Two people, and nothing about them looks alike. One is a married man who goes from one woman to the next. The other is the person everybody calls selfless — the one who pours everything into helping other people and has nothing left for themselves afterwards. Set them side by side and they look like opposite characters in opposite stories. Yet both of them want the same thing: to be recognised, to have someone confirm that they are worth something. The man goes out and collects that confirmation from women. The selfless one tries to earn it by using themselves up for other people.
What the man with many women is really getting
Take the man first. When people hear the word “affair”, most of them think first of sexual desire. But desire is not the essential part. The essential part is emotional: loneliness, emptiness, the wish to be recognised. When those needs are met, neither men nor women look elsewhere. What a man who goes from woman to woman wants from it all is to have one thing about himself acknowledged: that he is attractive as a man.
So he meets a woman he does not know and spends one night with her. Afterwards, deep down, he feels he has been recognised. She was drawn to him and gave in, and in his mind that is the proof: I am attractive as a man. Sex is what he uses to get that proof.
The son who tore into his father
A man’s hunger for this kind of recognition goes back to his childhood. A boy grows up watching how his father behaves as a husband and a father. If his father was unfaithful, the son may tear into him for it. But the moment the son becomes a husband and father himself, he can find himself cheating too, and it can come all too naturally.
Some men set themselves hard against it. My father did that, so I never will. And they don’t — they hold the line. Then, strangely, it is their sons who cheat. If the hurt their father caused them had been healed, and that was why they stayed faithful, it would end there. But they left the hurt as it was and only made a decision not to cheat. The decision keeps them faithful. The hurt is still there, though, and it breaks out in their sons. This is how pain like this is passed down through a family.
Because this comes from the man’s own past, whether a husband cheats does not come down to what kind of wife he has. There are husbands who cheat even though their wives have done nothing wrong, and husbands who stay faithful even though their wives make their lives very hard.
The illness of going crazy when you cannot help someone
Now to the second person: the one everybody calls selfless, who goes the opposite way. Instead of collecting recognition from others, this person uses themselves up to earn it. What they have is called codependency. Codependency is an illness of helping somebody — more precisely, an illness of going crazy when you cannot help someone. People like this fall ill when there is someone they cannot help. So they sacrifice a great deal of themselves to help others, pour everything into it, and then there is nothing left for themselves. To keep giving until nothing is left for you is to mistreat yourself. At bottom, then, codependency is an illness of mistreating yourself.
Neither the minister nor the helper knows it is an illness
Put people like this into a church, and the church can use them for all they are worth. What they do looks like strong faith and great self-sacrifice, but what it actually is, is an illness. I am not saying anyone here is bad. The hard part is that neither side knows. The minister does not know it is an illness, and neither do the helpers themselves. So the minister keeps handing out work and they keep taking it on, until they break down, mentally and spiritually.
Addicted to recognition
So why do they sacrifice themselves like that? Another way to describe codependent people is this: they are addicted to recognition. Recognition is their drug. Once they are hooked on it, they want it so badly that they will wreck their own bodies to get it.
Why does recognition matter so much to them? Because they have no sense that they are worth anything just for existing. Once a person believes that just being there will never earn them recognition, the only way left to earn it is through what they do. This is where the two people from the beginning meet. The man collects his proof from the women he wins over. The selfless helper collects it through sacrifice. Both are trying, through what they do, to be assured that it is all right for them to exist — that they are worth something.
In the helper’s mind it goes like this: If I am not sacrificing myself and devoting myself to others, I have no right to exist. They cannot feel, from the inside, that it is all right for them to be here. So they grow anxious and keep looking for something to do, always asking, What can I do?
Too perfect a match
When a man is an addict — with a drinking or drug problem, say — his wife is usually the one described as codependent. Why? Because the two make too perfect a match. The addict keeps living a life that says, “Look after me.” His codependent wife keeps living a life that says, “Yes, I will look after you.” It is a contract between them, though neither of them knows they have made it.
It looks like helping him recover
Then suppose the addict breaks that contract. He decides, I am going to take responsibility for my own life now, as an adult, and sets off on the road to recovery. What happens to his wife then? She is frightened, because the man she needs to help will no longer need her help.
So just when he is trying to recover, she trips him up and he falls again. He has to stay an addict, or she will have no one left to help. In the end, she keeps him from recovering. All along she has been the one looking after him, so it looks as if she is helping him recover, but what she is actually doing is wrecking the recovery.
The man with many women and the selfless helper live lives that look opposite. Underneath, though, both lack the same thing: the sense of being worth something just for existing. The man confirms his worth each time a woman is won over by him. The helper confirms it by helping, and helping needs someone who stays 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