Codependency and the Christian Savior

On power, truth, and grief

Understanding the dynamics of codependency changed my life.

Some people talk about codependency as though it means being overly dependent or clingy. Others misunderstand codependency to only exist within the context of addiction or only applicable to romantic partnerships. Still others wrongly believe that codependency is a fixed personality trait of weakness. Some call it love. These descriptions of codependency tend to miss its foundation.

At its core codependency derives from an imbalance of power. Codependency occurs when people give away their agency and deny their own truths, creating an undifferentiated, thus unhealthy, self. Its patterns can manifest in all kinds of relationships, whether interpersonal or institutional. Popular music, movies, and other media often portray codependent dynamics, and at least one source reports that up to 90% of the U.S. population demonstrates some form of codependency. Its prevalence makes codependency hard to detect. Not only that, but also codependent patterns are explicitly taught as necessary for the world’s health and restoration as codependents work to control people into goodness and purity. In fact, I suspect codependency is at the heart of fascism. It’s what drives MAGA. In this essay I argue that codependency mirrors common Christian beliefs about humans’ relationship with God, an imbalance of power indeed.

What is Codependency?

Scholars generally agree that codependency is marked by deference to others, a desire to help or fix people, a low self-esteem, need for approval, fears of rejection, people pleasing, attempts to control people using directives or placation, and conflating someone else’s needs, wishes, feelings, and perspectives with one’s own. Researchers found that people who identify with codependency commonly characterized their experiences by a lack of self, emotional imbalances, and childhood experiences of being highly controlled while also abandoned. Other researchers who systematically reviewed the literature on codependency found four themes regarding what constitutes codependency. From that literature review, they concluded that codependency is characterized in the scholarship by external focusing, self-sacrifice, interpersonal control, and emotional suppression.

The idea behind codependency originated in the 1940s as behavioral scientists began studying the relational contexts in which alcoholics lived, rather than viewing alcoholism in isolation. The term was popularized in the 1970s during the addiction recovery movement as researchers identified patterns among partners who enabled the addiction. According to Mental Health America, “Co-dependent behavior is learned by watching and imitating other family members who display this type of behavior.” In the initial conceptualization of codependency, scholars and practitioners noticed that codependent relationships are passed down from one generation to the next, even when there is no presence of alcoholism.

Scholars note that codependency as a construct is complex, multifaceted, and contested. It appears to take many forms and does not have a uniform set of characteristics that apply to all circumstances. By no means is codependency a clinical diagnosis, and some practitioners choose to abandon the term altogether because of its complexities. Still, codependent relational patterns have been explored in both scientific research literature and popular psychological self-help content, making the term real and tangible for people in such relational dynamics.

Psych Central describes codependency in the following way:

The main sign of codependency is consistently elevating the needs of others above your own…Codependency is a way of behaving in relationships where you persistently prioritize someone else over you, and you assess your mood based on how they behave…The more you focus on providing the support you believe others need, the more heavily they may begin to lean on you. Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle yourself.

Melody Beattie, author of Codependent No More, describes codependent people as reactionaries who struggle to trust themselves and who feel responsible for others’ emotions and behaviors. She states: “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.” She further articulates how the attempts to control others become a circular dynamic:

When we attempt to control people and things that we have no business controlling, we are controlled. We forfeit our power to think, feel, and act in accordance with our best interests. We frequently lose control of ourselves.

In other words, when people try to control others, they lose their sense of self, losing their own power. Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, conveyed a similar sentiment about how both the oppressed and the oppressor become tethered together when power is not in balance. He states, “It is only the oppressed, who by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.” Controlling others binds us to them with the illusion that their response is a measure of our power. But personal power doesn’t need to be achieved; it already exists.

