Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

Many of us learned these things because when we were children, someone very important to us was unable to give us the love, approval, and emotional security we needed. So we’ve gone about our lives the best way we could, still looking vaguely or desperately for something we never got. Some of us are still beating our heads against the cement trying

New experience can help change old beliefs. When our needs are ignored when we’re young, we often feel rejected for having needs. This can lead to a belief that our needs are too much or that our needs will drive others away. The belief gets dismantled by showing our needs and having them met.

After I detached and took responsibility for myself, I wondered if maybe other people weren’t the reason I hadn’t been living my own life; maybe they were just the excuse I’d needed. My destiny—my todays and tomorrows—looked pretty grim.

They did not discover their possibilities for strength and self-support in the normal course of their development through childhood and adolescent years; now they may have organized their lives around their sense of deficiency, trying either to please, to be taken care of, or, alternately, to control and dominate, to manipulate and coerce the satis