Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency

By my early 30s, I’d become pretty skilled at “doing life.” Running the New York office of a bicoastal talent agency, brokering high-value deals, and earning the respect of my peers—check.

Going to grad school to become a therapist and creating a career that aligned with my values—check. Surrounded by awesome, inspiring, drama-free friends—check. Getting high on life (sober) for close to a decade and invested in my own therapeutic life and personal evolution—check. In a passionate, healthy, and reciprocal relationship with a man I deeply loved and building our family with his three teenage boys—check.

For the first time ever, I felt peace and freedom within. My life was both full and wonderful, and I somehow managed to keep all the various balls in the air—that is, until my older sister Jenna found herself in crisis. Then, all my zen went flying out the window.

Jenna had a history of substance abuse and bad romances, but this rough patch was “code red” territory. Ever since she moved in with her abusive, drug addicted a-hole of a boyfriend, she’d been blowing up my phone with SOS calls, eager to relay every detail of his drunken tirades. Their fights had even turned physical. Making matters a million times worse, my beloved sister was completely isolated, living with a jerk in a shack in the woods that had no electricity or running water.

You can understand why my blood pressure spiked every time she called and I’d pick up the phone no matter what I was doing. All that mattered was getting her to safety. I lost sight of my own blessings.

In time, I started to notice a pattern. She’d call with another painful horror story (“he pushed me, he threw me out in a snowstorm, he claimed I flirted with a guy at the liquor store”), and I’d listen, filled with dread and determination. “Let’s figure this out,” I’d say, offering up every single remedy I could think of. “I have a book on escaping abusive relationships that I’ve underlined for you and will arrive in your mailbox tomorrow. I found a great therapist for you. I talked to a lawyer who specializes in domestic violence.” I begged her to leave him and temporarily move in with me. “Please, Jenna—we have room. You can get sober and into therapy, and life will be so much better.” The fix was so simple, according to me. All she had to do was consent.

Every time, she’d thank me for my support and advice, saying, “God, I feel so much better just talking to you. Thank you!” I, on the other hand, did not feel better after our calls. I felt awful. The black cloud of Jenna’s toxic environment transferred into my body, making me want to vomit. My emotional hangover would last two solid days.

Have you ever heard the saying, “Alcoholics don’t have relationships, they take hostages”? Well, if you’ve ever loved one, you know how true that statement is. With Jenna and this impossibly bad situation, I definitely felt like I’d been taken hostage. Soon, it felt like I rarely thought about anything else. I was often distracted, ruminating obsessively about Jenna in my determination to liberate her from hell. I was sometimes so fixed in worry that I might as well have been on a different planet.

Then one day, I hung up with Jenna and felt sadness wash over me. Before I knew it, I was leaning with my back against the refrigerator, sobbing as I slid down to the floor. How could my beautiful, funny, strong sister be caught up with such a monster? Why couldn’t she just accept my help? For the first time, I allowed myself to fully experience the profound sadness and grief over this impossible situation.

Something has to change, I thought.

At my next session with Bev, my badass, truth-telling therapist, I was still very tender and teary, but when I started to speak, frustration, fear, and fury came out. “Bev, I’ve done everything I can think of to help Jenna get out and get help! I’ve sent her money, offered ten thousand escape plans, but she’s not doing anything. What am I going to do?”

I hoped Bev would reply with the answer of how I could fix Jenna’s problems, but instead, she took a long pause. Looking at me with great compassion, she asked, “What makes you think that you know what lessons your sister needs to learn in this lifetime?”

Initially, I rejected the entire premise of Bev’s question. Obviously, anyone with an ounce of common sense could see that my sister didn’t need to learn any lessons by being abused by a drug-addicted POS. “She could learn those lessons while safe with us, hundreds of miles away from this a-hole, in a home with a functional water tank. I think we can all agree on that!” I exclaimed defensively.

Bev looked me in the eye and said calmly, “Actually, Terri, I can’t agree with that. I don’t know what your sister needs to learn. I’m not God.”

My interpretation of Bev’s comment was that it’s impossible for us to know what is right for another person—when we don’t live in their hearts—and it’s self-important and egotistical to presume that we do. This I-know-exactly-what-you-should-be-doing belief can be harmful to our own mental well-being, too, as I was slowly learning.