Psych Central lists the following traits of codependent behavior:

• a deep-seated need for approval from others

• pleasing, helping, accommodating others

• self-worth that depends on what others think about you

• insecurity and feelings of inadequacy

• a habit of taking on more work than you can realistically handle, both to earn praise or lighten a loved one’s burden

• a tendency to apologize or take on blame in order to keep the peace

• a pattern of avoiding conflict

• a tendency to minimize or ignore your own desires

• difficulty setting boundaries

• controlling behaviors

• self-sacrifice

• fear of rejection

• binary thinking

• excessive concern about a loved one’s habits or behaviors

• a habit of making decisions for others or trying to “manage” loved ones

• a mood that reflects how others feel, rather than your own emotions

• guilt or anxiety when doing something for yourself

• doing things you don’t really want to do, simply to make others happy

Mental Health America lists similar traits, plus a few others:

• An exaggerated sense of responsibility for the actions of others

• A tendency to confuse love and pity, with the tendency to “love” people they can pity and rescue

• Difficulty identifying feelings

• Difficulty making decisions

To review, codependency is characterized by deferential behavior borne from fears of abandonment, rejection, or retaliation, which can be passed from generation to generation. A sense of fundamental inadequacy creates people’s dependence on the external other for validation and worth. They rely on someone outside of themselves for direction, even basing their feelings on how the other feels. People in this dynamic presume they are responsible for others’ actions, emotions, and overall wellbeing. Thus, they seek control over others by trying to mold people into how they should be and by getting them to say “well done” or “you’re great.” A codependent person neglects their own needs and represses their truth to prioritize others. This results in their difficulty setting boundaries and saying no to others’ requests. Codependents need to be needed. They believe that their service to others makes them valuable, especially when they can “save” people they perceive as broken or lost. They give away their agency to a person or an ideology, often espousing to have no power at all. This sense of inherent powerlessness becomes the reason for their exaggerated desire for control. Underneath the surface, codependent behaviors develop as coping mechanisms to survive others’ and one’s own unprocessed emotional pain like grief, the ultimate human experience that is out of our control.

In The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency, Melody Beattie says, “Letting go of our ideas about how life should go is a choice that sets life's magic free.” She describes the process of learning to set boundaries as a release of guilt and shame for not being who someone else wants you to be. Letting go of what should be is process of release, a death.

Codependency in Christian Theology

Codependent behaviors are explicitly taught in some Christian theologies. As a reminder, researchers determined that the four themes across codependent scholarship include external focusing, self-sacrifice, interpersonal control, and emotional suppression. Let’s look at how these four themes of codependency are reflected in some Christian beliefs. I’m going to speak to theologies taught in evangelical spaces because they are what I internalized.

External Focusing

Evangelical Christian thought is focused on an external God. God and his son are both outside of and separate from humans. As the only being who was both fully human and fully divine, Jesus is presumed to act as a bridge across this chasm between God and humans, but the bridge metaphor preserves God’s external separation. He’s still over there, and you’re still over here. Despite the practice of inviting Christ into one’s heart, divinity remains with but separate from humanity. It’s like Jesus is now a magic little guy inside your sinful heart telling you what to do. The Bible, an external text, also tells you what to do. Subscribers to this theology believe that when you die, God, an external being, determines your eternal fate. They believe that God the External wants you to believe in Jesus or be abandoned, rejected, and tortured forever. He wants you to align yourself to his desires and his will.

This focus on the externalized divine lays the foundation for codependency reflected in Christian theology. Let’s explore some of the bulleted points from above that fit with this external focusing theme of codependency.

Binary Thinking

Externalizations begin with an elaborate set of binaries. Either-or. This or that. All or nothing. In evangelical Christian thought, God is entirely distinct from humans. The divine is a he, and he’s with us but still separate and opposite. This is the basis for all other binaries, like the ones mentioned in Genesis 1. Light is separate from dark, sky from land, humans from animals, and so on. The binaries don’t end with the first creation story. There are many more in the belief system: good or evil, right or wrong, angels or demons, and most definitely male or female. God is good and has all power. Humans are sinful and have no power. Christians are separate from non-Christians. Real Christians are separate from fake Christians. Outsiders are enemies who want to persecute us. “We’re at war,” we often said.

This us-versus-them, this-or-that thinking sets the stage for hierarchy and control. If you can pit opposites against each other, you can say which is better. You can say what should be rather than what is. Recall that the codependent person wants to help, save, or fix the external other with their “you shoulds,” while also feeling obligated to prioritize the other’s needs to gain appreciation, approval, and acceptance. Codependency maintains itself with endless “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that come from external mandates and even from subtle enculturation.

