The co-dependent, I’m continuing from the encyclopedia entry, the co-dependent does not feel fully alive when she’s alone. She feels helpless, threatened, indecisive, ill at ease and very much childlike. This acute discomfort drives the co-dependent to hop from one relationship to another.

The sources of nurturance are interchangeable to the co-dependent being with someone, with anyone, no matter who is always preferable to solitude.

And this, of course, these are elements here of the narcissist on the one hand and the borderline on the other.

Let’s talk a bit about the pathogenesis of co-dependency. How is co-dependency brought about?

Now remember, the clinical diagnosis is dependent personality disorder. There’s no such thing as co-dependency in clinical psychology. I don’t teach co-dependency at university. I teach dependent personality disorder.

But I’m going to use the word co-dependent as a shorthand. So let’s talk about how co-dependence evolved and developed as an issue of inner mother and an inner child.

Parents of co-dependence teach their offspring in early childhood to expect only conditional transactional love. The child is supposed to render a service, to perform, to fulfill the parents’ dreams and wishes, to realize the parents’ dreams and fantasies in return for affection, compassion, attention, emotion. This is usually a narcissistic parent, grandiose parent.

Ineluctably, the hurt child, the child in pain, reacts with rage to this unjust mistreatment. With no recourse to the offending parent, the child cannot do anything to the parent, of course, cannot punish the parent, does not dare to punish the parent, does not dare to think bad things about the parent.

So with no recourse to the offending parent, this rage at being mistreated, this fury at not receiving unconditional love is either directed outward at other people who stand in for the bad parent or inwardly.

So the anger can manifest in impulsive displays of acting out an aggression or can be internalized.

The former solution yields, in adulthood, a psychopath or a passive-aggressive, negativistic person.

And the second solution, internalizing the anger, creates a masochist or someone with a depressive illness.

Similarly, when the parent is dead, unavailable, the child’s reserve of love can be directed inward at himself and this creates a narcissist or outward towards other people and this creates the codependent.

The child can’t love the parent because the parent is not there to receive the love and reciprocate. The parent is gone, but still the child has this diffuse energy, libido, life force, eros, love, call it what you will, and he has to use it somehow.

And if he uses it on himself, if he redirects this life force, this love at himself, if he has, if he is libidinally affected in himself, if he is libidinally invested in himself, he becomes a narcissist. If his libido is externalized, projected, directed at others via object relations, becomes a codependent.

All these choices are pathological, of course. You don’t want to become a psychopath, you don’t want to become a narcissist, and equally you don’t want to become codependent. These choices retard personal growth, arrest the person’s development, they’re self-defeating.

In all four ways, the adult plays the dual roles of a punitive parent on the one hand, and an eternal vulnerable child who is unable and unwilling to grow up for fear of incurring the wrath of the parent with whom she had merged so thoroughly early on.

These people have inner child and inner parent in constant conflict.

When the codependent merges with a love object, with her intimate partner, she interprets her newfound attachment, the bond, as a betrayal of the punitive parent. That’s very crucial to understand.

The codependent is an internal, sadistic, narcissistic, selfish, immature, demanding, criticizing, inner critic, super-ego parent. And when she falls in love with someone, that parent feels betrayed. That inner parent, the inner mother, the inner father, the representation of these parents, they introduce, they feel betrayed.

The codependent now loves someone else. She’s supposed to love the parent, the internalized parent. She’s not supposed to love someone else, and if she does, she’s a traitor.

And the codependent knows this. She senses the resentment of her own inner constructs that stand for her parents, so she fully anticipates the internalized parent’s disapproval. She dreads the self-destructive, disciplinarian measures that the inner parent is going to take against her. The inner parent is going to punish her for loving someone else. This punishment is imminent, inevitable, it’s coming.

And in an attempt to placate, to mollify, to ameliorate, to somehow, you know, calm down this internalized implacable divinity, these internalized parent figures, the codependent turns on her partner. She lashes out at him, she punishes him.

And this way, she shows her internal parents where her true loyalty is, an affiliation lie with them, not with her intimate partner.

And this is where there is an excuse between codependent and borderline.

Codependent bleeds into borderline, seeps into borderline, becomes borderline in a way, in some situations, because she has to recreate inner equilibrium and balance to ameliorate anxiety.

And she has two types of anxiety.

She, on the one hand, she’s very anxious, like the borderline, she’s very afraid to be abandoned by the partner.

But she has another type of anxiety that borderlines don’t necessarily have. And that’s the anxiety of keeping her inner mother, her inner father, happy.

