Description of a Controlling Co-Dependent

You could be a passive co-dependent, “people pleasing” your way through life and in a relationship with a controlling co-dependent who is:

• Someone who is deeply insecure and feels better about life when he or she is in control
• Someone you need who knows that you need him or her
• Someone who supports you financially and holds that over you
• Someone you feel indebted to for some reason
• Someone you are afraid of
  
  
  Intimidation by a Controlling Co-Dependent
  
  You could be a controlling co-dependent if you:
• Use emotional blackmail to get others to do what you want them to do
• Convince others that you are the “only one” with enough intellect, wisdom and experience in life to give directions
• Act in such a way that no one would dare question or stand up to you
• Keep others loyal to you by threatening to pull back your support, love, caring or approval of them

Intimidation is a control issue and is used in an attempt to get others to do what you want them to do. If you use intimidation tactics to get your own way and you want to change your behaviour, acknowledge the fact that it is you who has to change. Change your thinking to change your feelings to change your behaviour.


Co-Dependency Progression

As co-dependency progresses, it will result in stress, disrupted relationships, controlling behaviour and physical illness. This is possibly the underlying cause of many addictions, including food addiction. We can also pass it on to our children unless we break the chain of co-dependency.

Co-dependency is a family disease. If the mother is co-dependent and overweight, this could result in the whole family suffering from obesity and subsequent health problems. The inability of a parent to lose weight becomes a family issue and can lead to self-esteem problems for the children.

SELF ANALYSIS QUIZ
Are you co-dependent?

These are all self-defeating learned behaviours that often result in an inability to initiate and maintain healthy relationships. If you identify with several of these symptoms, or are dissatisfied with yourself and your relationship with others, then consider getting professional help.

1. Do you put other people’s wants and needs before your own?
2. Do you value other people’s approval of your thinking, feelings or behaviour, over your own?
3. Do you change or ignore your own values in order to maintain a relationship?
4. Do you feel overly responsible or assume responsibility for someone else’s feelings or behaviours?
5. Do you worry about how other people may respond to your feelings?
6. Do you focus your attention on protecting other people?
7. Do you anticipate other people’s needs and desires, meeting them before they are asked to be met?
8. Do you feel good about yourself only when helping others?
9. Is your self-esteem bolstered only by other people?
10. Does fear about someone else’s feelings determine what you say or do?
11. Do other people’s behaviours and attitudes tend to determine your behaviour?
12. Do you value other people’s opinions more highly than your own?
13. Do you have trouble saying “no” when people ask you for help?
14. Do you keep quiet to avoid confrontation?
15. Do you have an unhealthy dependence on relationships, and do anything to hold on to a relationship in order to avoid feeling abandoned, rejected or alone?
16. Do you have a compelling need to control others?
17. Do you feel uncomfortable expressing your true feelings to others?
18. Do you feel bad when you make a mistake?
19. Do you have difficulty accepting compliments?
20. Do you have problems with intimacy and boundaries?
21. Do you have a tendency to confuse love and pity, with the tendency to “love” people you can pity and rescue?
22. Do you think people in your life would not be able to cope without your constant efforts?
23. Do you have an exaggerated sense of responsibility for the actions of other people?
24. Do you have a tendency to do more than your fair share all the time and become hurt when people don’t recognise your efforts?


Irrational Ideas That Cause the Co-Dependent Emotional Distress

1. It is absolutely necessary to be loved and approved by all the important people in my life if I want to consider myself as worthwhile.
2. It is unbearable when people and things are not the way I think they should be.
3. My unhappiness is caused by external circumstances.
4. I must always prove to others that I am a thoroughly confident person.
5. Unless I constantly worry about a problem it will only get worse.
6. It is easier to avoid certain life difficulties and responsibilities than it is to face them.
7. It is reasonable to be dependent upon others who are stronger that I am.
8. I should condemn everyone who acts unreasonably and unfairly to me and blame him or her for my stress.
9. I should become quite upset over other people’s problems and do all I can to alleviate their worry.
10. When people act unfairly or badly, they should be severely punished.