It’s interesting that the refrain, and there was evening and there was morning, which is repeated after every opposite in Genesis 1, seems to have been lost in the theology. Dusk and dawn signal the nature of interconnectedness, transition, and continua between every distinction, defying binary thinking.

An Exaggerated Sense of Responsibility for the Actions of Others

Codependency rests on the premise that one party is responsible for the other party’s actions, emotions, and wellness. If one is acting from stress, the other feels responsible - and is made responsible - for eliminating the stress. One is happy when it seems she made others happy. If one displays unhealthy behaviors, the other feels responsible to heal or fix them. The unhealthy party relies on the other to heal or fix them.

Similarly, in evangelical belief humans must look to an external God to be delivered from their hardships, to release their guilt, or to become whole, making God responsible for their wellness. Conversely, humans become responsible for the actions of God. God sends people to hell for failing to profess their belief in Jesus. In other words, God makes humans responsible for his actions of sending them to hell. This is similar to the abuser’s refrain, “See what you made me do!” Within this belief system, God becomes responsible for humans’ wellness, and humans become responsible for God’s actions. Misplaced responsibility for behaviors and emotions is a key characteristic of codependency.

Fear of Rejection and a Deep-seated Need for Approval from Others

Evangelicals believe their worth comes from God, never from within themselves. God the External bestows approval, and Christians long to hear, “Well done my good and faithful servant” after they die. They will even sing, “I am nothing without you.”

This kind of groveling occurs in abusive relationships oppressive contexts. Religious trauma experts note that a child’s belief that God sends people to a place of eternal conscious torment creates foundational trauma, especially for marginalized groups. The child develops an exaggerated need for reassurance, given the threat of abandonment, rejection, and punishment from a “loving” parental figure. They begin to seek approval from the external other, God, to feel safe. People in this belief system try to ease their fears by thinking that they can avoid abandonment by doing what God wants, thereby feeling in control of what God does to them, a power imbalance.

Self-sacrifice

Perhaps the most obvious connection between self-sacrifice and evangelical Christian beliefs is the meaning we ascribed to Jesus’ death. One theological tenet, penal substitutionary atonement, suggests that by sacrificing himself on the cross, Jesus saved humanity from our sins. Jesus stepped in as a substitute for our death when we should have been punished, all so we could be atoned, restored, covered over, or made right with God. Jesus died when we should have died, which was always such a strange idea to me given that we all die anyway, sometimes in an equally gruesome fashion. By scapegoating Jesus as our substitute whipping boy, we misplaced responsibility. Plus, the shame and guilt for our bad behavior didn’t go away just because we told ourselves Jesus took it from us as we sang, “There is power in the blood.” We suppressed the shame and worked harder to be better, to earn approval.

Another meaning ascribed to Jesus’ death is the ransom theory of atonement, the notion that Jesus paid a ransom price for us after Satan held humans captive to sin. One could only be saved from Satan’s grasp by believing Jesus saved all of humanity from their sins by dying on the cross. But this means the rescue from hell didn’t actually apply to all of humanity after all because not everybody believes in Jesus. Despite this circular logic, self-sacrifice is idolized in Christian theology because Jesus “paid it all.”

Codependency is rooted in sacrificing oneself for the benefit of others. Recall the following characteristics of codependency listed above.

Doing Things You Don’t Really Want to Do, Simply to Make Others Happy

Apparently Jesus was so anxious about dying that his sweat resembled blood in the Garden of Gethsemane beforehand. It seems appropriate to infer that he didn’t really want to die. A lot of us don’t. But instead of sitting with our own reticence for death, change, and loss, we kept reciting John 3:16 to focus on our future utopia after we died. We turned the story into martyrdom, specifically Jesus’ willingness to die a gruesome death to make others happy, to save the world.

