Last week, I had the insight that, I may be co-dependent. In the past, I have rejected co-dependency as professional jargon, but last week, something told me to check it out; I did, and I’ve decided that it is a useful construct. The term co-dependency grew out of the Alcoholics’ Anonymous Movement, along with the understanding that, the alcoholic was not the only part of the equation. In essence, co-dependency is excessive caretaking at significant personal expense. It is learned behavior that is passed on from one generation to another. Although it took me almost a lifetime to admit it; my father had a drinking problem when he was younger, which is, obviously, a risk factor.
As I write this, I am also reminded of female gender socialization; in other words, females, across cultures are socialized to be caretakers of their children and their men. Then, there are the expectations in some cultures (like Hispanic and Asian) that family come first. I started wondering about all of this, because I have noticed that I spend most of my mental energy thinking about others. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to imply that I am a martyr, since there is always a pay-off. Thinking about others distracts me from taking responsibility for myself. For example, when I was on tenure-track at Michigan, I would stop my work, or whatever else I was doing, to answer a phone call. Abandoning your routine to respond to somebody else is one of the symptoms of co-dependency, according to Melodie Beattie in Co-Dependent No More. It took me years, and I am not kidding about this, to figure out that I could choose not to answer, or if I did, that I could say, “I’m busy, can I call you back?” And, although I am far better than I was back then, I still other-escape. Feeling compelled to help people solve their problems is another one of my symptoms, which may be why I avoided clinical social work. Instead, I was addicting to helping others as a hobby.
As I said, earlier, this behavior is learned. In my family, my mother would put her needs aside for my father and we were supposed to as well. Her needs, my sister’s, or mine did not matter because my father ruled the roost; this implied that we should not have needs that conflicted with my father’s, and after he died, my mother’s. He wanted me to get an education, to marry young, have children, and to live near the family. That, of course, was not what I wanted, so I rebelled: I left home, got a PhD, married late, and didn’t get around to having children. I don’t mean to blame my parents, but to recognize that I have been programmed to be-other directed, and I wonder whether that is why I didn’t make active choices in my career. I did choose to go back to school, in part as an escape, but once I did, I followed the program that was traced for me by my dissertation advisor, both to please her and to avoid struggling with getting a “real job,” one that was not a continuation of graduate school. Fast forward, twenty-five years, and I am taking baby-steps to discern my needs and wants, making friends with uncertainty, taking leaps, and hoping that, as the saying goes, I grow wings along the way. My mantra: It’s all about me. What about you? Are you taking care of you?
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Wow. I read this twice, Z., because you said so much all at once that seemed, in one way, to make sense; I think you underrate yourself, though.
I’ve watched a lot of kids who were the first in their clan to graduate college, and it’s very tough on them, I think. There’s no model for understanding how the process works, but there’s always plenty of expectations set for a successful outcome. Who knows what a successful outcome looks like when the context of forming ideals is outside a well-established frame of reference? Pioneering is always hard because we have to be our own teachers, motivators, disciplinarians, etc. But as you’ve often said, you also negotiated a foreign country for both yourself and your parents, faced off with new cultural ideals as you grew, and you took a direction in life that wildly digressed from the ways your family knew.
When you write about school, the thing that comes to my mind is that you didn’t have a support system in place that could provide benchmarks for helping you know how to discern and map out the path of higher education and its demands. Also, you entered an education system foreign to the ways of your culture of origin, and I don’t know how you could possibly have known all the implied, naturalized ins and outs of what pursuing this life path means without having a mentor to help you.
I understand how the cultural model in your family actually taught you that your role was to serve. Some people call this co-dependency… but I think you made a good point about the ways society cultivates women to find their worth through service. To stigmatize that which society cultivates is so unfair to women… we’re bitches when we set boundaries and alternative priorities, but we’re co-dependent if we behave true to our conditioning. It’s a double bind for women.
Maybe you avoided your social clinical work because you got stuck. Have you ever thought that maybe you took yourself as far as you were able to imagine… and then you didn’t have the support or clarity you needed to go farther at that time? Maybe you returned to familiar patterns to sort and re-form in a way that validated you, and your origins, while holding your own with the life you picked for yourself? It seems like a very complex process to negotiate when any person breaks with established ways to create a different way… maybe your family wasn’t equipped to validate how remarkable you are. Maybe, just maybe, you have a very human need to be validated and appreciated… and maybe people around you weren’t/ aren’t validating your pursuits in a nurturing way.
I’m glad you’re revisiting your needs and wants. And, I’m glad you’re doing it incrementally. It’s like reading a great book twice–the first time is all about putting everything together, and the second time is often about going back to take in the full breadth of the piece. Both reads serve a purpose.
My best… and a great hug,
Meredith