Inner Work Notes

Tag: codependency

  • Why Setting Boundaries Causes Conflict Almost Every Time

    Have you ever wanted to say no, heard yourself agree instead, and then spent the evening replaying the conversation? You knew you didn’t want to do what was being asked of you, but the other person’s disappointment felt more urgent than your own answer. By the time you noticed what you wanted, you had already promised to help.

    This is not mainly a problem of finding the right words. The trouble starts earlier, with whether you can tell your own feeling apart from the other person’s. A boundary is what lets you say to yourself: their disappointment belongs to them; my decision belongs to me. When that distinction is unclear, saying no feels less like making a choice and more like harming someone. So you keep handing over your time and energy to protect their mood.

    What do psychological boundaries actually mean?

    In psychoanalytic thinking, a boundary isn’t a matter of manners. It isn’t the polite distance you keep at a dinner party, and it isn’t the same thing as being assertive. It is the line in your mind that says: up to here is me, and beyond here is not me. When that line blurs, what you feel inside starts to pass for what is actually happening outside. So a boundary is less about politeness than about keeping hold of what is real.

    In everyday life, the line comes down to a simple distinction: this feeling is mine, and that reaction belongs to the other person. With that distinction, you can see that someone is upset and still ask, as a separate question, whether you actually did anything wrong. Without it, you start treating feelings as facts. If you feel guilty, you assume you must have done something wrong. If someone becomes quiet, you assume they are angry with you. If you feel anxious about saying no, you conclude that saying no is dangerous.

    That’s why boundaries matter so much for emotional health. Without a clear boundary, you start to lose track of what is real, including what is going on inside you. People who can’t say no often say they are unsure what they want and what they think, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re feeling until someone else names it for them.

    Why does a self need an outline?

    Think of a country on a map. You recognize it by its outline. Without the border line there would be no shape to recognize, only blank paper. A person is the same. Only when a line is drawn around you does the shape of who you are appear, so that you can say, “This is the kind of person I am.” In daily life, you draw that line through small distinctions like these: I like this and dislike that. I can help with this but cannot take responsibility for that. I understand why you are upset, but I do not agree with your conclusion. Each one marks something as yours — your taste, your limit, your view — and so shows where you end and another person begins.

    Without those distinctions, you can feel many things without knowing which feeling should guide your decision. You notice the other person’s anger before your own exhaustion. You can explain what everyone else needs but cannot answer a simple question about what you want. A boundary is what lets you know which feelings and which choices are yours.

    When does the “I” first appear?

    You are not born with boundaries. They form slowly as you grow up, and they begin at the moment you realize that another person is truly separate from you. A small child first learns this from their caregiver, the person who looks after them. The child may be hungry while the caregiver wants to rest. The child may want something, and the caregiver may say no. A boundary develops as the child learns to bear this: the person they depend on is separate from them and has wants of their own.

    This realization comes through small discoveries about someone close to you. Their temperament isn’t yours. What makes them laugh isn’t what makes you laugh. They are someone other than you, and they will not become you. Noticing this is where the line begins.

    Notice the order, because it is the opposite of what we usually assume. We imagine that a fully formed “I” exists first and then learns to recognize other people. It actually works the other way around: only when you realize that someone over there is not you does the outline of your own “I” begin to appear.

    Saying no is often hardest with the people who matter most to you, because with them you most fear that their anger could end the relationship. When someone close to you is upset, you stop checking your own response and start arranging yourself around their reaction. So it is not only that you are afraid to speak. For the moment, you have lost track of what your own answer even is.

    What happens inside when the line goes blurry?

    When a boundary is weak, what is inside you and what is outside you get mixed up. A feeling that rose up in you feels as if it came at you from outside, from another person.

    Most of us know this in mild, everyday forms. You are actually unhappy with yourself, but it feels like this: “I feel bad because that person dislikes me.” Or a harsh thing you have been telling yourself for years suddenly seems to come from someone else: you catch it in their tone of voice, the look on their face, the wording of their text message. Psychoanalysis calls this projection: you feel as if a feeling came from someone else when it actually started in you.

