Quotes about Codependency

Being codependent means that when you die, someone else's life passes before your eyes.

The fear of man is no respecter of persons. It might be called codependency by adults, peer pressure with teens, and shyness with children, but whatever it is called, it all betrays the same idolatrous heart.

Don't give up hope. It took many of us twenty years or more to acquire these protective behaviors we umbrella with the word codependency. It may take as much time as that to let go of them.

A codependent person is one who has let another person's behavior affect him or her and who is obsessed with controlling that person's behavior.

Godly accountability is never codependency.

When a codependent discontinued his or her relationship with a troubled person, the codependent frequently sought another troubled person and repeated the codependent behaviors with that new person. These behaviors, or coping mechanisms, seemed to prevail throughout the codependent's life—if that person didn't change these behaviors.

Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They under-react. But rarely do they act.

It is almost impossible to fall in love with majesty, power, or perfection. These make us fearful and codependent, but seldom truly loving. On some level, love can only happen between equals, and vulnerability levels the playing field. What Christians believe is that God somehow became our equal when he became the human Jesus, a name that is, without doubt, the vulnerable name for God.

I want to thank each person who has the courage to push through and past the set of coping behaviors we've come to label as codependency—who learn what it means to take care of themselves. "Nobody taught me how to take care of myself," a fifty-year-old woman told me recently. "I didn't have enough money to go to therapy, but I had enough to buy a book.

Codependents aren't crazier or sicker than alcoholics. But, they hurt as much or more.

A codependent person is one who has let another person's behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person's behavior.

We're learning, through trial and error, to separate our will from God's will. We're learning that God's will is not offensive. We've learned that sometimes there's a difference between what others want us to do and God's will. We're also learning that God did not intend for us to be codependent, to be martyrs, to control or caretake. We're learning to trust ourselves. . . . and the power to carry that through.