Is codependency bad? Yes. Why?

Codependency can slowly weaken what appears to be a loving and devoted relationship.

While showing deep care and concerns for your partner is okay and natural, it can, however, cross the line into an unhealthy dependency. But how?

This article is structured to inform you about the often misunderstood concept of codependency, its warning signs, causes, and the serious dangers it can pose to your relationship and personal well-being.

Feel free to use the Table of Contents to jump to any section you’re most interested in, as this is a long and detailed article. Or, if you prefer, you can read it all the way through for a deeper understanding of codependency and its dangers.

But, first…

What is Codependency?

It’s an unhealthy emotional and behavioral pattern in which a person prioritizes another person’s needs (which in the context of this article is referred to your partner) obsessively, all to the detriment of their own self-worth, personal identity, and emotional well-being.

In codependent relationships, one person always sacrifices their own needs to accommodate their partner’s, leading to the enabling of dysfunctional behaviors in the process.

It’s more like brainwashing yourself or being brainwashed into thinking that you’re worth nothing, except your partner validates your existence as important or vital. In fact…

It causes you to downplay your self-worth, neglect your own needs and well-being, and give everything to your partner in an attempt to feel worthy. It’s as if you’re saying, “I’ll serve you in any way, shape, or form—just love me, please!” And…

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, while showing deep care and concern for your partner is natural, it can cross the line into unhealthy dependency if taken too far. This is where codependency comes in—when you obsessively prioritize your partner’s needs at the expense of your own well-being. It’s important to know that…

True love encompasses mutual support, understanding, and self-sacrificing spirit from both partners, which in this case, codependency lacks. Rather than create all of what true love creates, codependency creates an imbalanced dynamic where one partner’s self-worth is completely entangled with their ability to care for or control their partner. That being said…

Here are some…

Quick facts about codependency:

• Codependency was first identified when studies was conducted on families with addiction issues.
• It appears to be romantic on the surface, but beneath it lies an emotional wound that craves the love a person never had in their childhood, which they depend upon for survival.
• It can exist in any relationship, not just romantic relationships.
• It interferes greatly with building and maintaining healthy commitments, as it makes it hard to do just so.
• The relationship is very likely to suffer from both emotional and physical abuse.
• Many adults experience some codependent behaviors, so you’re not alone on this.
• It often coexists with other conditions like addiction, trauma, or mental illness.
• Recovery is possible, but requires enough time and efforts, as proper healthy boundaries and self-work is needed.

Signs of Codependency In a Relationship

Recognizing these signs can help you distinguish someone that’s codependent from someone just being clingy with their partner. Side note: this signs are not focused on a clingy partner, but strictly on codependency. And…

With that out of the way, here are key indicators:

Enabling Your Partner’s bad Choices and Behavior

Are you always making up excuses for your partner’s unhealthy behaviors, whether it’s related to addiction, being financially irresponsible, or emotional immaturity?

Codependency can often cause you to repeatedly rescue your partner, rather than allowing them face the consequences of their actions and learning from their mistakes, thereby unintentionally strengthening their destructive behaviors.

Feeling Unfulfilled or No Sense of Purpose Outside the Relationship

Your sense of identity will become so intertwined with that of your partner so much so that you find it difficult to define yourself separately.

You will then notice your hobbies, friendships, and personal goals all taking a backseat to your relationship, leaving you feeling empty when you’re not actively caring for the needs of that of your partner.

Not Always Attending to Your Partner’s Needs and Wants Makes You Feel Guilty

A codependent partner always feels like it’s their responsibility to solve all of their partner’s problems. As a result…

If you’re a codependent person, you might experience an intense guilt or anxiety when you choose to attend to your needs for once, over that of your partner’s, or when you fail to anticipate and fulfill all of your partner’s desires.

Inclination to Put Up With Damaging Actions From Your Partner

You put up with their disrespectful, hurtful, or even abusive behavior for fear of abandonment or maybe because you believe you don’t deserve better treatment.

Your safety in the relationship no longer seem to be of any importance to you. Also…

You find yourself defending their abusive actions whenever they are being called out by others, by simply diverting the blame on yourself instead.

Trying to Take Charge of Every Aspect of the Relationship

You find yourself micromanaging the relationship, with the belief that if you can control all aspects of your shared life, you can prevent problems or even emotional pain.

This may include controlling finances, social activities, or even your partner’s personal choices. To you, controlling all of these will somehow make you feel happy and well fulfilled.