    This is why checking with the other person may not bring relief. You ask, “Are you upset with me?” They say no, but twenty minutes later you want to ask again. Their answer cannot settle the fear, because the fear did not start with them. It started in you, in your own expectation of being rejected. Until you recognize the fear as yours, you will keep asking the other person to remove it.

    Why does setting boundaries cause conflict almost every time?

    Here’s the part almost nobody is warned about. When you start holding a boundary, conflict follows. Not occasionally. Close to always.

    Looked at plainly, this makes complete sense. The other person was used to getting a yes from you, and now they’ve met a “no.” Of course there’s friction. Say you have always done what someone asked, and one day you tell them for the first time, “I don’t think I can this time.” They may be more than disappointed: they may be caught off guard and ask why you have suddenly changed. The longer your yes had been taken for granted, the louder the reaction. A boundary changes the terms of a relationship, and terms don’t get renegotiated quietly.

    At that point most people back down. They take the conflict as proof: I’ve handled this badly. I’ve hurt them. I’ve broken something. So they quietly erase the line, the peace returns, and the old pattern stays in place, ready to repeat the next time.

    But there is another way to read the conflict. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described one of the ways we come to experience another person as truly separate from us, a person in their own right: they survive our anger or attack, neither striking back nor falling apart. Saying no for the first time can feel, to you, like exactly that kind of attack, as if you were hurting them. Surviving it does not mean the other person stays calm; they may well be upset. It means they do not insult you or threaten to end the relationship, and they do not collapse. Then you learn that your no did not destroy them, and that choosing differently from them does not make you a bad person. A relationship that can take a “no” and still stand has become a relationship between two separate people. If you have been keeping the peace in order to stay close, this is hard to accept, because it means the friction you have been avoiding may not be an obstacle on the road to closeness. It may be part of what closeness is built from.

    So the conflict that flares up may not mean the relationship is damaged. It may mean that a line now exists where there was never one before.

    None of this promises that every relationship will survive the change. Nor is it a reason to force a confrontation you aren’t ready for. It is an invitation to look carefully at the friction before you decide what it says about you.

    What if you keep erasing the line to keep the peace?

    So what happens if you don’t hold the line — if fear of conflict wins, as it understandably might for a while?

    The relationship becomes quiet, which is why giving in can feel like success. But every time you agree before checking what you want, you practice ignoring your own answer. Over time you get better at making other people comfortable and worse at knowing what you like, where your limits are, and what you yourself want to do.

    Winnicott used the term true self for your spontaneous reactions: what you feel and want before you adjust it to win someone’s approval. A genuine no comes from this part of you. But when agreeing has become automatic, “Sure, that works” comes out before you have checked whether it actually works for you. The problem is not only that you lacked courage. You agreed so quickly that you did not have time to hear your own answer.

    Growing as a person has an order, and the first step can’t be skipped. People often want to jump straight to the later steps: opening up to others, giving generously. But first there has to be a clear “I”, with its outline drawn. Opening up and giving come after that.

    So if you are uncomfortable right now because you are drawing a line you have never drawn before, that discomfort is not necessarily a step backward. It may be the step you have to take in order to move forward.

    One small thing to try today, if you’d like. Bring to mind the moment from the past day that bothered you most. Then ask yourself one question and write the answer on paper in a single line: Where did this feeling start? If it started in you, write that it’s yours. If it was really the other person’s feeling — their disappointment, their anger — write that it’s theirs. It’s fine if you can’t tell for sure. You’re not solving anything, and not deciding what to do about it. You’re stopping for a moment to tell your feeling apart from theirs and putting one mark on the paper — and that’s how an outline gets drawn.

    This is educational writing about a psychological idea, not guidance for your particular situation. Drawing a boundary is not equally safe in every relationship — if holding one in your own relationship could put you at risk, please talk it through with someone qualified who knows your circumstances before you act on anything here.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts

    You already know the relationship is hurting you. You know how tired you are and how often you have been disappointed. You may even have packed a bag or promised yourself that the next incident would be the last.

