You can’t get enough of it. It’s taking control of your life, but you can’t stop. You know it’s bad for you, but you can’t leave it alone. You’ve pushed friends away, compromised your responsibilities and even walked off the job for it. You’re addicted and you don’t want to admit it. I’m not talking about drugs, alcohol or gambling. I’m talking about relationships.
Codependency is a serious problem and is seen in the psychology world as a disease; it can actually be diagnosed. The addiction to relationships or to a person is dangerous and can sometimes result in murder, suicide, stalking or unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as excessive alcohol or drug use.
“Codependency, by definition, means making the relationships more important to you than you are to yourself,” Dr. Tina Tessina said in an article on WebMD. “It’s kind of a weird phrase, and it doesn’t sound like it means a one-sided relationship. But that’s what it is. It means you’re trying to make the relationship work with someone else who’s not.”
Tessina is a marriage and family therapist in Long Beach and has published several books on codependency and dysfunctional relationships.
Codependents often come from households with the same issues.
“Most people who didn’t grow up in a codependent atmosphere aren’t going to put up with it for too long,” Tessina said. “The ones who start with the impression that love is sacrificing for my partner and putting up with whatever my partner wants to dish out, they’re the ones who get deeply stuck in it.”
The University of Illinois website includes an entire page on its counseling center section about addictive relationships.
The website reads, “In such relationships, individuals are robbed of several essential freedoms; the freedom to be their best selves in the relationship, the freedom to love the other person through choice rather than through dependency, and the freedom to leave a situation that is destructive.”
The website has a short survey for those who think they may be in an addictive relationship, as well as where and when to seek help.
Being in a toxic relationship is clearly emotionally destructive. These relationships often become abusive and sometimes have fatal endings. But aside from the obvious mental and emotional stress of such a relationship is the strain it creates in the rest of a codependent’s life. Usually codependents are convinced by their partners that they only need them or in other instances are pressured into believing they are the ones negatively affecting the relationship.
This leaves the addict’s friends and family in a rough spot. Outsiders typically recognize the unhealthy relationship and, when trying to help, are pushed away. The relationship typically goes through a continuing cycle of good, to calm, to bad, to a breakup, to a makeup. Family members and friends are allowed back into the addict’s life during the bad and breakup stages, then pushed away again during the makeup before they help the addict see the path they’re leading themselves right back to.
There is a concept known as the “honeymoon stage.” I’m sure you’ve heard this term before. It’s not made up; it’s actually used by many family therapists and is included in the “Five Stages of a Relationship” by Dr. Marty Tashman, a clinical psychologist in New Orleans.
“This is the romantic, passionate, stars-in-the-eyes phase,” Tashman says on his website. “The sex is good and there is never enough of it. This doesn’t happen for all couples, but as a rule, this strong attraction stage is laced with thinking about and wanting to be with your new love.”
Relationship addicts thrive on the return of the honeymoon phase every time they get back together with their partner and as soon as it fades, the destructive path repeats again.
It’s extremely difficult being the friend of an addict. Trying to save someone from the repetitive downward spiral of a destructive relationship is nearly impossible and is incredibly painful to watch the cycle continue to repeat itself despite every effort to make it stop.
The best advice out there for people addicted to a relationship is to identify it and seek help. Family and marriage counselors are available everywhere, including on campus. Individual and couples counseling are offered at no cost at the San Diego State Counseling and Psychological Services in the Calpulli Center. More information is available online at sa.sdsu.edu/cps/
