhood trauma for a deeper explanation of this concept.

The seed was already there on a soul path level and our childhood experiences were in fact the fertilizer needed to have these seeds grow into our current life psychological patterns and subconscious programming in an attempt to heal them within this incarnation.

How personal boundaries relate to personal power

Having parents that trampled on our boundaries whether implicitly or explicitly was simply a manifestation of this deeper underlying soul path wound. A way to ensure that we would create the human personality that corresponded to our soul path wounding.

This allows us to pick up each incarnation where we left off, instead of reliving Groundhog Day in each lifetime. This is true in a positive sense, that we get to carry all lessons learned and skills developed with us into our next embodiments but it also means that we take with us as well everything that we still struggle with or have in the past misunderstood in order to heal them this time around. You can’t have one without the other, it’s a one-package deal that can’t be separated.

If our boundaries and therefore personal space have become something we haven’t learned to define ourselves but rather have had others define for us by violating them and deciding for us what was acceptable or not, we will also find it difficult to take up our own space or rightful place.

A personal boundary is the line between your energy and someone else’s energy. When you have healthy boundaries, you’ve got plenty of space within your little circle, and so does the other person. This is personal power and neither party is abusing it. Neither party is giving up their personal power, either. This is good, healthy, and creates a balanced and harmonious environment.

When one of the parties has unhealthy boundaries, things get lopsided. This becomes control. There is a personal power struggle. One party is asserting their personal power and dominance over the other party. Things are no longer harmonious and balanced. One person’s energy is intruding on the other person’s energy. This type of thing tends to happen between two people when one of them oversteps their boundaries.’ Source: InMySacredSpace.com

Poor boundaries create enmeshed family dynamics.

Enmeshment is a trait of family dysfunction that involves poorly defined or nonexistent boundaries, unhealthy relationship patterns, and a lack of independence among family members. Children who grow up in enmeshed families often carry similar patterns forward into adulthood, unaware of the cycle they are perpetuating.‘ Source: BRCHealthcare.com

While codependency is what we call the outcome, the pattern that creates it, the poorly defined or nonexistent boundaries – aka the struggle for control is passed down from generation to generation.

Anxious vs Avoidant attachment styles

Other terms for the codependent dynamic are found in attachment theory. Attachment theory again looks at our childhood and the style of attachment we have with our parents or caretakers and how this influences our styles of attachment in romantic relationships. Have you ever noticed that the word PARENT is an anagram of the word PARTNER perhaps because they are so closely related? Before modern technology, you had to be a partner to become a parent. Even if you were an involuntary partner, you could still become a parent.

There are four different attachment styles:

  1. Anxious: Adults who struggle with feelings of unworthiness
  2. Avoidant: Adults who avoid commitment rooted in feelings of fear
  3. Disorganized: Adults with insecurity and unpredictable behaviors
  4. Secure: Adults with a positive self-image and who are open to romance

List source: BrianaMacWilliam.com

When it comes to codependency the two people that like to team up are the people with an anxious attachment to those who have an avoidant attachment style. They are often referred to as the GIVER and the TAKER. Or if you’re in a Twin Flame dynamic the RUNNER and the CHASER.

Yet, they are all phrases that describe the same dynamic using different words. It’s all codependency.

In codependent relationships, givers have anxious attachment styles—they define themselves by their relationship and will do whatever it takes to stay in it, according to Daniels. Takers, she says, tend to have avoidant attachment styles, meaning they try to avoid emotional connection at all costs.[…]

Givers and takers are drawn to each other — often subconsciously, says Daniels. Over time, givers wear themselves out as they fight for the reassurance they may never get from the taker, while the takers continue avoiding their emotions and taking responsibility for their actions.‘ Source: Time Magazine

You can have multiple or even conflicting attachment styles

It gets even more complex, you can have multiple attachment styles across different relationships. One of my clients came with two conflicting attachment styles into a session. She noticed that she was both anxious as well as avoidant, which almost seem like two conflicting states. In a previous session, we had already found a large part of the anxious pattern that was primarily playing out in her romantic relationship.