Idolizing Jesus’ self-sacrifice led us to idolize it in ourselves and each other. In fact, self-denial and self-sacrifice became an explicit expectation. Because we believed Jesus died so we didn’t have to, we equated love with suffering. Every time we did something we didn’t really want to do so we could make others happy, we added a jewel in our crown. The heavier our cross, the better our value. The more we could endure, the stronger our love. These beliefs made people perfect targets for dysfunction, even abuse.

We didn’t talk much about the verses in which Jesus referenced the line in Hosea, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Mercy means foregoing punishment or ending the suffering, quite the contradiction to our theories of atonement.

Pleasing, Helping, Accommodating Others

“God first. Others second. I’m third.”

Until quite recently, I did not realize that Jesus’ calls to be in service of others were directed toward men, not women. I mean, of course. His audience most often included his disciples, men. In the context of the Roman Empire during the first century CE, masculinity meant imposing action on others, conquering others, and being served by others, similar to our contemporary notion of the alpha male. Jesus critiqued this version of masculinity, essentially telling his followers they should act more like women. The Greek word for ministry, diakonos, was used in the context of domestic caretaking. It commonly meant to serve a meal, something women and slaves did, not something male citizens (non-slaves and non-women) did. When Jesus told his followers to minister to others, or in other words to serve, help, and care for others, he was talking to the men. He was saying that men needed to learn to be more empathetic, considerate, attentive, nurturing, and caring, traits women and servants already exhibited because they had to.

Universally applying these verses about ministry and service to others outside of their original context distorts the message because it neglects the larger societal power structures and cultural expectations of gender performance. Showing nurturance for others has largely fallen on women over the millennia, resulting in men’s entitlement to receiving care, thus their significant reliance on women for their wellbeing. For a long time, I interpreted Paul’s directive in Philippians 2:3-4, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others” to mean that I should neglect my own needs in favor of others’ needs, or in other words, to be codependent. Telling women to be in service to others only reinforces the power imbalance, the very thing Jesus was trying to disrupt.

A Tendency to Apologize or Take on Blame in Order to Keep the Peace

Taking blame for what others do reflects interpretations of Jesus’ death. A writer for The Gospel Coalition says that Christ willingly took the blame for our sins, blame humans are always trying to pass off. Worship songs state that Jesus “took the blame and bore the wrath” when dying. Jesus took blame that wasn’t his, then we apologized for it to keep the peace. I internalized the understanding that I wouldn’t “be saved,” or enter heaven, unless I confessed my sins, asked for forgiveness, and professed my belief that Jesus died for me. And although when Jesus died, he apparently took every bad behavior in the history of humanity with him, we still had to identify anything that might count as sin and apologize for it to be in right relationship with God, to keep the peace. This is codependency.

Interpersonal Control

Ahem. Evangelical Christianity isn’t called a high control religion for no reason. James Dobson didn’t joke that he was “apparently resented by an entire generation of kids who would like to catch [him] in a blind alley on some cloudy night” for no reason, as if his suggestion to beat your child with a belt is funny. The root causes of people’s alignment with high control systems are complex. I draw a connection between the need for a rule-bound structure and 1) people’s unhealed trauma or unprocessed chaos during childhood when they were most vulnerable and least in control; and 2) the belief that God has all power, and humans have none. In my estimation, the second comes from the first.

Controlling Behaviors

Some people respond to traumatic stresses by losing a sense of control over their circumstances. I suspect that believing power is wholly externalized onto God aligns with people’s feelings of helplessness during times of trauma, something we’ve all experienced. Professor Jeff Sharlet connects evangelical leader Ron Luce’s authoritarianism to his childhood trauma of being abandoned twice by his father:

The lights will drop down to indigo, and a guitarist will stretch single notes into soft cries, and Luce will murmur into his microphone, “Run to him. Run to him.” By “Him” he means the Father-God, but he’ll keep slipping between the divine and the dad who failed, whispering to the kids about fathers who never told their daughters they were pretty or their sons they were brave.

At Teen Mania events like Acquire the Fire, which I attended by the way, Luce’s theology consisted of an angry Jesus who needed warriors to fight the enemy. But instead of tracing the source of his passionate anger and powerlessness back to childhood, and instead of understanding that his “enemy” was the rejection he internalized, he turned Jesus into an angry son and the rest of us into an army who needed to fight harder, choose wisely, and do better for The Father. Instead of living in truth, Luce recursively projected his wounded inner youth onto masses of kids. He created circumstances in which teens were abused.

