Look, I’m going to stop you right there before we even get into this.
I will not hear you call yourself codependent. I won’t do it. I won’t let you label the part of you that is fighting for love as a bad part of you. That’s not what we do here.
Here’s the thing. The word codependency was invented before anyone in that research room was thinking about attachment theory. Not once did they reference it. They were looking at partners of alcoholics, people who were bending themselves completely out of shape to keep their person close, and instead of saying, “My God, look how much they love this person, look how hard they’re fighting not to lose them,” they said, “There must be something wrong with them. They must need to be needed.”
That is a damning, unfair, deeply unloving interpretation of what is actually happening.
What is actually happening? Attachment. That’s it. Full stop.
You are a human being who needs to be emotionally bonded to your person from the cradle to the grave. That’s not a flaw. That is your design. And when that bond feels threatened, you are going to do whatever you learned to do as a little kid to make sure you don’t lose the connection. You are going to monitor, and compensate, and shrink, and chase, and over-function, or under-function, whatever your particular flavor is, because losing your person feels like dying. Because when you were very small, it basically was dying.
That is not codependency. That is attachment under threat.
Now, anxious attachment specifically. Here’s what I see with anxious folks. They’ve learned, usually very early, that love is not reliable. It comes and goes. The person they needed most was sometimes there and sometimes not, warm and then cold, present and then gone. And so their whole nervous system got wired around one terrifying question: “Are you still there? Are you still okay with me? Am I going to lose you?”
And that wiring doesn’t just go away because you’re an adult now. It gets activated the second your primary partner does anything that even rhymes with that old feeling of being left or dismissed or not enough. Then the alarm goes off, and you do whatever you have to do to get the connection back.
People look at that and go, “Oh, that’s codependent.” No. That’s a person who loves someone completely and is scared out of their mind of losing them. Just like a little child who will give up every toy, every friend, everything, before they give up Mom.
Now, the work is not to get rid of that feeling. The work is not to need your partner less. Anyone who tells you that is selling you something that doesn’t exist.
The work is to go deeper into it. To get underneath the panic and the clinging and the over-functioning, and find the little one in there who is so sad, who needed something and didn’t reliably get it, and love that part of yourself up. And from that softer, sadder, more vulnerable place, to actually let your partner see you. Not the frantic, anxious, chasing version. The real one underneath who is just scared and small and hoping to be loved.
That is the path through. Not getting rid of the need. Going all the way into it.
So please. Stop calling yourself codependent. You’re just someone who loves people with your whole heart and got scared. That is one of the most human things there is.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Attachment Styles in Relationships: How Your Love Pattern Shapes Your Bond
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