And the only way to keep them happy is to show them that she loves only them. She loves no one else.

Here, she’s abusing her intimate partner as proof positive that she doesn’t love him. It’s kind of an internal dialogue projected on the intimate partner, and the codependent begs the intimate partner to collude and collaborate with her in order to maintain her peace of mind and inner calm.

Most partners of codependence will agree immediately. They will immediately identify this dynamic when the codependence abusively, aggressively, viciously, actually asks them for help.

Her way of asking for help is by misbehaving concurrently. She punishes herself as she tries to preempt the merciless onslaught of her sadistic parental introjects and superego. She engages in a panoply of self-trashing, self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors, saying to the parents, you don’t need to punish me, I’ve already punished myself.

Acutely aware of the risk of losing her path, owing to her abusive misconduct, the borderline codependent experiences extreme abandonment anxiety.

She mistreats her partner and she knows that he may just pack up and go. She knows that he may abandon, she knows it may be one bridge too far this time, and she swings wildly between self-effacing, submission, object submission and clinging between being a doormat and being a heredon.

So this pendulum is very typical of borderlines and more so of codependent borderlines.

And there is this explosive vituperative, invective on the one hand, and childlike, eternal child, expressions of punitive parent on the other hand.

She swings wildly between these behaviors and she can’t settle, she can’t find the golden mean, the middle ground.

Again, she swings between self-effacing and clinging, which is doormat behavior, on the one hand, and explosive defiant impulsive, vicious, verbal and other types, sometimes physical abuse on the other hand.

The clinging behaviors and manifestations of the eternal child, the internalized child, the psychopathic behaviors, the defiant behaviors, the secondary psychopathic behavior, they’re expressions of the punitive parent.

Such abrupt shifts in effect and in conduct are often misdiagnosed as a mood disorder, especially bipolar disorder.

But where a dependent personality disorder is diagnosed, these pendular tectonic upheavals are indicative of an underlying personality structure rather than any biochemically induced brain perturbations or abnormality.

Like dependence, people with dependent personality disorder, like dependence, co-dependence, they depend on other people for their emotional gratification and the performance of both inconsequential and crucial daily and psychological ego functions.

Reality testing, for example, the codependent relies on her intimate partner to tell her what’s real and what’s not. If the intimate partner is a narcissist, that’s a major ego boost.

He becomes a guru. He becomes her guiding light, the sage.

Codependents seek to fuse and merge with significant others by becoming one organism, by becoming one with their intimate partners, twin flame, soulmate.

Codependents are able to actually love themselves via loving the other. And that’s what I call the whole of mirrors effect when the codependent actually falls in love with herself as she is seen by the narcissist.

Narcissist idealizes his would-be source of supply, idealizes her, and then it allows him to idealize himself.

But she gets addicted to this idealization. She sees herself in his wall of mirrors and she falls in love with herself. Sometimes it’s her first experience of self-love.

Codependents are needy. They are demanding, but they are submissive. They suffer from abandonment anxiety and to avoid being overwhelmed by it, they cling to other people and they act immaturely.

These behaviors are intended to elicit protective responses and to safeguard the relationship with their companion or mate upon whom they depend.

It’s very baby-like infantile behavior.

Codependents appear to be impervious to abuse. No matter how badly codependents are mistreated, they remain committed and invested in extreme codependents.

This fusion, this merger, this enmeshment with a significant other, this leads to in-house stalking by the codependent as she strives to preserve the integrity and cohesion of her personality and the representations of her loved ones within the personality.

So she kind of stalks her own introjects. She engages in snapshotting, actually. She creates a snapshot of the intimate partner.

The more she is afraid to lose the intimate partner, the more narcissistic she becomes. It’s a narcissistic defense.

As abandonment anxiety increases and when it is not ameliorated or reduced by the intimate partner, where the intimate partner gives indications that, yes, he is about to reject her, he is about to abandon her, he had had enough, he had had too much, he wants out, he’s about to break up.

Her narcissistic defenses climb. What she does, among many other things, she snapshots him. She takes a snapshot, as a typical narcissist does, and from that moment she stalks the snapshot. I call it in-house stalking.

This in-house stalking, when actual abandonment occurs or rejection, or perceived rejection or imaginary rejection, becomes actual stalking, but it starts first in the codependency mind long before the actual stalking starts.

This is where the co-in-co-dependency comes into play.