    But when you imagine leaving, another thought appears: He would fall apart without me. She would not manage. Everything would collapse because I stopped holding it together.

    If you have wondered why you cannot leave a relationship that keeps hurting you, love may not be the only reason you stay. Codependency may also be holding you there: you have become responsible for keeping the other person stable, and you believe that if you sacrifice enough, your care will eventually change them.

    Have you ever thought, “They would not make it without me”?

    Codependency is a way of relating in which another person’s problems become your responsibility. When they drink, you call their employer and say they are sick. When they forget a bill, you pay it before the service is disconnected. When they become angry, you change your words and behavior to calm them. Once you have done this again and again, caring for them is no longer just one part of your life. It becomes your role, and you start to feel that you matter only as long as you are solving their problems.

    From the outside, this looks like devotion. The devotion is real. People in this position often give more than anyone around them and continue giving after they are exhausted. But underneath the giving, there is often an unspoken condition: If I sacrifice enough, this person will change.

    You may never say this condition aloud. It may feel like commitment rather than a bargain. But the expectation still shapes what you do. You give up sleep, money, friendships, and plans of your own because you believe each sacrifice brings the other person closer to becoming responsible, sober, affectionate, or stable.

    People rarely change because someone else has sacrificed for them. Change must begin inside the person who needs to change. When that change does not happen, however, you often reach the wrong conclusion. Instead of thinking, They are not choosing to change, you think, I have not loved them well enough yet.

    That conclusion creates a repeating cycle. They create another problem. You step in and repair the damage. They avoid the consequences of what they did. Because the crisis has passed, you feel briefly relieved. Then the same problem returns, and you try even harder. You give more and more, but they take no more responsibility for their own behavior. You believe you are helping. But because you keep taking the consequences onto yourself, they never have to face them, and so they have no reason to change.

    Why were they so good to you at the beginning?

    People with an addiction, or with some other trouble they have never dealt with, are often unusually attentive at the beginning of a relationship. They listen closely, respond quickly, and adjust themselves to what you need. Their warmth may be sincere. At the same time, the part of them that desperately needs the relationship is working hard to make sure you do not leave.

    Later, when they feel certain that the relationship will continue, that effort may disappear. The person who once called every night stops answering. The person who noticed every change in your mood now dismisses your pain. Because you experienced their warmth at the beginning, you remember that warm person as who they really are. The way they treat you now seems like a temporary change, not the whole relationship.

    This is why you keep thinking, He was a good man when we met. She used to understand me. If I respond correctly, we can return to that time. Each brief return of affection strengthens that expectation. A kind weekend after weeks of conflict can convince you that the person you first met is coming back. You stay not only because of what the relationship is now, but because you are still waiting for it to become what it was at the beginning.

    The longer you stay, the harder it becomes to leave. You have already put in years, money, and patience, and given up many plans of your own. Leaving now can feel as though you are admitting that none of those sacrifices produced the change you expected. To avoid that conclusion, you make one more effort. The more the relationship costs you, the more determined you become to make the cost mean something.

    Did you really choose this person?

    As a therapist, when I look at a relationship, I pay attention to how each person was already handling fear, loneliness, and responsibility before the two of them met. Give two people the same difficult month and they may respond in completely different ways. One asks three friends for help within two days. The other becomes silent, hides the problem, and waits for someone to notice. Each person brings a way of coping like this into a relationship.

    You also came into your relationship with patterns of your own. You may be drawn to people who need rescuing because being useful makes you feel secure. You may trust an emotionally distant person quickly, because that distance feels familiar. You may work harder for affection if, as a child, love was something you had to earn. These patterns usually shape your choice of partner long before you can put them into words.

    This is why the faces can change while the shape of your relationships stays the same. One partner drinks and another withdraws, but you become the responsible one in both relationships. You make excuses for them, wait, repair the damage, and give another chance. The details change, but your role and the ending remain familiar.