Augustine wasn’t the first to instantiate his unaddressed psychological material into theology, nor was he the last. Even today some will sing, “I give you all control” or say “I have no power,” which is fundamentally untrue, but in saying so, people are re-creating trauma, just as trauma survivors tend to do. Humans do have power, but when personal power goes unacknowledged or unclaimed, people try to enact their power through their efforts to control others, whether a child, a partner, an organization like Teen Mania, or an entire nation.

Despite our unconscious efforts of control, the evangelical conscious mind could only espouse grace and love. We vehemently denied that our beliefs were rooted in entire systems of dominance. Instead, we claimed we were: loving, helping, saving, protecting, encouraging, obeying, teaching, disciplining, supporting God’s mission, ushering in the second coming of Christ, and so forth, all the while acting from a need for control. Much of the time, we were attempting to control how other people saw us, portraying an image of ourselves, not the truth of ourselves. Because we had to stay away from the “appearance of evil” from 1 Thessalonians 5:22-23, we needed to control how we appeared to others, which is codependency.

As for the control embedded in our conceptions of the afterlife, I can’t imagine a more manipulative doctrine than the idea of hell as eternal conscious torment. Threats and fears of rejection or abandonment also undergird codependency.

Difficulty Making Decisions in a Relationship

I’ve previously written about how Christians learned to live a life of deference to God. God knows best, so we were always trying to figure out what God wanted and align our will to his. Although we claimed to have free will, our choice and agency always existed within the confines of God’s rules. The world’s ills were blamed on free will. It was more of a “go ahead, do what you want, and just see what happens to you” sentiment rather than free will as honoring every human’s agency, consent, autonomy, and empowerment. Consent is made irrelevant in both purity culture and rape culture because the underlying issue is denying people their right to decide.

Codependent people who live in accordance with shoulds and shouldn’ts are terrified of encouraging people to “judge for yourselves what is right,” as Jesus suggests his listeners do in Luke 12:57. Any interpretation of this verse always came with the reminder that our discernment should align with God’s will through scripture but without the acknowledgement that sometimes the stories in the Bible are about God-ordained horrors like genocide, slavery, women as chattel, and child sacrifice. We couldn’t trust ourselves to know right and wrong, good and evil. Any hint of doing so was “individual moral relativism.” But treating the Bible as an inerrant guidebook meant that people enacted individual moral relativism without ever admitting to. It contains contradictions everywhere. Using the Bible as a proof text means picking and choosing verses that support one’s beliefs while denying other verses and stories that would disconfirm them. Relativism.

This inability to discern for oneself due to our deference to the external text, the rules, and to authority resulted in a lack of personal boundaries. Boundaries were set for me, not by me. A life of obedience and deference to something outside of myself meant basing my decisions on what someone else had already outlined as the wise and best choice. This is codependency.

Emotional Suppression

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.” (Galatians 5:22-26).

We really thought we could just force ourselves and others into goodness. We thought that repressing our negativity reflected our valiant strength in the Lord. Our obedience needed to be cheerful, never a sour attitude. Anxiety was talked about as a lack of faith, grief was selfish, and anger was like playing with fire. Our sense of peace needed to come from outside of us, from an external God. God was responsible for giving us that peace, we could never find it on our own, and a positive outlook meant we were healed. So we smiled and cried happy tears as we worshipped human sacrifice and glorified suffering. If we were to win souls over to our side, the right way to be, we needed to be a good witness. We needed to show that there was something special we had that everyone else wanted, which was peace, hope, and love, so we mastered emotional bypassing, a staple practice in codependency. How great that Jesus would suffer so we don’t have to.

