As Codependents We :

Hide our pain from ourselves and from others, especially significant others.

We Try to Hide us from us.

Being denied our basic childhood dependency needs:

• We dwell in shame, plagued with dependency problems.

• Normal needs and urges become attempts to fill the empty self.

• The need for fun and excitement becomes addiction to intensity.

• The need for attention becomes acting out, acting in, or transfer and projection onto others. We say they are the ones with the problem or are needy, when it is really about us.

• The need for self-esteem becomes arrogance.

• The need for nourishment becomes our eating disorders.

• The need for understanding becomes compulsive demanding.

• The need for security becomes obsessive worrying and misery.

• The need for self-care becomes isolated narcissism.

• The need for relationship becomes desperation.

• The need for intimacy becomes enmeshment.
Sexual needs become shame, compulsion, fear, confusion and jealousy.

• The need for identity becomes an over-identification with the responses to our childhood hurts.

• We over-identify with the labels of pathology, of appearing to know what causes us to do what we do, when it is really us talking about us when we talk about them, ie. the pathologies.

• These pathologies are merely windows to lost childhood.

• Addiction(s) is a window to the hurting child.

• Self-destructiveness is a window to lost childhood pain.

• Hopelessness is a window to the loss of self or to the underdeveloped self.

Terry Kellogg was asked to define codependency in ten words or less. His reply was amazingly to the point; “it is the child's reaction to a low functioning family”. He later clarified his statement by saying, “it is just short of chronic mental illness”.


NDT: the above passage was extracted from Experience Has Taught Us --- Searching for the Willingness to Change ... Bright Star Press ... available on amazon.comTerry Kellogg and his wife are at the forefront of the work and treatment of Co dependency ... Writer Terry Kellogg observes, “Codependency is not about a relationship with an addict, it is the absence of relationship with self” (Broken Toys Broken Dreams, BRAT Publishing, 1990). with the book Broke Toys Broken Dream I usually wear 2 or 3 a year ... so