    In these relationships, choice is shaped by familiarity. You can mistake what feels familiar for what is right for you. You do not consciously decide to repeat the same pain. You recognize the familiar feel of the relationship long before you see what it will cost you.

    Why do their words sound like something you have heard before?

    Suppose your partner swears at you, and as you hear it, you remember your father swearing at you in almost the same words decades earlier. The current scene hurts, but it is not unfamiliar. You already learned what to do in this kind of relationship: become quiet, watch the other person’s mood, wait for the anger to pass, and try not to make the situation worse.

    Because of that history, familiar pain can feel safer than a calm you are not used to. Your body already knows the sequence. Their voice changes, your muscles tighten, you stop saying what you think, and your attention moves from your own feelings to the other person’s reaction. In a calm relationship, nobody needs to be rescued or watched. Because you have not practiced living that way, calm can feel empty or uncertain rather than safe.

    Psychoanalysis calls this pull toward familiar pain the repetition compulsion: without realizing it, you keep going back to the kind of emotional situation you first lived through as a child. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called a knot of early feelings and memories a complex. A complex does not remain in the past. It influences which people attract your attention, what behavior you excuse, and which role you automatically take when conflict begins.

    This is why your partner’s words can sound like your father’s. The present relationship puts you back in the place you held with your father as a child. You again become the person who absorbs the anger, keeps everything from falling apart, and waits for warmth to return. Part of you is also trying to do this time what you could not do back then: finally fix the relationship with your father. That old wish is part of why you try so hard to change your partner. Willpower alone rarely breaks the pattern, because to you this is simply how a relationship works.

    Where does devotion end and codependency begin?

    Devotion and codependency can look almost identical from the outside. In both cases, you may cook, pay bills, attend appointments, and stay close during a crisis. The difference becomes clearer when you look at what happens to your own life while you are helping.

    Here is the first question to ask yourself: If this person never gets better, do I still have a life of my own?

    If you continue sleeping, working, seeing friends, making decisions, and knowing what matters to you, your care is closer to devotion. If their condition determines your mood, your schedule, your self-worth, and whether you are allowed to have a life of your own, then this is codependency.

    The second question is harder: If this person became completely well tomorrow, what would happen to me?

    Imagine that they manage their own money, make their own appointments, regulate their own emotions, and no longer call you to solve each crisis. If you feel relief, then what you wanted all along was to share a life with them, not to carry their life for them. If you feel empty or anxious, being needed may have become the main source of your identity.

    Feeling empty or anxious is not a moral failure, and it does not mean you consciously wanted them to remain unwell. It means the role has been giving you something important: the sense that you matter. When you are the person who notices the unpaid bill, makes the phone call, prepares the meal, and prevents the next disaster, you always know what to do and why you matter.

    If the other person begins doing those things without you, your role disappears. Then another question appears: If nobody needs rescuing today, what do I want to do with my own life? That question can feel frightening when you have put your own wishes, friendships, work, and rest on hold for years.

    If their recovery makes you feel empty instead of relieved, being needed has probably been giving you a reason to remain in the relationship.

    If they were completely well tomorrow, what would you want to do?

    Try writing something today, but not about them. Do not write about what they did last week, why they behaved that way, or what you should have done differently. Instead, write your answer to one question:

    If this person were completely well tomorrow, what would I want to do?

    You may not have an answer. That blank space tells you something important. Your days may have been organized around another person for so long that you have stopped asking what you enjoy, whom you want to see, and where you want your own life to go.

    You do not have to make a final decision about the relationship tonight. Begin with one concrete answer about the life that would still belong to you if the other person were no longer at the center of every day. Write down one place you would visit, one person you would call, or one activity you stopped doing when managing the relationship took over your time.

    What you write down is not yet a plan to leave or stay. It shows that you have needs, wishes, or a direction of your own that do not depend on holding another person together.

    This is educational writing, not treatment. If you are afraid for your safety in this relationship, getting safe and getting outside help come first, before any effort to persuade or change the other person.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board