To feel the peace that passes all understanding, we saw the good in everything and everyone, so we twisted our realities, sometimes without even realizing it. Mistreatment was downplayed, “Yeah, but we all do hurtful things,” or “He really is a good guy at heart,” or “I shouldn’t complain, that must have been hard for them,” or even, “Let’s invite him over for dinner.” We believed that loving someone who disrespects us is evidence of God’s love within us. The more we believed in our original sin, our inherent unworthiness, and God’s unmerited favor, the more grateful we became for crumbs. How great that God would love someone as wretched as I was. How great that anyone would.

Twisting our realities so we could feel the peace of Christ and show the love of God meant tolerating disrespect. It meant significant problems with setting boundaries. Teaching masses of people to worship an external someone who would be willing to torture souls instilled the fawn response as our instinctual coping mechanism. We learned to praise the people who hurt us. We learned to convince ourselves we loved them, anything to avoid a reckoning with our vulnerability and pain.

Stuffing down the truth of our experiences and feelings meant making ourselves sick. It meant the body keeps the score. It meant feeding the Leviathans of our anger, envy, conceit, and grief, all swimming around in our unconscious and unwittingly causing pain to those around us. Whatever truth is repressed becomes the truth that controls. And controlled by our Leviathans we were.

Difficulty Identifying Feelings

In codependent dynamics, you struggle to identify your emotions because you learn to base your state of being on others, like we did with God. If we displayed the fruits of the spirit like joy and kindness, then we could prove that we were aligned with God. Evangelical belief systems teach that the “flesh” is sin and therefore, our embodied desires needed to be crucified, as in the verses above. This belief was not an abstraction. Any passion, desire, emotion, and somatic sensation, whether anger or excitement, originated from sin unless we justified it as necessary for God’s glory. By mastering emotional suppression and repression, we mastered the fake versions of ourselves—but without realizing it.

Much of my healing over the past eight years has been learning how to identify, validate, and process my emotions. I’m usually tempted to intellectualize, rationalize, or analyze them, but doing so keeps me in my head and out of the nasty visceral sensations of emotions that arise in my body. It’s a lot more comfortable to bypass my emotions altogether, but doing so means bypassing the truth. Sometimes the truth of me is sorrow, anger, or envy; other times it’s gratitude, playfulness, or joy. And sometimes it’s all of them all at once. I’ve had to learn that I’m whole, never only one thing.

J.S. Park, a hospital chaplain and author of As Long As You Need: Permission to Grieve, notes the ways people use platitudes to try to steer people out of their grief and into a more positive and palatable state. Some of those platitudes include: This is God’s will for your life. Everything happens for a reason. God is using this to refine you. God needed another angel in heaven. God gives his toughest battles to his strongest warriors. They’re in heaven, so you should be rejoicing. Just don’t think about it, and you’ll feel better.

Chaplain Park states: “Trying to insert future hope in the present loss can only harm us because it’s rushing us towards a conclusion that so many of us are not ready for. The first step out of that myth is to not look away from grief, but to let it in.” The Christian hope, as we talked about it, often worked to suppress uncomfortable emotions, creating a difficulty with accurately naming our experiences, which led to difficulty living in our realities.

A Tendency to “Love” People They Can Pity and Rescue

Some youth groups went on mission trips to build houses for people. I went on mission tips to save the lost. Saving people’s souls from hell was how we loved them. We loved others so much we were willing to have uncomfortable conversations with them about how sinful they were and how much they needed the love of Jesus. We pitied all those non-Christians (and fake Christians too!) going to hell. We needed to rescue those poor, poor people heading down a path of death and destruction, just like Jesus rescued us because he loved us. We tried to convince people to be like us, the righteous white ones with all the answers about the good life. We loved them by saving them, just like codependents do.

In a Nutshell

In essence, behaviors that enable addiction resemble popular Christian theologies. At its core, codependency is an imbalance of power. It prevents people from accessing their authenticity because they are so focused on The Other that they never learn to express what is true for themselves. Codependents obsess over what should be and conflate self-erasure with devotion and sacrificial suffering with rescue. They presume the good life will arrive when they can just control others into acting right. They cannot let go. They fear rejection, abandonment, or punishment to the point of becoming enamored with those who hurt them to feel safe. They worship dictators to cope with the chaos and violence. They justify atrocities by calling it love.

