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How You Can Break the Bonds of Codependency and Start Living a Fulfilling Life

Mary Keating
10 min readMar 23, 2022

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Man and Woman separated in vertical columns of water with man reaching for woman. Only part of their heads and body are in open space.
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Do you have an unhealthy balance in your relationships? Do you give far more than you receive? Do you go to extremes to help others without a thought about how it affects your life? Do you have a strong desire to appease people and feel uncomfortable sticking up for yourself? If you answered yes to any of these questions and are not a parent, you may be a codependent.

Don’t worry. You’re not alone, and you can learn to let go of unhealthy behavior.

While all relationships are codependent, codependency becomes problematic when we make it a habit to suppress our needs in order to satisfy someone else’s. Our give side of the equation far exceeds the take side. I get an uneasy feeling in my gut when I’ve gone too far past the midpoint.

I was raised by an active alcoholic. When I was twelve, my mother became sober through the help of AA and never drank again. But while she was drinking, I lived in an emotional world that didn’t make sense:

Some days she loved to hear me run around being a kid; other days I had to lie absolutely still next to her in the dark while she took a midday nap. Some days she’d let me invite my friends to stay for a sleep over; other days she couldn’t stand having…

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Mary Keating
Mary Keating

Written by Mary Keating

Author of "Recalibrating Gravity" a memoir in verse written to give hope to those who need it and to encourage disabled people to live their best lives.

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