Viewing Your Partner as Flawless or Perfect

If your partner has great qualities, you simply have no reason otherwise to not admire them. Regardless, a codependent partner has a tendency to also dismiss their flaws or problematic behaviors as well.

To you, they’re a complete form of perfection irrespective of their behaviors or actions.

Withholding Needs and Opinions Out of Fear of Disagreement

You find yourself always suppressing your true feelings, needs, and opinions simply because you want to maintain harmony in the relationship. But here’s the thing…

While preserving harmony in the relationship is a welcomed development, suppressing your feelings, needs, and opinions just to maintain it only creates a false sense of connection.

A real and true relationship shouldn’t create a room for resentment or emotional distancing to ever build up. There shouldn’t be a roadblock to voicing your feelings respectfully.

Overextending Yourself to Manage Everything

You always take on more responsibilities on yourself than you can handle, seeking to earn your partner’s praise, or having the belief that your partner can’t do it properly.

This martyrdom approach only leads to burnout, and also prevents your partner from being competent in handling their responsibilities in the relationship as well.

Feeling at Fault When You’re Not

For every relationship problem, your partner’s mood, or external issue beyond your control, you automatically blame yourself.

Obsessing Over Your Partner’s Mental State

You may find yourself spending enormous amounts of time and emotional energy keeping track of their moods and feelings, often at the expense of your own emotional well-being.

Their happiness becomes your primary focus while disregarding yours at the same time.

Moving on, let’s now clear up some misconceptions about codependency.

What Codependency is not

• It’s not simply being helpful or supportive. Offering help or being there for your partner is normal and healthy part of a relationship.
• It’s not the same as being interdependent, where both of you are dependent on each other.
• It’s not something that naturally passes with time or as the relationship develops. It’s usually rooted in deeper emotional patterns and unresolved personal traits, often formed early in life, and requires conscious effort to address.
• It’s not loving your partner “too much.” Having “too much” love for your partner is normal, but shouldn’t be done out of fear, control, or insecurity—which are all traits of codependency.
• It’s not a clinical diagnosis, meaning, it’s not officially recognized as a mental health disorder, but a pattern of learned behaviors.

Causes of Codependent Relationships

How does codependency develop in the first place?

These core factors we’re about to consider explains just how:

Toxic Parental Bonds

Children who grow up with parents who were emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, or with serious addiction problems often develop caretaking behaviors as survival mechanisms.

In many cases, parents may teach their child not to think of themselves, leading the child to believe that their own needs don’t matter—only the parent’s do.

Side note: This is not the same as healthy discipline, such as correcting a child for being disrespectful or teaching them a better way to handle a situation.

A child with such toxic parental bonds unfortunately comes to the conclusion that their value only comes from meeting the needs of others while suppressing their own emotions and needs, which they may later carry right down to adulthood.

Low Self-Esteem and Insecurities

Individuals with profound low self-worth or deep-seated insecurities often end up being codependent. And…

This often happens because they don’t believe they’re valuable for who they are. As a result, they seek external validation or try to earn love by excessively caretaking and high self-sacrificing—even at the expense of their own well-being.

Living with a family member facing mental or physical illness

Individuals who take on the role of caregivers, especially at a very young age, may begin to see their own needs as unimportant and develop a habit of always prioritizing others.

While caregiving itself isn’t unhealthy, it becomes problematic when it’s your primary source of identity and self-worth—this is how codependency can develop.

Adopted Patterns of Behavior

Children may unknowingly learn codependent behaviors from a codependent family system, where such patterns are normalized. As a result…

These children often model those patterns and carry them into adulthood.

Past Emotional and Physical Abuses

Experiences of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse can lead to the development of codependent traits as protective mechanisms—based on the belief that pleasing others or controlling their environment will help them stay safe. This is because…

Such traumas can create distorted perceptions about relationships, safety, and self-worth. As a result, individuals with these experiences may later seek out abusive relationships because that kind of treatment feels familiar. And with all that out of the way…

It’s now time to take a look at the dangers it poses.

The Dangers of Codependency In a Relationship

While you consider codependency as a form of devotion to the relationship, its consequences can be devastating for both you and your partner and the relationship itself, in the following ways:

1. Looks For External Validation to Feel Worthy

Those who are codependent lacks self-esteem and self-love. Instead, they obsess over external validation just to feel important and loved. What then happens as a result of this?

They may end up overextending themselves to get this approval or validation. In other words…

They develop this strong desire to please others, even if that involves putting aside their needs, feelings, and opinions, most at times expecting reciprocation, and if it isn’t met, they become resentful.

