One thing is for sure, humans are social beings. There is no doubt about that. Everyone knows that. We have to be careful though not to be codependant. If we are codependent, we feel insecure and vice versa, if we are insecure, we are probably codependent. This does not apply to everyone of course, but to 70%-80% of the population.
What Does Insecurity Mean, Why Are People Insecure And How Does It Relate To Codependency?
Everyone is looking at the outside world at what is going on around them. We get information through our five senses. Everything we hear, see, feel on our skin, taste and smell. As a result of receiving all information and stimuli, we form thoughts and conclusions in our minds and will make decisions and experience different things based on these thoughts.
If we look to the outside world, and with these senses we can't look to anything else, then we look there for help, for support. As long as we allow our mind to think things through, so to think, automatically, we cannot think consciously, so we cannot control our thinking. Until we can change that, we are always looking to the outside world for help and support.
When we look at the outside world, we are looking for answers about what can be good for us, what can be bad for us, what can be useful, what can be true or false. What we are doing is trying to adapt the outside world to ourselves. In short, we control.
How This Relates to Codependency
When our thinking self is watching our partner, what happens is that we think that we can be happy, we can be emotionally safe, if our partner behaves in a way that is good for us.
That's where control comes in, but we don't just control our partner, we expect them to live up to our expectations and behave in a way that suits us. They should behave in a way, that is safe and satisfying for us to be in the relationship.
Our thinking self does not think about what we can do to maintain a good relationship, but we look at what our partner does and how they do it. In most cases, we step up and say: "our relationship would be better if you would change, it would be better if you were nicer to me, if you cared more about me, if we went on more holidays, if we were together more" and I could go on and on.
So we are trying to sort out the outside world, to make sure that we are safe. But it's not that simple, because we can't completely control the outside world. We can ask our partner to change, but their change is not up to us, it is up to our partner. In doing so, we put ourselves at the mercy of our partner.
If our partner sees, that our request is justified, we have won the case and have managed to settle the outside world, but if they do not want to change, we will develop a long-lasting dissatisfaction.
The result is, that we become more and more stressed about our dissatisfaction and start shouting our problems out to the outside world. We'll complain to our friends and maybe not only our partner won't be good enough for us, but everyone else won't be either.
This is where codependency comes in. Because we don't change ourselves, but we try to force our partner to suit us, we look to our partner for support.
We don't decide, we depend on our partner, we don't see our own reality, only that of our partner. That is why we become insecure, because the outside world is constantly changing around us and we do not adapt to it, but we have expectations.
The more we pay attention to the outside world the more we will become insecure, because it is changing rapidly and we cannot and do not want to keep up with it.
We experience this in our daily lives with all the fake news and misinformation. We have absolutely nothing to hold on to and we don't know what to believe and what not to believe. We simply cannot get help from the outside world.
Discovering Inner Security
The solution is to discover our inner security. We should become aware of our thinking selves, who we really are. Who we are in the background. When we were born we were not thinking and as children we had no thinking self, but we were very happy. Full of power, potential and good abilities. Our thinking selves should be turned into our real selves with potential and good abilities.
When we realize who we really are, we not only discover our potential, but we also realize, that we cannot change the outside world, but we can put our best pressure on it. The outside world cannot be controlled, we cannot decide about politicians or the epidemic situation, but we can change ourselves, we can make our own decisions within ourselves.
If we can adapt to the outside world, and able to control ourselves, then we will see, that we will feel freer. We may ask the question, how can we feel free if we control ourselves. We make ourselves flexible to the outside world so we could make the right decisions in the right time.
Let's just stick to the example of the relationship. If we become flexible we will change our point of views and we decide whether we stay in the relationship or step out of it and leave. That is what I mean by freedom. We have free will and we will not be codependant.
We become frustrated when we do not achieve control. When we want to control everything and that everything already has its own rhythm, then we get stressed and feel defeated and out of control. In the case of couples, the only thing left to do is to separate because their lives have become a mess of disagreements.