But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

| Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

"For many, codependency was normal for us growing up. If you had a parent that you took care of (as opposed to the other way around), you learned that your happiness and safety were dependent on the other person’s happiness. There were no boundaries, and your feelings were ignored or minimized. You were made to feel guilty for trying to prioritize your well-being. Furthermore, you learned that your well-being and sense of self were completely contingent on the well-being of someone else. When that person was happy, you felt loved and needed. By default, if the adult was upset or unavailable (emotionally or physically) to you, you felt worthless and unloved."

even though i'm frustrated with how little boundary i'm allowed to have with my family (i.e. my mom sent me abroad when i was 15 against my will because she wanted to but now i'm made to feel guilty because i don't want to move back; she got upset because my #1 grad school choice doesn't align w hers), i inadvertently replicate the same conditions in my romantic relationships (i.e. automatically getting upset if my partner did something that i'm not comfortable with, instead of empathizing with how they're feeling in the situation)

Codependency is a learned pattern of chronic neglect of self in order to gain love, approval, or validation.

We learn this pattern as children through our earliest attachments (relationships) with parents.

If we experience emotional neglect, if we aren’t seen, heard, + allowed to uniquely express ourselves, we develop a core spiritual wound. We develop a lack of connection with our true self.

This lack of connection with self causes us to desperately seek our sense of self through others.

We become obsessive about romantic partners. Their behavior. What it means. And many of us unconsciously seek to change our partners. To get them to see us. To get them to finally choose us— just as we did as children because we had no choice.

At the core of codependency is a deep fear of abandonment.

Many people connect codependency with substance abuse. This can absolutely be the case, but the most common addiction within codependency is an emotional addiction.

The highs and the lows. The cycles of rejection then being chosen. The powerful chemical cocktail of stress hormones running through the body as our adult attachments activate the trauma body memory of unresolved childhood attachments.

Codependency isn’t a bad thing. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s something to become curious about.

We can unlearn the patterns of codependency + begin to develop interdependent relationships where we have secure attachments with others while also having self autonomy.

Healing from codependency is an act of deep spiritual healing where we learn to restore self trust (through keeping small promises) + honor our own needs, boundaries, + freedom