About ending co-dependence

Let’s say there is a person ‘X’ I meet who feels offended and hurt for every small thing, blowing things over the top, making emotional mountains of issues, to create guilt in you for making them feel that way.

I need to stop feeling responsible and hypersensitive to other people’s reactions to me. That speaks more about them than me. Because they see my appearance in their sensory input and interpret it based on their imagined mental castle worlds. I see their appearance and imagine them in my mental castle world.  Each person’s experience is their own making, their responsibility, including mine.

Else the situation is like, interacting with that person is like as if their mental castle is full of booby traps which I have to devote so much attention on ‘how to avoid them’. That is so much of baggage to hold on to all the ‘Do/Dont’s rules’.

This greatly impedes the functioning of my spontaneous self, as a result, I resent it and don’t desire it at all. Interacting with another person, should open up new vistas for me, not put me in a minefield or booby trap castle where I have to constantly hold on to the ‘What to avoid’ algorithms as an enormous burden and stress.

My fear of their emotional  unpleasantness is precisely the reason I am enslaved. Similarly the other person also unconsciously uses their unpleasantness as a power to reduce the other to a slave.

In co-dependence, the caregiver has convinced you, that your actions are intimately tied to her emotions and well-being. She has not taught you that you are independent and she is independent. So then you keep a constant watch on how you behave, act, speak and even think, so that you match the caregiver’s expectation so that no untoward reaction is triggered. Once this paradigm is set, you are as controllable as a TV remote is to a TV, for the caregiver. She moves the invisible remote of her emotions in response to everything you do, and your task is to ‘please/maintain neutrality’ and avoid things that ‘displease’. This is a prison like paradigm itself. Co-dependence is basically slavery where in this setup, the other can use his/her emotions like a remote control to control the other. In childhood we have no choice, because displeasing the caregiver means DEATH when you are that helpless. But it is a totally different ballgame once you are an adult. However this pattern tenaciously stays deep in the psyche and has to be uprooted.

The solution I feel to get over this fear is to allow the feared thing to happen: Let them abandon you, get angry, scream, shout, get dejected, frustrated, cut you off, attach you, be hostile etc. or display any of your feared emotions. Let things get bitter, sour, hostile, horrible, disgusting, messy, terrible, violent.

I fear these reactions in them, and it is my own fears that keep me in the prison of ‘attention hijack’ where all  my attention is directed to ‘What to avoid, and how to please’ like a slave. The more reactive, negatively sensitive, trigger-able the other person is, the more my fears are triggers and my own fears subjugate me to a slave.

Either way, the controller or controlled in this game, is participating in the same game called CO-DEPENDENCE.