Goal: Become genuine about your experience by imagining that everyone can see what you’re experiencing inside. When you are around other people, imagine that you are completely open and transparent to them. Pretend that other people can see exactly what you are experiencing inside as easily as you can.
Make an Unreasonable Request Goal: Practice asking for what you want and asserting your needs and desires by making an unreasonable request. Codependents have a hard time asserting their needs and desires. By making unreasonable or ridiculous requests with no attachment to the outcome, it gets easier to ask
Goal: Practice paying attention to your feelings by checking in with them regularly. Set a timer to go off every 60 minutes on your watch or mobile phone. When the timer goes off, stop whatever you’re doing. Take a deep breath. Ask yourself, “How am I feeling, right now?”
Just Say “No.” Goal: Practice arbitrarily declining requests in order to become comfortable setting boundaries. The next time someone makes a request of you, consider simply saying “no.” Offer no justification for your response. Observe your feelings. Optional: instead of declining the request completely, you can modify it or
Your personal boundaries are your decisions about what you will and will not tolerate in your life. When you set a boundary, you must make it real by enforcing it with action. To set personal boundaries: Create a personal boundary by deciding what you will not tolerate in your
Talk to Yourself Goal: Practice paying attention to your experience by describing it to yourself as it occurs. Set aside 10 minutes of your day. For those 10 minutes, talk out loud to yourself. Start by describing how you feel. Focus on how you’re feeling in the present moment.
How Honest is Too Honest? Honesty is extremely important. You have to be able to speak with integrity about your own experience in order to heal your codependency. However, there is such a thing as being too honest. Over-sharing means voluntarily sharing inappropriate information about yourself to others. Over-sharing
Notice Justification Goal: Stop justifying your experience to others. Your experience is perfect in itself and needs no justification. It is as it is. Justifying your experience is an attempt to control the perceptions of other people. When you are talking to other people, ask yourself why you are
What is the difference between codependency, independence, dependence, and interdependence? People often use the word “codependent” incorrectly. They use it when they really mean “dependent:” For example someone might say, “He’s totally codependent on his parents for money.” What they actually mean to say is, “He depends on
Where Did the Word “Codependency” Come From? Codependency is a term that originally came from therapy for addiction and chemical dependency. It was found that alcoholics who had gone through recovery were frequently relapsing into alcoholism. So the question was “Why aren’t alcoholics staying sober after recovery?” Vernon Johnson