Two people, and nothing about them looks alike. One is a man working his way through a series of women. The other is the person everybody calls selfless — the one who empties himself into helping other people and has nothing left over afterwards. Set them side by side and they look like opposite characters in opposite stories. Both of them are after being recognised. One goes out and collects it. The other gives himself away to earn it.
What he is actually taking home
Take the outward direction first. Say the word affair and we reach for sexual desire. But the desire is not the essential part. The essential part is emotion. When the feeling of being recognised is filled in, neither men nor women look elsewhere. That is the hinge. What a man who runs from woman to woman wants out of it is a capacity of his own: that he has appeal as a man. He wants that capacity acknowledged.
So he meets a woman he does not know, and they spend a night, and what registers inside this man afterwards is how much recognition he has just been given. She was taken with him, she came over to him — so I am recognised as a man. And sex is what gets used to confirm it.
The son who tore into his father
Where does a man learn to take it that way? A boy watches, from early on, what the father’s role consists of. If the father was unfaithful, the son may tear into him for it. Then the son arrives at the father’s role himself, and a situation gets built in which the same thing can happen with complete ease.
Some men set themselves against it hard. My father did that, so I never will. And they don’t — they hold the line. Then, strangely, it turns up in the son’s generation. The injury was never treated. A decision was taken over the top of it instead, and a decision holds for the man who makes it. It does not travel to the boy who grew up beside him.
Which is why none of this turns on what sort of wife a man has. There are husbands who are unfaithful although their wives have done nothing wrong, and husbands who are not unfaithful although their wives have given them ample reason.
The illness of going mad because you cannot help
The other direction runs the opposite way. Codependency is an illness of helping somebody. More precisely, an illness of going mad because you cannot help. Not being able to help another person makes these people ill. So they sacrifice themselves enormously in order to help, they pour everything into it, and then there is nothing left for themselves. At bottom, codependency is a self-abusing illness.
Neither the minister nor the person doing it knows
Now put a person carrying a self-abusing illness into a church. “They could be put to superb use.” It has every appearance of strong faith and generous sacrifice, and what it actually is, is an illness. The hard part is that neither side knows. The minister does not know. The person doing the work does not know. So work gets handed out and taken on and handed out again. There is no ill will anywhere in it. It is ignorance, running on both sides at once.
Addicts of recognition
So why sacrifice like that? There is another name for codependency. They are addicts of recognition. Recognition is the substance, and once a person is addicted to it they will want it badly enough to wreck their own body getting it.
Why should recognition weigh that much? Because the person has no value of being that could be recognised. Settle it about yourself that simply existing earns nothing, and the only road left open is doing. Which is how both directions arrive at the same place — the man collecting evidence that a woman came over to him, the helper collecting evidence of sacrifice. Each is trying to obtain, through what he does, some verdict that his existence is acceptable too. What it is like to live with the inside never filled in, I have written about separately in You Got Everything You Needed. So Why Does the Inside Dry Out?
If I am not performing that sacrifice and devotion, my existence is not permitted. The permission to be here does not come through from inside. So there is anxiety, and then chasing — casting about for something. What can I do?
Too perfect a double act
Wives living with an addict are generally spoken of as being on the codependent side of it. Because it is too perfect a double act. The addict goes on living a life that says look after me. The codependent goes on living a life that says yes, I will look after you. The same arrangement can be described as parts in a play, which is how I set it out in They Really Did Become the Person I Was Afraid Of.
It looks like helping the recovery
Then suppose the addict breaks the arrangement. I am going to take responsibility for my own life now, as an adult — and off he goes down the road of recovery. What becomes of the codependent? Fear. The person I am supposed to be helping is disappearing.
So at the exact moment this addict is trying to recover, he gets hit on the back of the head. To knock him down again. He has to stay an addict. It looks like helping the recovery, and what it does in fact is wreck it.
Opposite lives, one shortage underneath. The one who went outward confirms himself by the other coming over to him; the one who went inward, by the other staying broken.
Related
- Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts
- Infidelity Is Not a Sexual Problem. It Is a Broken Promise.
- I’ll Do This for You, So You Do This for Me
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