In the first session, it was all about the false beliefs ‘I can’t trust myself to keep myself safe. My survival is the safest in the hands of other people.’ It was the combination of an adult’s past life where she was a man who had been too self-centered and vain creating havoc in other people’s lives followed by a child’s life as a young boy where his parents die and his family tries to steal their wealth which makes him flee with the family fortune only to die in the desert.

The adult life created the false belief ‘I can’t trust myself to do the right thing’ which in combination with the child dying in the desert imprinted the false belief ‘My survival depends on others telling me what to do.’ This was the exact pattern my client was playing out in her childhood and now as an adult in her romantic relationship. Obviously when we subconsciously believe that our survival depends on others telling us what to do it will make us cling to whomever we believe ensures our survival (read who we have outsourced our power to). This explained the root cause of the anxious attachment.

This second session was focused on her avoidant attachment style which she felt tied in with her OCD and the relationship with her father for example. In that session after tracing the pattern of avoidance, we saw that the deeper pattern was a lack of love being repeated over and over again – we saw this playing out in the various past lives but it was also something she recognized quite strongly in her current life. One of the pivotal wounds in this pattern was a lifetime where she was a feminized man who had this out-of-this-world love affair with an alien light being that was only with him for a short period. When we asked for clarification she saw the story of Adam and Even which is a metaphor for the human incarnation and Ascension process.

When the light being had to move on as part of his mission, she felt as if she had been cast out of paradise. This was not a Twin Flame client, yet she experienced what many people on the Twin Flame journey will recognize as if she had a taste of paradise and it was then snatched away from her. Because she couldn’t share the experience with anyone it became a deep painful wound of love lost and the very next embodiment she started a repeating pattern of lost love.

In the next lifetime, she was a young man who secretly killed his brother to monopolize his mother’s love but even with the brother gone the mother didn’t give him the love he was hoping to have. We saw that the avoidance showing up in her life was the avoidance of the deep pain of this experience of losing this out-of-this-world love she had experienced with this alien light being.

But not only that the client saw that her anxious as well as avoidant attachment style were two sides of the same coin. She saw that it was both the clinging to what was lost as well as the avoiding the pain of the loss wrapped into one. This pattern was not only playing out here within this specific incarnation but even on a soul level as being cast out of paradise is about feeling we have lost God’s or the Divine’s love when we leave the soul realm to start the incarnation game.

Even when we understand the necessity to incarnate and are eager to do so, the actual experience of living the illusion of separation can be traumatizing. The Divine as our creator is the ultimate parent and this on the one hand clinging to the experience of paradise lost by being thrown out of the garden of Eden and on the other hand trying to keep out the immense pain of the perceived loss of the love of our creator was the original wound to this anxious-avoidant attachment style.

How codependency shows up in different relationships

Because so much of our current incarnation codependency traits result from our childhood experiences you can actually see codependency as inner child wounding that we bring into our adult relationships. Remember codependency has two faces, both the dependent child as well as the hyperfunctioning adult a pseudo-identity created to create a sense of control which in turn restores a sense of safety.

Parents

In the relationship with our parents, codependency can show up as parentification. This is where the child takes care of the emotional and/or practical needs of at least one parent. This can happen in cases of domestic violence, mental or other illnesses, substance abuse, etc. Rather than the child being able to be the child and having their needs met by their parents, the child takes responsibility for the parent’s emotional or practical needs.

I recently worked with a client on this pattern. In her session, we saw three lifetimes tie into each other to create the pattern of emotionally dependent parents (parentification) that was still playing out in this lifetime. It started in a lifetime in Lemuria where she was a man who was whole, both feminine and masculine as we were still androgynous beings in that stage of our descent into physical matter. He had been infatuated with a girl who he wanted to be with but because he couldn’t marry her, he split off his feminine side thinking this was the reason he couldn’t have her.