Bev reminded me of how hard I’d worked over the last decade to build a beautiful, harmonious, and functional life for myself. My sister’s dumpster fire of a situation—or, more precisely, the fact that she would not leave that blazing mess—was threatening my hard-won peace.

“What you really want is for Jenna to get it together, so that your pain can end,” Bev explained.

Wow, I thought. Her wisdom hit me like a freight train of truth. You are not wrong.

This mind-blowing reframe immediately brought my self-image into question. I truly believed that my care and concern for Jenna (and the rest of the world) was born out of selfless, Mother Teresa-style love. It had never even entered my mind that my need for Jenna to get the hell out of Dodge was motivated, at least in part, by my desire for my own pain to end. I tried to wrap my head around this distressing and humbling truth: my need to free her was more about me than I’d realized.

Until this game-changer of a revelation with Bev, I had no clue that what I thought was straight up caring was actually soaked in codependency. For any HFC—someone with an overachieving, I-got-it version of what I call high-functioning codependency—it’s hugely helpful to understand the difference.

I conceived of the term high-functioning codependency to describe the flavor of codependency that I see in the majority of my highly capable therapy clients every day. It was also uncannily familiar, because it was what I experienced for years. I define HFC as behavior that includes being overly invested in the feeling states, the decisions, the outcomes, and the circumstances of the people in your life to the detriment of your own internal peace and emotional and/or financial well-being. HFC relationships can include blurred boundaries and imbalanced effort and power, with the high-functioning codependent often taking responsibility for fulfilling the other person’s needs and trying to control most aspects of the relationship.

High-functioning codependents are often smart, successful, reliable, and accomplished. They don’t identify with being dependent because they are likely doing everything for everyone else. They might have an amazing career, run a household, care for children or aging parents, juggle all the extracurriculars, coordinate the various appointments, and likely life coach their friends through all their problems, too.

Bottom line: the more capable you are, the more codependency doesn’t look like codependency. But if you are over-extending, over-functioning, over-giving, and over-focusing on others—and doing way too much—these behaviors are compromising your inner peace and well-being. Regardless of what we call it, it’s a problem.

And because we are so damn efficient, we make all our overdoing and over-managing look easy-breezy—so no one notices we’re suffering.

Unhealthy Helping

Many HFCs are the lovers, the caregivers, the healers, the resident “moms” and “therapists” wherever we go. If you’re identifying as an HFC, it’s a safe bet that your heart is in the right place, like mine was with Jenna. So, it can be challenging to accept that—despite the best intentions—our codependent actions may be misguided.

Whenever I explore the “codependent versus caring” distinction with clients and students, I inevitably hear, “What’s wrong with being nice?” The answer is—nothing at all. In fact, helper’s high is a legit phenomenon that describes the increased feelings of fulfillment and well-being that arise from lending someone else a hand.

Truly healthy, loving, and appropriate giving can create feel-good vibes all around. However, if you’re chronically giving, doing, and over-functioning from a place of fear in order to dictate outcomes, feel valued, recognized, or even loved, that’s more dysfunctional and codependent than genuine caring. So much of the time, we can see our helping as just being “nice,” but the truth is that there is a tipping point where our compulsion to jump into someone else’s situation may be less about their needs and more about our own.

The concept of unhealthy helping—“helpful” behaviors that are unintentionally unhelpful—was originated by Shawn Meghan Burn, a psychologist, researcher, and the author of Unhealthy Helping: A Psychological Guide to Overcoming Codependence, Enabling, and Other Dysfunctional Giving. In exploring the unintended consequences of dysfunctional giving, Burn writes, “Some types of helping and giving create unhealthy dependencies and reduce others’ self-confidence, competency, and life skills.” So, when we engage in unhealthy helping, we’re making others dependent on us and sending the disempowering message that they don’t have what it takes to handle their own business.

Why do we engage in unhealthy helping behaviors? A lot of my clients over the years have said things like, “I see myself as a helpful person—it’s just who I am,” or, “I like to be needed.” Here’s the thing: If we are pushing our help on someone else, then is it really about them? Or are we doing what we need to feel valuable or okay?

Other people have a right to make mistakes, to fail, to flail, to not be doing the things we think they should be doing. To paraphrase Bev, none of us are God.

