Top Quotes on Codependency.

Codependency is about normal behaviours taken too far. It’s about crossing lines. – Melody Beattie

We all started out life being codependent on our parent, caregivers, society and peers. Codependency is not necessarily bad, there is a place and time for it. The danger is becoming codependent beyond the normal point. It is not the same thing as care for a loved one who needs your help, it becomes codependence when you begin to enable self-destructive behaviours. Codependency shows up in our relationships through enabling and indulging people to abuse substances such as drugs and alcohol, enabling chemically dependent siblings, enmeshed and dysfunctional family units and toxic entaglements with our friends and peers.

Here are 30 top quotes on codependency:

• A codependent person is one who has let another person’s behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior. –  Melody Beattie, Codependent No More
• Codependence is a disease that deteriorates the souls.  It affects our personal lives; our families, children, friends, and relatives; our businesses and careers; our health; and our spiritual growth.  It is debilitating and, if left untreated, causes us to become more destructive to ourselves and others. – CoDependent Anonymous
• Codependency involves an unhealthy enmeshment that occurs between two people. It usually happens in relationships where one person enables the other individual to make poor choices. – Shannon Thomas, Healing from hidden abuse
• Codependent behaviors could be described quite similarly to those that Caretakers use. However, most Caretakers take on this role almost exclusively inside the family and primarily only with the borderline or narcissist. – Margalis Fjelstad, Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist
• Being codependent means you have lost yourself while trying to enable, fix and control those around you. – Jeanette Elisabeth Menter, You’re Not Crazy- You’re Codependent
• Enmeshment may feel like intimacy, but it is not. Intimacy comes from knowing each other very well, accepting shortcomings and differences, and loving each other anyway. Enmeshment is attempting to feel and think as if you were the same person. – Anne Katherine, Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin
• It’s not your job to manage the emotions of others. It’s an exhausting role that may offer temporary bursts of self-worth, but ultimately will drain the life out of you. – Jackson MacKenzie, Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and Emotional Abuse
• Codependency pertains to any relationship where people become emotionally entangled with the feelings and outcomes of others. In codependent relationships, it’s challenging to separate what we feel from what others think and feel. – Nedra Tawwab, Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A guide to reclaiming yourself
• The caretaker typically comes from codependent dynamics. Gains a sense of identity and self-worth through neglecting their own needs. Believes that the only way to receive love is to cater to others and ignore their own needs. –  Dr. Nicole LePer, How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self 
• Codependency is about normal behaviors taken too far. It’s about crossing lines. – Melody Beattie, The New CoDependency

• Many of us live in denial of who we truly are because we fear losing someone or something-and there are times that if we don’t rock the boat, too often the one we lose is ourselves…It feels good to be accepted, loved, and approved of by others, but often the membership fee to belong to that club is far too high of a price to pay. –  Dennis Merritt Jones,Your Redefining Moments: Becoming Who You Were Born to Be
• Allowing others to suffer the consequences of their own actions, without enabling them, is the best motivation for them to undertake the difficult task of change. – Darlene Lancer, Codependency For Dummies
• Enmeshment creates almost total dependence on approval and validation from outside yourself. Lovers, bosses, friends, even strangers become the stand-in for parents. Adults raised in families where there was no permission to be an individual frequently become approval junkies, constantly seeking their next fix. – Susan Forward, Toxic Parents
• If you live your life to please everyone else, you will continue to feel frustrated and powerless. This is because what others want may not be good for you. You are not being mean when you say NO to unreasonable demands or when you express your ideas, feelings, and opinions, even if they differ from those of others. – Beverly Engel, The Nice Girl Syndrome
• it’s a mistake to expect loyalty from someone who won’t even give you honesty. – Dana Morningstar, Out of the Fog

Our compliance rewards the blackmailer, and every time we reward someone for a particular action, whether we realize it or not, we’re letting them know in the strongest possible terms that they can do it again. – Susan Forward, Emotional Blackmail

•  The surest way to make ourselves crazy is to get involved in other people’s business, and the quickest way to become sane and happy is to tend to our own affairs. – Melody Beattie, Codependent No More
• In all codependent relationships, the rescuer needs the victim as much as the victim needs the rescuer. – Barbara De Angelis
• I learned again and again in my life, until you get your own act together, you’re not ready for Big Love. What you’re ready for is one of those codependent relationships where you desperately need a partner. – Bruce H.Lipton, The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth.
• Your whole being is involved in taking care of someone else, worrying about what they think of you, how they treat you, how you can make them treat you better. Right now everyone in the world seems to think that they are codependent and that they come from dysfunctional families. They call it codependency. I call it the human condition. – Cynthia Heimel, If You Can`t Live Without Me, Why Aren`t You Dead Yet?!’
• If we want to improve, first we have to recognize our own maladaptive coping skills, called codependency, then change. – David W. Earle LPC, Love is Not Enough
• Codependency : Those self-defeating learned behaviors or character defects that result in a diminished capacity to initiate, or participate in, loving relationships. – Earnie Larsen

All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.