The next embodiment was in Atlantis where she was a father whose daughter was killed on her wedding day. He killed the groom’s tribe in rage. Followed by a boy in Egypt who secretly kills his brother in order to have his parents to himself, but then couldn’t have the parents because they were grieving. After that lifetime, she kept recreating the pattern of her parents being emotionally dependent on her. Looking back she saw that she had taken things too personally and had lived under the illusion of something that she felt belonged to her being taken from her.

In my own life, I also had a parentified relationship with my mother. For me, the underlying wound was a previous lifetime where I was the product of rape between my current life mother and my current life father. In that lifetime, however, my father was not my mother’s husband but her uncle while she was married to another man. Burdened by the shame of the experience my mother hung herself and I died in utero a very traumatic death. Because of the mother-child symbiosis I had imprinted her death by strangulation as my own and left that life believing my mother had strangled me to death.

In my current lifetime, my parents had already been together three years before my mother became pregnant with me. My father who later became very abusive had never hit my mother before and beat her for the first time while she was pregnant with me. This triggered the past life memory of dying in utero, which had me decide that was never going to happen again so I became my mother’s protector.

How noble as that sounds, it was realizing that I was actually protecting myself and not my mother that helped me heal this pattern. Based on my past life wounding I was trying to ensure my own survival through trying to ensure her survival. It wasn’t noble at all, it was pretty self-serving which is true for all forms of rescuing, we do it to make ourselves feel good as well as safe.

Another way that codependency can show up in a parent-child relationship is by making the child dependent on the parent emotionally and practically. We can probably all imagine what this looks like emotionally, but what about practically? One of my clients had a Tiger mom, this went so far that she wasn’t allowed to do any chores in the home but instead was told to use her time to study. She became all her mother wanted her to be on an academic level but at the cost of her own independency skills.

She had not learned the basic skills of how to take care of herself on the most practical level, she had for example never even needed to cut and peel her own fruit. Although her mother had done this with the best intentions, she wanted her daughter to succeed in life – because the daughter was lacking these skills she needed and attracted a partner who could do these things for her the way her mother had always done – creating the same codependent dynamic in her adult romantic relationship.

I recognize this because it’s a constant battle I have with my own mother who lives with us. As a single mother and even within my two marriages, I have always involved the children in age-appropriate chores. When I went to live with my dad at age 13,5 I was like my client, I couldn’t do anything for myself really. My dad and stepmom had no issues delegating chores and I had to clean my own room, do my own laundry, take out the funky-smelling compost and do my dad’s ginormous dishes each night without a dishwasher and still do my homework and get up at 6:30 to catch the one hour bus to school.

Interestingly enough, I did exactly what my client did I subconsciously attracted a partner who took care of me the way my mother had, a chef who was amazing in the kitchen and who cleaned up everything himself initially so that I would have time to study as I was 16 and still going to school. By the time I was an adult, the pattern that had set in was difficult to break – it had a very incapacitating effect on me which I know everyone in such a dynamic understands.

The ongoing battle with my mom is that she does the same thing with my kids, if my son would eat what she cooked she would even cook separately for him which she used to do when he was a child. I expect him to eat what we all eat and just made sure I didn’t make things he couldn’t eat just like with my other kids. I made my kids help with the trash, loading and unloading the dishwasher, cooking when they were old enough, and hanging up the laundry. On days that my mother was there, the kids wouldn’t have to do anything because she would do it all. She could do it faster anyway she would tell me. This was fine if she was only there a couple of days in the week, but when she moved in with us we had to have talk after talk even with professionals and she would mentally grasp what we were explaining, but still not be able to stop her incessant caretaking.

These are such deeply ingrained patterns that when my mother broke both of her arms and we had to take care of her and even feed her the first week or so, she went through deep emotions of feeling useless because she was temporarily forced out of her pattern. Some of you may remember that I actually left my son and mother together alone for a couple of days to figure it out together because having spoiled my son so much who was 17 at the time, he expected me to do all the work while he played Fortnite on the computer.