Their addiction to external validation creates a perilous emotional state where their sense of self-worth fluctuates based on their partner’s reactions and feedback.

2. You Find it Difficult to Express Your Needs and Feelings

Codependent relationships lacks healthy communications.

Rather than freely express their needs and feelings in the relationship, a codependent partner holds back. The reasons? Fear of abandonment and rejection from their partner. And…

Although they’re unhappy with their partner’s unhealthy behavior, they often suppress their true feelings to avoid conflict and keep the relationship going. But…

What they fail to realize is that by always prioritizing their partner’s happiness over their own, they accumulate unmet needs—leading to resentment over time.

3. Inability to Set or Maintain Respectful Boundaries

Having healthy boundaries helps protects both partner’s emotional well-being. Unfortunately, codependent relationships lacks this, as boundaries are either non-existent or regularly violated.

Your needs, thoughts, and feelings are usually entangled with that of your partner’s. This isn’t the same as simply agreeing on an issue—it’s more about neglecting your own boundaries entirely. For example:

Even if your boundaries differ from your partner’s, instead of communicating them respectfully, a codependent person tends to go along with whatever their partner wants. They’re often willing to sacrifice their personal identity in exchange for approval or validation. The effect?

This can make it hard for such ones to pursue their own interests and maintain other meaningful connections outside the relationship.

4. Strained Relationships

Codependency can hinder the growth of healthy, balanced relationships. How?

Healthy communication and boundaries become strained. Other meaningful connections—like those with friends and family—also suffer. Over time, you may start enabling your partner’s behavior, which can create dysfunctional patterns in the relationship. (We’ll go into more details on this next.)

5. Enabling Dysfunctional Behaviors

Codependency enables or perpetuates unhealthy behaviors in your partner. To better understand this, let’s take an example:

Say you have a boyfriend who’s an alcoholic. You clean up after him, apologize to people on his behalf, try to compel him to go to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Not only that…

Also, if he gets kicked out of his residence due to his alcoholism, and you decide to let him stay with you, staying up late to take care of him whenever he’s drunk, etc. What do you think you’re doing at this stage?

You’re obviously enabling his dysfunctional behavior, meaning he’s not going to change or want to get better. You aren’t giving him the chance to grow or learn from the consequences of his actions.

To you, if you can control or micromanage everything about them, you’ll feel better or earn their love. However, all this does is hurt both you and them in the end.

6. Inability to Ask for Help

Despite being so focused on helping others—often their partner—codependent individuals typically struggle to ask for help themselves.

They make it a habit not to ask for help or express their own needs. They may believe that needing support is a sign of weakness or fear that their partner won’t show up for them the way they do for their partner.

7. Strong Desire to Control the Dynamics of the Relationship

One of the main markers of codependency is the need to control the actions of self and that of others.

Codependents may try really hard to meet the needs of partner, hoping this will give them influence over the relationship and preserve its balance. And in trying to maintain this balance…

They also put a great deal of effort into controlling their emotions, thoughts, and actions—often ignoring or denying their own feelings, opinions, and needs to keep the relationship peaceful. However…

This controlling behavior does more harm than good, as it stifles genuine connection and hinders mutual growth in the relationship.

8. High Chance of an Abusive Relationship

Due to low self-esteem and people-pleasing tendencies, codependents don’t mind going into and choosing to remain in a relationship with an abusive partner.

Their diminished sense of self-worth makes them vulnerable to emotional, physical, or psychological abuse by their abusive partners. And since their abusive partners are aware of this vulnerability, they take advantage of it to get a tight grip over the dynamics of the relationship. In other words…

If a codependent person believes that love requires complete self-abandonment, it’s easy for them to tolerate increasingly harmful treatment from their partner.

9. An Unhealthy dependency

Instead of being interdependent—where both partners rely on each other in a balanced way, as healthy relationships do—codependency disrupts this dynamic by causing one partner to give beyond their capacity. They do this…

Not possibly out of genuine love, but out of the fear of abandonment, rejection, and obsessively seeking validation from their partner. The result?

This unhealthy emotional reliance can prevent both partners from developing a strong sense of self or forming a genuine emotional connection.

10. Mental Health Breakdown

Codependency has been linked to psychological symptoms like anxiety, depression, and eating disorders, etc.

11. Tends to Repeat Across Generations

Codependent patterns usually transfers to children, as they learn by observing the behaviors of their parents.

