For adults who know exactly what everyone else needs and go blank when asked what they want.
The word gets used loosely enough that it's nearly lost its meaning. It isn't a diagnosis and it doesn't appear in the DSM. What it describes is a pattern: your sense of being okay runs through someone else's state, so managing them stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like survival.
It usually didn't come from nowhere. Most people who recognize themselves in it learned it somewhere it made sense — a household organized around someone's drinking, someone's illness, someone's temper, or someone's moods. Reading the room and getting ahead of it was a reasonable strategy. The problem is that it kept running long after it stopped being necessary.
Not a diagnostic checklist, only an evaluation can do that. But these are the things people describe most often when what they're dealing with turns out to be codependency.
The concept came out of the addiction field, originally describing what happened to spouses and children of people who were drinking. That lineage still holds. If you grew up around active addiction, or you're with someone who's using now, a lot of what gets labeled codependency is really just what you had to become to keep a household functioning.
It also shows up in families where the organizing problem was something else entirely — a parent's untreated mental illness, a chronically ill sibling, a household where one person's anger set the weather. More on that side of the work on the complex trauma page.
Codependency and relationship issues show up in a lot of different ways. We'll start by noticing the pattern as it happens: the managing, the over-functioning, the part of you that can't tolerate someone being upset with you. Usually that comes well before it feels changeable.
We'll look at how those patterns developed, including early relationships and other significant people in your life, so they start to make sense instead of just feeling like “who you are.” The work is about finding safety in relationships again, communicating more clearly, and being able to trust and love without abandoning yourself. Better usually looks like more choice, not less care. It looks like putting down some of the old beliefs and burdens you've been carrying.
In our first few sessions I'll ask questions so I can actually understand you, not just the relationship that brought you in. We'll talk about why you reached out, what happened along the way in your life that contributed to how you got here, and other parts of your world so I can see the full picture.
We'll also talk about how therapy works with me, and I'll answer any questions you have. Then we'll start discussing goals. If you don't have clear goals yet, that's completely fine. We'll figure that out together.
No. It isn't in the DSM-5 and never has been. It's a description of a relational pattern, not a clinical disorder, which is part of why definitions of it vary so much. That doesn't make the pattern less real or less worth working on.
No. The pattern shows up with family, friends, and at work as readily as it does with a partner, and some of the clearest work happens between relationships, when there's room to look at it without managing someone in real time.
No, though it gets confused with that constantly. The difference is usually cost and choice: whether you can say no without it costing you days of guilt, and whether you know what you want independent of what the other person wants.
You're not here because you're the problem. You're here because loving someone who's struggling has a cost, and that cost is showing up in your own life. We'll look at your emotions, your fears, and the patterns that have formed around the relationship. We'll also work on boundaries and communication, so things can get healthier between you and them, and between you and yourself.
No. I work with adults individually. If couples work is what you're looking for, I'm glad to point you toward colleagues who do it.
Closely, and in both directions. Codependency as a concept came out of the addiction field, describing what happens to the people around someone who's using. It also shows up on its own, in families where the organizing problem was something else entirely.
A free 15-minute call is a low-stakes way to find out whether this is the work you're looking for.
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