I booked a hotel took my laptop and went on a work vacation for a couple of days to get my own work done that I had not been able to do because I had no time and I am the family provider. I also put them in this situation to have them figure it out together and they did. He took perfect care of her and understood that it was too much work to expect me to do on top of my own work even though we have a weekly cleaner as well.

Because not only did we have to take on her chores, but we had to feed her, bring her to the bathroom, pull down her pants, help her sit down, shower her, and wash her hair. With two broken arms, you can’t do any of the things that you normally do for yourself. As soon as she was healed she went right back to living the same pattern, and she will rather pile on extra work on me than delegate things to my son. Because my mother has a pattern of avoiding conflict, she finds it easier to lean on me than to risk a conflict with my son who doesn’t want to stop gaming for example which leaves me stuck in the middle. She will tell me that he doesn’t listen to her, that he only listens to me which may be true now but she’s been saying this since he is three years old.

On the one hand, my mother will complain that there’s always so much to do, on the other hand, she will get angry with me at the grocery checkout if I start packing the bags because that’s her job and otherwise she has nothing to do and is just standing there wasting her time…. Even yesterday as we left the house she wanted me to take the empty shopping bags and she would carry my King size heavy duvet to the car to bring it to the cleaners as summer is here and I won’t need it till November. I of course carried the duvet to the car and let her carry the empty shopping bags that she had already picked up.

I am explaining this in such detail so that you can see that patterns like these are damaging to all parties, they aren’t truly helpful to the recipient but they’re also not helpful to the person living them. Left to her own programming my mother would wait on us hand and foot not because we expect that of her but because her own subconscious wounding drives her to behave in this way. My mother had a loving home but she was born just before World War II she grew up with air raids, sirens, and running with her family to the bomb shelters. She was born in a Dutch city close to the German border which was one of the cities hit the hardest during the war. To this day any loud unexpected noises will startle her, despite her having worked hard on healing her war trauma.

Lovers

I feel we have already looked into how codependency shows up in romantic relationships, but a big clue is when you’re doing all of the work and your partner is only half-assing it. This is tricky, however, because codependency is about needing to be in control in order to feel safe. In a way, subconsciously choosing a partner that is not giving their all gives us the chance to feel in control and competent. As does subconsciously choosing a partner that seems to need us to take care of them.

One of the ways that this battle for control can play out in our intimate relationships is through both partners seeking to be in the masculine role. One of the other side effects of violated boundaries as a young child is a collapsed inner masculine. The inner masculine or as psychiatrist Carl Jung called it the Animus is the part of us that protects us and that asserts our personal boundaries,

We all carry an inner masculine and inner feminine part called the Anima within us, regardless if we are a man or a woman. When as a child the inner masculine can’t protect us from the adults violating our boundaries, the inner masculine collapses. This leaves the inner feminine to fend for her own and the only way to protect herself is to take on the masculine role. She can only do so at the expense of her own feminine traits such as being vulnerable, open, and able to receive.

Women in their masculine will constantly seek to gain control within the relationship often emasculating their partner in the process in order to keep themselves safe. Their partners will often mirror this wound of the inner collapsed masculine which is why they were subconsciously attracted to them in the first place. You can’t rescue a man with a healthy inner masculine template he doesn’t need or want to be rescued, but you can rescue a man who is a hurt little boy in a grown man’s body.

Putting on a dress and some lipstick is not going to fix this problem, it’s a too superficial approach to such a deeply ingrained pattern because just as much as this is a product of our childhood experiences the deeper roots of such a pattern lie on a soul path level. One thing you may have already noticed is that many but not all of these past life codependency wounds were lifetimes as men and boys – not women and girls.

In order to heal the collapsed inner masculine, we need to not only know its roots on a current life level but find the original wounding on a soul path level that created the pattern.

Remember that within the codependent dynamic, we also talked about GIVERS and TAKERS. This is part of the collapsed inner masculine/rigidified inner feminine pattern, where we feel much more comfortable GIVING than we are RECEIVING.