They may view these behaviors as normal and continue them in their relationships as adults. And…

In many cases, codependency is normalized within family dynamics, making it difficult for children to recognize these patterns as unhealthy. As a result, they may continue the cycle of dysfunction. That said…

Is it possible to break the cycle? Let’s find out.

How to Develop Healthier Dynamics in a Codependent Relationship

Breaking the cycle of codependency is possible with a commitment to change, self-awareness, determination to develop healthier relationship patterns, and often professional support.

Here are some recommendations you can try:

Let Your Partner Do Things for Themselves

Are there any areas you’re over-functioning for your partner even when you know they can handle the responsibility themselves? Why not gradually step back and let them do it? Because…

Remember, even if you believe you know what’s best for them, it’s important to accept the fact that you can’t control someone else. To better put…

Allowing your partner to handle things on their own often encourages personal growth and fosters a more balanced, healthier relationship. The goal is to support them, not to control the dynamics of the relationship.

Have Time for Yourself Too

Do you often feel guilty when you try to take time for yourself? You shouldn’t—and here’s why.

To reduce the effects of codependency, it’s important to reclaim time and space for your own interests, friendships, and self-care. In addition…

Building a fulfilling life beyond your relationship not only reduces codependency but also brings renewed energy and clarity to your connection. But…

To effectively achieve this, you don’t want to be aggressive, you just need to be assertive. Recognize your partner’s position, and then also let them know your position, without leaving any room for misinterpretations.

Examples of assertiveness:

• “I enjoy helping, but I need some time for myself this weekend.”
• “I understand this matters to you, but I think it’s important you handle it yourself.”
• “I want to be honest instead of pretending I’m okay when I’m not.”
• “I want to support you, but I can’t be responsible for your happiness.”

Develop High Self-esteem

Learn to validate and value yourself from within, not just through others. The reason?

Because building high self-esteem can help you bounce back from social setbacks like rejection more easily.

Studies also suggest that individuals with higher self-worth tend to experience lower levels of anxiety and depression. As such…

Strengthening your self-esteem, therefore, can support you in managing the anxiety that often drives codependent behavior. You may also…

Want to try therapy, support groups, journaling, and positive self-talk, all of which might help strengthen your sense of self-worth.

Make Your Desires Known to Your Partner

Constantly pretending to like or want something just to please your partner can leave you feeling empty and unsatisfied. Instead…

Practice respectfully expressing your needs, preferences, and boundaries in a clear and direct way. You can start with smaller requests to build confidence, then, gradually work your way up to sharing more of yourself—always with respect. Nevertheless…

Don’t forget about compromise. You don’t want to completely flip the dynamic and insist on always having things your way. Remember when we talked about not trying to control the relationship—a behavior tied to codependency?

When your preferences don’t align, instead of always insisting on your way or constantly giving in to things you don’t enjoy—whether it’s hobbies, TV shows, or long-term goals—it’s healthier to seek compromise. You might take turns supporting each other’s interests or agree to pursue some activities separately.

Counter Self-defeating Thoughts

Whenever thoughts like “I’m only valuable when helping others” or “If I set healthy boundaries, I might be abandoned” arise, try to question their validity and replace them with healthier perspectives.

By learning to regulate your inner fears or anxieties, you create space for healthier, interdependent relationship with your partner. To do this, you want to…

Identify these anxious thoughts, challenge them, and then replace them with positive perspectives.

Here’s how you can do just that:

Identify it..

Getting your mind stuck in the negative outcome: “If I express my disagreement, my partner might get upset and cut me off.”

Challenge it..

When such negative thought arise, ask yourself this: “Could I be exaggerating the likelihood of this fear?”

Replace it..

Now think of a positive outcome: “Disagreeing respectfully can clarify my thoughts to my partner and help us connect on a deeper level.”

Conclusion

Codependency can disguise itself as love and devotion, but its impact on the relationship and personal well-being of both partners can be devastating. But…

Understanding its signs, causes, dangers, and recovery methods can help you build a healthier bond with your partner.

It’s also worth noting that recovery from codependency doesn’t mean abandoning care or compassion for your partner. Rather, it means finding balance—creating space for both partners to thrive as individuals while nurturing the connection.

With self-awareness, commitment, and often professional support, it’s possible to transform codependent patterns into genuine intimacy—built on mutual respect, healthy boundaries, and authentic self-expression. Also…

Understand that healing from codependent behaviors is not a linear process—setbacks are a natural part of growth. That’s why it’s important to practice self-compassion and recognize that learning to love both yourself and your partner in healthier ways is a journey worth taking.