What Does It Really Mean to Be ‘Codependent’?

According to the internet, it’s very possible that I am “codependent.” Do I try to fix the problems of my loved ones? Sometimes, yes. Am I sacrificing “who I am” in my relationships with my husband, children, and parents? If you put it in those terms, probably. Could the level of responsibility I feel for others be classified as “exaggerated”? Oof—maybe.

To be codependent, according to some TikTok talking heads, advice columnists, celebrities, and mental-health advocates, is to care too much, try to control others, and be terrible with boundaries. Beyond that, diagnostic criteria can get a bit fuzzy. The support group Co-Dependents Anonymous offers a long list of traits, including being too submissive, too bossy, too sensitive, and too avoidant, and says on its website that “the only requirement for membership is a desire for healthy & loving relationships.” Meanwhile, the nonprofit Mental Health America says that codependency is another term for “relationship addiction”.

This ambiguity exists in part because codependency is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; nor has there been substantial research on the concept. Some people may find it to be a useful tool for explaining bad relationship habits, but the term’s popularity also gestures at something worrisome: an avoidance of vulnerability and the natural asymmetries in relationships. To be a person is to be dependent on other people, perhaps in incredibly inconvenient ways. “Codependent” is a fairly accurate description of the human condition.

We are, however, in the age of boundaries. “There is something in the zeitgeist about people really wanting to individuate from relationships,” Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, told me, referring to the rise of family estrangement, for example. Sometimes, such as in unhealthy or even abusive relationships, emotional distance is wise. But a constant preoccupation with distance is not. “We have adopted this view that relationships are too messy, challenging, demanding, or threatening, and it is cleaner and easier to go through the world solo,” Saxbe said. “But that doesn’t track with what we know about human flourishing.”

The codependency concept gained steam in the late 1980s, in part because of the self-help author Melody Beattie’s best-selling book, Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself. According to Beattie, well-meaning loved ones of people with substance addictions have an unhealthy compulsion of their own: helping others. “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 wrote.

In addiction-support circles, “enablers”—the loved ones of people with addictions—were seen to also be at fault. As long as they kept caring for their loved one, that person would never hit rock bottom and find the inspiration to quit. Meanwhile, the enabler would be so obsessed with changing someone else’s life that they risked jeopardizing their own financial and emotional security. Better for everyone, apparently, if the enabler distanced themselves from the addict and broke the chain of unhealthy mutual dependency. Recent research questions this thinking, showing that those with substance-abuse disorders tend to benefit from strong social relationships, whereas loneliness increases the odds that they become addicted in the first place.

In subsequent years, codependency rhetoric moved from the addiction field into mainstream self-help culture. It found, in particular, a female audience navigating a world in which default expectations to be a dedicated wife and mother were shifting. The term codependency offered a tool for these women to determine which of their relationships they had overinvested in, to their detriment. It gave reason to reject an assumption that they should be caregivers, perhaps at the expense of caring for themselves.

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This impulse was understandable. There are limits to how much caregiving anyone can do, and for a long time, women were expected to give too much. But some ’90s feminists spotted the issues with using codependency to reimagine women’s roles, pointing out how the concept pathologized caregiving, and how convincing women that they were the problem could obfuscate wider sexism. In 1990, the therapists Jo-Ann Krestan and Claudia Bepko described the adoption of codependency language as “a social phenomenon that seems to reflect a more global search to name and articulate pain.”

Today, talk of codependency has found an accommodating home on social media, which thrives on simple diagnoses of complex human pain. In memes and short videos, codependency remains a shorthand for women’s fears of being too emotionally dependent on others, and of losing their independence and individuality as a result. These conversations raise deep human questions about how much of ourselves we should protect, and how much we should give. But rarely is there any acknowledgment of the fact that when we give to others, we receive from them too. “Things have been twisted in a way in which all care is bad,” Saxbe told me.

Balancing one’s own needs with the needs of others is, in fact, a universal challenge. To scapegoat codependency is no help in this task. We evolved to attach to other people because humans, quite simply, can’t survive on our own—starting right from when we are babies depending on our parents. Those who think they are codependent and therefore to blame may be missing important cues about what they truly want in a relationship, Amir Levine, a neuroscientist, an associate psychiatry professor at Columbia University, and the co-author of Attached, told me. If, for example, a woman is worried that her partner doesn’t spend enough quality time with her, that might just be a sign of incompatibility. Her desire for his attention doesn’t necessarily make her emotionally unhealthy or controlling; their expectations may simply not be aligned.

Some traits of so-called codependency should be taken seriously. For example, a deep-seated fear of abandonment, combined with other symptoms such as impulsive and self-destructive behavior, could be a sign of borderline personality disorder. And even when the codependency label isn’t masking a psychological disorder, the term can still be helpful. “It is important to validate that the term codependency really resonates for some people,” Kimberly Calderwood, a social-work professor at Trent University, in Canada, told me, even if “codependency does not exist separate from other existing labels.” Still, those identifying with it may benefit from exploring whether they have a more specific and diagnosable condition. If not, they might consider whether avoiding so-called codependency is stopping them from doing the hard and ultimately inevitable work of navigating human connection.

Think about it this way: Mutual reliance is an accurate definition of a healthy relationship. The more we see depending on others and being depended on by others as an affliction, the less prepared we are for not just parenting and caregiving, but also any long-term friendship or romantic partnership. When someone is depressed or sick, they need exactly the kind of disproportionate care that codependency language warns us to stay away from. For my part, 15 years into marriage, I can assure you that the ship is never centered. All one can hope for is that it tips according to the tide of both partners’ needs.

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When thinking about our deepest relationships, Levine prefers the concept of interdependence, which emphasizes our interconnectivity as a species. The important thing to remember, he said, is that we shouldn’t believe that we have to be fully formed, emotionally secure individuals before forming a bond. Oftentimes, we establish ourselves through a bond. In my 20s, I tried many solo paths to self-discovery: meditation retreats, hikes, backpacking around the world. None of these challenges taught me as much about myself as raising children, being married, or supporting my loved ones through hard times have. Only then was the gap between the person I thought I was and the person I am—or could become—fully revealed. Paying close attention to others’ needs made me a more accurate observer of my own. Whoever I was before a meaningful relationship was challenged and transformed through one-on-one connection. And if I hadn’t been, what would’ve been the point? We don’t just self-actualize, we co-actualize. It’s what makes being human interesting.