This is a trauma response because receiving makes us vulnerable and it means we have to open up to receive while giving allows us to be the one who is in control. Healing the collapsed inner masculine heals the rigidified inner feminine. With the inner masculine there to protect her she can be open, vulnerable, and receptive. She no longer needs to be in control to feel safe which shifts the dynamic within the relationship. Her partner will either step up and take on the masculine role or bow out, but because she has reclaimed her inner masculine (her inner power) she is fine either way.

So, on a surface level codependent behavior may seem driven by a constant need to prove your worth by working extra hard, striving for perfection, being overly responsible, and taking care of everyone else. On a deeper energetic level, all of these behaviors are driven by the need for control in order to feel safe.

Friends

In friendships, codependency can show up in two ways; the one relying on others or the one being relied upon.

A while back I worked with a client on visibility wounds, she was sick of being a wallflower and was ready to be seen. After the session, I messaged her to tell her that it was interesting that the pattern of her wounding was similar to codependency wounding. She responded by sharing with me that although she never had identified herself as codependent she used to have a friend who would get really drunk and would rely on her to get her home safely.

The more she did this the more excessively irresponsible her friend became, Her friend would call her up in the middle of the night to come pick her up (rescue her) and she would go do it too which now seemed insane to her. But here’s the best part, she realized that she still didn’t use her full real name on the internet so that this so-called friend wouldn’t be able to find her. Talk about visibility wounds, she was going through life incognito trying to hide from this person. This client has aspirations to be an artist which means that she has to stop hiding.

A recent Soulology client who was already in her Golden years came to me with a story of how everyone in her life abandoned her and she couldn’t understand why. Her codependency showed up in needing others to help her process her emotions, her husband of 30+ years didn’t mind fulfilling that role for her but I helped her see how this codependent behavior was driving her friends away. Although they had said that it was too much for example for them and that they felt that she was leaning too heavily on them, because she was caught in the pattern she wasn’t able to see how her hurt inner child was driving her behavior.

Only in the safety of sharing with another adult could she access and process her emotions, if she tried to access them herself she wouldn’t be able to feel them. Within Soulology we don’t do soul path work, so I wasn’t able to bring her to the original wound of her pattern. Instead, I explained to her the concept of reparenting and how rebuilding the trust between her inner child and her inner adult would help her inner child feel safe to process her emotions with the inner adult instead of needing an outer adult to help her move through her emotions.

As a child in her family of origin showing emotions had not been allowed so she had never learned how to deal with them. This client had done many different courses and programs including an inner child course, that had not taught her the concept of reparenting nor had it helped her really get any insight into her inner child wounding the way she had now gotten in one hour of working with me.

This is a mistake I often see people making taking courses instead of working with a healer or a therapist one to one, the issue is that the really deeper stuff will often not show itself this way because you need a safe container to explore them. Most programs and courses aren’t set up to offer this deeper personal healing aspect. Plus working with a professional helps you not only move past your blindspots, a skilled professional will help to navigate you past your own survival, protection, and defense mechanisms that protect your unresolved pain.

Siblings

I don’t have any real-life examples from my clients of how codependency shows up between siblings, but if you are your brother’s or sister’s keeper you have a codependent relationship with them. If you have a big brother or sister that runs your life for you or bails you out every time you get yourself into trouble you have a codependent relationship with them.

Sometimes as the oldest sibling, we are made surrogate parents to our younger siblings. If you have a sibling with a handicap or a disease you may have had to help care for your sibling. When my youngest was young we had Senegalese kids living a couple of doors down from us. My son’s father is Senegalese as well but he would always get upset when this seven-year-old kid would be sent out in the street with his three-year-old brother and was expected to take care of him for hours while the parents stayed inside.