By accepting the role of victims, codependents seek to control their abusers and to manipulate them. It is a dance macabre in which both members of the dyad collaborate and they both contribute to the abusive relationship.

Codependents sometimes claim to pity his abuser, cast herself in the grandiose roles of saviour, redeemer, or lately empath. Her overwhelming empathy imprisons the codependent in these dysfunctional relationshipsand she feels guilt, either because she believes that she had driven the abuser to mistreat heror because she contemplates abandoning the abuser.

There are two possible pathological reactions to childhood abuse and traumaand codependence and narcissism. They both involve fantasy as a defense mechanism.

The codependent has a pretty realistic assessment of herself, but her view of others is fantastic. The narcissist is opposite. His self-image, his self-perception are delusional, fantastic grandiose, but his penetrating view of others, mediated by cold empathy, is blood-curlingly accurate.

Pathologic narcissism is a form of addiction to narcissistic supply. The narcissist is caught in a conundrum of his own making.

On the one hand, he considers himself superior, in god-like. On the other hand, to maintain his inflated, grandiose, and fantastic sense of self-worth, his self-image, the narcissist is objectly, humiliatingly dependent on constant input from people whom he considers vastly inferior to him.

He clings to these people, but he hates and resents themand he hates himself for his dependenceand this leads to bouts of approach, followed by bouts of avoidance, a repetition compulsion.

I’ve just described the narcissist. It equally applies to the codependent.

So let’s talk about types of codependence.

Not all codependents are made the same. They are not all alike.

Codependency is a complex, multifaceted, and multidimensional defense against the codependent’s fears and needs.

There are five categories of codependents, a codependency, stemming from the respective etiologies.

Etiology is how the disease develops, how the disorder develops, the reason, the cause of the disorder.

So there are five etiologies and five types of codependents.

Number one, codependency that aims to fend off anxieties related to abandonment.

These codependents are clingy, smothering, and prone to panic. They’re plagued with ideas of referential ideation. They think other people are talking about them, gossiping, mocking them. They display self-negating submissiveness.

The main concern of this type of codependent is to prevent his or her victim, friends, spouses, or from attaining true autonomy and independence.

These codependents merge with their loved ones and experience any sign of autonomy, personal autonomy, or any sign of abandonment, actual, threatened, imaginary, as a form of self-annihilation, form of amputation.

That’s the first classic type of codependent.

Then there is a second type. It’s codependency that is geared to cope with a codependent sphere of losing control, not of abandonment.

The first type that I have just described, we can call it safely borderline codependent because it has features of borderline together with features of codependency.

The second type, perhaps we can call psychopathic codependent. It’s again codependency that is geared to cope with a codependent sphere of losing control.

By feigning helplessness, by emphasizing neediness, such codependents co-earth, force their environment to cater to their needs. They force everyone into ceaselessly catering to their wishes and requirements.

These codependents are labile drama queens, and their lives are a kaleidoscope of instability and chaos. They refuse to grow up. They force their nearest and dearest to treat them as emotional or physical invalids. They deploy their self-imputed deficiencies and disabilities as a weapon.

Both these types of codependents, the first and the second, they use emotional blackmail and, when necessary, trace to secure the presence and blind compliance of their suppliers.

Codependent type 3, vicarious codependents, they live through others. They sacrifice themselves in order to glory in the accomplishments of their chosen partners or, should I say, targets.

This kind of codependents subsist on reflected light, like the moon and the sun, on secondhand approbation and applause, and on derivative achievements.

This kind of codependents have no personal history, no successes, no accomplishments, having suspended their lives, wishes, preferences, and dreams in favour of another’s.

An example of a sub-type subspecies of this kind of codependent is the inverted narcissist. The inverted narcissist is a sub-type of covert narcissist. It’s actually a codependent, it’s also called, by the way, narcissist codependent. It’s actually a codependent who depends exclusively on narcissists.

If you are living with a narcissist, if you have a relationship with a narcissist, if you’re married to a narcissist, if you’re working with a narcissist, this does not mean that you are a narcissist codependent or an inverted narcissist.

To qualify as an inverted narcissist, you must crave to be in a relationship with a narcissist, regardless of any abuse inflicted on you by the narcissist. You must actively seek relationships only with narcissists, and no matter what your bitter and traumatic past experience has been, you keep at it, you keep looking for narcissists.

You feel empty and unhappy in relationships with any other kind of person, non-narcissistic person.

Only then, and if you satisfy the other diagnostic criteria of dependent personality disorder, only then you can safely label yourself an inverted narcissist.