Some Clarifications

But to be clear, the party that controls others by imposing harm, retaliating, threatening violence, or by exploiting people’s kindness and other vulnerabilities is the party responsible for the harm, not the party that capitulates to cope with that harm.

A few other clarifications: Stepping into one’s power by expressing one’s truth does not mean turning into a jerk. It just means you don’t align your every thought, feeling, and move with someone or something outside of you. It means you learn to find resonance and alignment with your truest self, which some might say is your Christ. You begin to access your fullest, deepest being with love, which is the most considerate way to show up in the world, the most loving way to be with others. It’s quite disrespectful to act nice when you don’t mean it or to offer to help when you don’t have the capacity. Also, some people seem to think that a willingness to feel negative emotions means you intend to stay in them. That’s not how it works. Fully feeling emotions helps them move. The only way emotions get stuck is when you don’t acknowledge they are there.

One final clarification: The origin of codependency’s conceptualization remains important. It started as a construct that describes relational and familial maintenance of addiction. However, scientists found the same patterns in subsequent generations, even without the presence of addiction. Thus, these relational dynamics of codependency generalize across contexts and social spheres. Savior intentions are not limited to conservative Christian spaces. For what it’s worth, self-sacrifice, scrupulosity, policing others, emotional suppression, and deference are also quite prevalent in progressive, social justice activist spaces. It’s common to presume that alleviating the world’s suffering means getting everyone to act right, rather than trusting in the power of speaking one’s truth. Codependent patterns show up almost anywhere, in the halls of government, in public universities, between neighbors, in corporations and classrooms. My intent here was to convey how an entire religious belief system can mirror codependency when power is imbalanced.

Embracing Grief

I suspect that codependent behaviors, many of which are explicitly taught, are numbing behaviors. Emotional suppression numbs people from emotional suffering. Developing a sense of having the solutions to the world’s problems numbs people from the pain of those problems. Deference to others numbs people from the uncomfortable possibility of being exposed as fallible. Valorizing self-sacrifice numbs people from the fear of rejection for not being who others need you to be, for not saving the day. Numbing is natural, but it needs to be temporary.

People engaging in codependency presume that if they can control the other’s mind or behavior, then they will be accepted, secure, and free. But the opposite happens. Controlling others, whether by appeasement or imposition results in repressed truth and thus increased dysfunction. Melody Beattie says:

Letting go means we stop trying to force outcomes and make people behave. It means we give up resistance to the way things are, for the moment. It means we stop trying to do the impossible—controlling that which we cannot—and instead, focus on what is possible—which usually means taking care of ourselves. And we do this in gentleness, kindness, and love, as much as possible.

Letting go of our attachments to outcomes means embracing, not evading, grief. It means learning to lose what we thought should have been but never was and never will be. It means learning to lose people when it’s time for them to go. It means learning to lose the comfort that illusions provide, like believing that making yourself lovable means you will be loved or that controlling the other will set you free.

Maybe all the stuff Jesus said about service to others, mercy, and self-denial made sense to say to men in the 1st century CE Roman Empire. Again, men were his primary audience. Plus, only men and some wealthy women were formally educated in Ancient Greece and the broader Roman Empire, thus men would have authored and read the texts. Then and now, masculinity is defined by strength, power, entitlement to care, self-aggrandizement, aggression, and impositions onto others. But not everyone needs to hear that such traits are harmful. Not everyone needs to be told to consider others and deny yourself. Not everyone is trying to prove their manhood.

I like to imagine that Jesus’ death and resurrection symbolizes the process of learning to live in truth, thus learning to embrace grief. Death and resurrection are precisely what occur when the veil is lifted, and you see things for what they are. You lose your innocent naïveté, like a lamb, a death that is necessary for waking up to that which is, rather than that which should be. You start to see your circumstances and people, including yourself, in their totality, describing them accurately rather than according to whatever description maintains your comfort. Living in truth is a process of renewal; it’s death and resurrection over and over, which requires endless love. Throughout this process, we enact our inherent power when our outer expressions are aligned with our inner truths. Alignment to truth in this way is our atonement with God.