This little seven-year-old was literally his brother’s keeper; responsible for his little brother not running away, not getting hurt, not getting hit by a car, etc. Rather than being able to relax and play with his friends carefree, he would always have to push his own needs and desires aside to take responsibility for this toddler that his parents should have been looking after instead of him. This boy was being primed from an early age to take on a responsibility that wasn’t age-appropriate and that could set him up for a lifelong pattern of taking responsibility that wasn’t his which is a hallmark sign of codependency.

Work & Business

Codependency can also show up in your work, that colleague that always dumps their work on you. People pleasing towards your colleagues, superiors, or clients. Taking on more responsibility than you’re getting paid for. Feeling taken advantage of. Overgiving to clients for example. Not feeling appreciated.

Just look at the list of codependency traits at the beginning of this teaching and you can imagine how these patterns sabotage you getting ahead in your company or business.

Stepping into your power will be the game-changer that you’re looking for in order to move up the corporate ladder, increase work satisfaction or become more successful in your business. Codependency makes you a ‘Yes man’ and that type of person can never become a leader because he/she can’t lead themselves.

If you are a healer, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, nurse, doctor, social worker, coach, etc. chances are that codependency (the need to rescue others) was a driving force in your career choice. My mother was a nurse for example, but also many of my health professional clients have come to realize in our work together that part of what drove them into their field of expertise was their own codependency wounding.

This doesn’t mean that you will not want to do this work anymore once you released this wounding, it means that you will be able to do your work from a place of freedom instead of your subconscious wounded bonding. You will become more effective in your work and you will have a higher degree of work satisfaction because there isn’t this hidden agenda anymore behind your choice of profession. In other words, you aren’t secretly trying to fulfill your unmet childhood needs through your work or trying to prove your worth through self-sacrifice.

How to heal codependency on a soul path level

We can conclude that even though codependency manifests itself in our relationships, it is not a relationship problem. This is why it can’t be fixed on a relationship level because as we have seen in the examples I have shared the subconscious programming runs so deep which is true for most of our subconscious programming that we can’t change it through our conceptual understanding of the issue. Two of my clients that I have helped release this programming are psychiatrists who on a mental level completely understood the pattern of codependency but still couldn’t brake it.

Even years of traditional therapy and inner child work cannot fully heal the pattern of codependency although I would highly recommend everyone to work on their current life and childhood wounds with a professional as well as do inner child work. Our childhood wounds need to be addressed just as much as our soul path or past life wounds.

However, the root cause of our current life patterns are all on a soul path level. Nothing we are dealing with in our current life is solely from this lifetime. It may seem to be at first glance, but having worked with over a thousand clients I have never encountered anyone whose subconscious wounds only belong to their current lifetime. All our current life wounds and struggles have past life roots, without exception.

I know this because I have made my career out of bringing people to the root cause of their psychological patterns and subconscious programming on a soul-path level. That’s always where my clients find them, as I guide my clients to experience their soul past firsthand. They tell me what they see, feel, know, or hear – not the other way around.

When it comes to codependency not only are these patterns formed in our current life early childhood, but they were also created in our early ‘child’ years of our soul journey just like our other survival, defense & protection mechanisms.

Lemuria, Atlantis, and Ancient Egypt are the timelines of our soul’s childhood aka the start of our incarnation process. Now I know many of you believe that time doesn’t exist and although that is true in the non-physical realm, it is not true for the physical realm where we do not just haphazardly incarnate randomly throughout different lifetimes and timelines back and forth.

This is true because the incarnation game itself is a process of descension from the ethereal into the physical and ascension of the physical into the ethereal.

As I have explained in the previous Soul Teaching on the Mind-Body connection, we are part of the seven Root races within our Human Evolution. Lemuria and Atlantis were the third and fourth Root Race, we are the fifth Root Race, and after us will come the sixth Root Race. We are the turning point in our human evolution.

The sixth root race which is the next stage of our human evolution is on the ascending arc, it will “be rapidly growing out of its bonds of matter, and even of flesh” (SD II:446). This seems to suggest that the bodies or vehicles of the future races will return to becoming more ethereal and androgynous. Source: Theosophy World

For context the Lemurains were ethereal and androgynous as well, they were on the descending arc. This makes it a linear rather than a non-linear process.