Compulsive Reactions

So often, as HFCs, we give and help without pausing to consider if we actually want to be giving or helping in the ways we feel instantly compelled to. We may simply hook our focus on what’s going to help avoid conflict. We are motivated by what we think is best for others, and what’s going to cause us the least amount of short-term stress.

Auto-accommodating. Auto-accommodating is a state of hyper-awareness, where you are acutely dialed into what’s happening around you, unconsciously scanning for ways to ward off conflict or correct problems, even if said conflict or problems have nothing whatsoever to do with you. It’s always being ready to lessen someone’s burden or to help, even without being asked. It’s an unconscious mechanism, so you may not realize how responsible you’re feeling for everything and everyone around you.

Whatever form it takes, acting from unconscious reactions is not acting freely—it’s reacting to whatever might be causing us angst in our environment. Resisting this type of reaction is vital to stopping HFC behaviors in their tracks. When the urge to spring into action is so strong we can’t not do it, that’s a telltale sign that we’re compulsively reacting and not acting from choice.

Anticipatory Planning. Another compulsive and draining behavior is anticipatory planning, or trying to prevent anyone from getting upset by arranging situations just so, ahead of time, leaving no detail untouched.

Years ago, I was planning a couples road trip and one of my girlfriends was in a relationship with a challenging personality. I found myself ruminating over all the ways I could preemptively avoid conflict with this person who had a history of ruining our gatherings with their drama. How could I make them more comfortable and meet all their needs so they wouldn’t instigate problems or torture my friend? That’s called codependent anticipation. It encompasses the anxiety (and fix-it behaviors) that precedes a situation where there might be conflict.

Fear. Looking back, it’s kind of remarkable how much energy I was putting toward my sister Jenna’s situation when I also had a full-time job, a newish relationship, and three step kids who definitely needed my time and attention. But my compulsive behavior came from the sheer terror that something more terrible might happen to my sister. My actions were more a desperate bid for control than a healthy expression of my free will to help. But it was also so darn sneaky I couldn’t even see it.

Over the years, I’ve treated and encountered many women at the end of their rope, experiencing exhaustion and other physical conditions, like autoimmune disorders, TMJ, irritable bowel syndrome, and burnout. Nearly all were blind to their compulsive behaviors and sought help to address either their stress-related physical symptoms or a loved one’s dire pain. It often took time for them to gain awareness around their emotional pain.

Auto-Advice Giving. The moment someone in your orbit so much as hints at a problem, do you find yourself naturally turning your mental dial to the “fix it” channel and offering grade-A, but unsolicited, advice? This behavior is what I call auto-advice giving, a common HFC move. To avoid our unease with someone else’s discomfort, we whip out strategies, doctor referrals, sage bits of research-backed advice, and relevant personal anecdotes. Our well of sound solutions runs deep.

But let’s consider the following hypothetical example: a colleague confides in you because she’s just had a fight with her partner over their future. He wants kids, she doesn’t. Instead of listening to her with an open, compassionate ear, you mentally gather your ideas, thoughts, and judgments about what’s right for her. As she’s about to dissolve into tears, you come up with a plan, “Here’s the name of a great couple’s therapist. Grab a copy of The Baby Decision.”

We may not realize it, but when we’re automatically citing from the-world-according-to-me, we’re missing out on some of the richest parts of human interaction, which is the give and take of sharing and listening. In this example, you’re seeing your colleague through a reactionary, must help lens tinged with your own desires and life experiences. Your colleague is not recognized for her strength or who she might become as a result of her struggle. And you’ve defaulted to a familiar utilitarian role where your value is only as good as what you can do for others. The real connection can get lost in that stream of excellent advice.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean you should never ever again share your thoughts or opinions with the folks in your life. It means you can learn to do so mindfully and with respect for the other person’s autonomy.

When most HFCs start to look under the hood and see that their behaviors are not always motivated only by lovingkindness, it can feel mortifying. But as an HFC in recovery, I can sincerely say that it’s better to raise your self-awareness and risk this (temporary) discomfort than to stay in a pattern of behaviors and relating that is stealing your precious peace, time, and well-being. You don’t have to be perfect; you just have to be willing to unlearn the disordered behavioral patterns that are not optimal for the life you deserve. 

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Adapted from Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency by Terri Cole (October 2024) Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Sounds True.