Codependency wounds are not created in a single lifetime

Codependency wounds are the result of two to three lifetimes that have led to the collapse of the inner masculine on a soul path level.

What I have found is that the soul path wounds to codependency are not necessarily directly power related, although they can be. I have found that they are two to three lifetimes that have led to the collapse of the inner masculine on a soul path level. They are a combination of adult male or female lives, with a child (boy) life that signifies the collapse of the inner masculine within us. With all of my clients, this played out in different ways, they each had their unique story but their past life history all followed the same pattern of this combination of adult and child lives, where the child was a boy that locked in the pattern.

This makes sense because the inner masculine is our agency of power. Just as the collapse of the inner masculine on a current incarnation level creates a pattern of seeking control, so does the collapse of the inner masculine on a soul path level create a pattern of seeking to control as well. In many cases, wounding with being able to trust the Divine came into play as well.

One client felt she had to fill the role of the Divine and make everything happen just perfectly, which she could never accomplish due to soul path trauma she felt she could no longer trust the Divine. The client I mentioned earlier felt that she had lost the love of the Divine, this falls under betrayal trauma which is the most traumatic trauma we can experience. Another client based on an experience in Atlantis had imprinted the false belief ‘If power is this cruel I don’t want anything to do with it’ She saw the fall of Atlantis as something done to humanity by evil higher-ups and decided that you can’t trust the Divine plan. These are all subconscious imprints that would create patterns of control.

The other reason why this makes perfect sense is that power is a soul attribute, as souls we have the power to create worlds. We are immeasurably powerful, think of Marianne Williamson’s poem – Our deepest fears, in it she writes that our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure! But that is the ‘problem’ because we wanted to play the incarnation game, we had to experience the opposite of being powerful which is powerless and the only way to do this was to have the inner masculine aspect of us, also sometimes referred to as the Divine Masculine within us collapse. Without a collapsed inner masculine, we would have retained our innate sense of power and could not have densified into physical matter the way we have. Our unresolved pain was what helped us densify.

Now as we are moving into a new era of human evolution, it is time to reclaim our soul attributes including reclaiming our power which is why codependency is being played out everywhere in our lives to help us heal where we have been giving away our inner power. Although this is an evolutionary process, patterns of codependency or giving away our power won’t simply heal by themselves we do have to be the ones to take the steps to find the childhood and soul path wounds that created this pattern.

It’s tempting for people stuck in their spiritual egos to read teachings like these and tell themselves that they have already done this inner work. They use the information they acquire to measure their own level of spiritual evolvement, which is why you know it’s the spiritual ego because only the ego wants to know how spiritually evolved it is. The problem is that because our patterns of codependency are so deeply ingrained in our subconscious, you may not even be able to see where they are playing out in your life.

Like my client for example, who wasn’t initially able to see that it was her own subconscious behavior that was costing her these friendships. Because she didn’t know any better, childhood patterns make us believe that they are normal because we don’t know anything else (a fish doesn’t know that it’s wet) she thought that this is what normal friendships look like. It was only when we looked at it together that she could see that she had indeed leaned much more heavily on her friends than she had realized. She was the taker (the one who needed to be rescued) in this particular dynamic until her friends had nothing left to give, showing once again that codependency is a two-way street and that both the giver and the taker are codependent in their own ways. Had I for example been able to talk to her friends, we would have probably seen that they had giver (rescuer) tendencies.

I pray that this Soul Teaching helps you identify patterns of codependency in your own life and helps you move forward in your process of reclaiming your power. In the Soulology sessions, I can help you take a deeper look at these patterns and prescribe you Bach Flower remedies to help your healing process. In the Soul Embodiment® Therapy sessions, I can help you find the lifetimes that led to the collapse of the inner masculine and the initial point of loss of power.

With my deepest love,

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