These irrational ideas contribute to depression with its associated symptoms of:

• Anger
• Fear
• Resentment
• Self-pity
• Guilt
• Hopelessness
• Lost motivation
• Self-loathing
  

Often, the above emotions lead to overeating to alleviate the emotional pain. Once sugars and carbohydrates are ingested, self-discipline disappears and the compulsion to satisfy food cravings continues.

If you eat one piece of cake or a biscuit, this doesn’t necessarily mean you are trying to regulate your mood and energy levels. But if you feel compelled to consume large portions of sugars and carbohydrates all of a sudden, you are most likely eating to anaesthetise troubling emotions. That is, you are experiencing tension, depression, anxiety or boredom (which is really loneliness combined with the frustration that life is too routine), and you want to feel better fast.

Criteria for a Dysfunctional (Co-Dependent) Family

In a dysfunctional family, members may suffer from insecurity and fear manifesting in any of the following obsessive/compulsive behaviours:
Overeating
Work addiction
Shopping addiction
Gambling
Alcohol
Drugs
Sex

Description of a Dysfunctional Family in Denial
Dysfunctional families do not acknowledge that problems exist. As a result, family members learn to repress emotions and disregard their own needs. Also:

They become “survivors”
They have no personal identity, switching between roles to make people happy
Their emotional development is inhibited and they fail to “grow up”
They develop behaviours that help them deny, ignore or avoid facing difficult emotions
They detach from reality by eating, drinking, gambling, working, shopping, etc.
They don’t feel
They don’t trust
They don’t touch
They don’t talk
They don’t confront

Passive co-dependent people sacrifice their own needs in order to take care of others. They place other people’s health, welfare and safety before their own and often lose contact with their own needs, desires and sense of self. This often leads emotional overeaters to resentment and self-pity when their own needs have not been met. To counteract these feelings, they seek solace in food, which gives them a “chemical” and “emotional” short-term satisfying feeling.

How Do Co-Dependent People Behave?
Co-dependents have low self-esteem and look for anything outside of themselves to make them feel better. They find difficulty being themselves and try to feel better through the use of food, alcohol, drugs and nicotine, or they develop compulsive behaviours like workaholism, gambling, shopping and indiscriminate sexual activity.

A co-dependent person can be very passive, or very bossy and controlling, or both.

Controlling people try to change everyone and everything around them. They are not happy unless they get their own way – all the time. Tyrannical and dominating, some co-dependents rule with an iron first from a self-appointed throne. They are powerful individuals who make life a misery for everyone around them.

Other co-dependents do their controlling under cover. They hide behind a costume of sweetness and nicety and secretly go about their business – controlling other people’s business.

Others use sighing and crying to announce their overall victimisation, and successfully control through weakness. They are so helpless. They need your co-operation so badly. They can’t live without it. Sometimes the weak are the most powerful manipulators and controllers. They have learned to tug at the guilt and pity strings of the world by using emotional blackmail.

Whatever the tactics, the goals remain the same. Make other people do what you want them to do. Make people behave as you think they should behave – control, control, control.

Being a controlling co-dependent is one of the biggest emotional weights to carry around. Why waste an incredible amount of energy in attempts to make others behave in ways they don’t want to?

Being physically overweight, combined with carrying around emotional weight, is self-destructive. Emotional overeating is but a symptom of a more serious underlying emotional problem. Want to lose weight? Get rid of the emotional weight that is sabotaging your ability to lose physical weight and you will “break FREE and win!”

Typical Behaviour of a Passive Co-Dependent’s Rescue & Caretaking Role of Other People

Some co-dependent people rescue others from their responsibilities. They take care of people’s responsibilities for them, inhibiting their ability to mature emotionally. This can include:

- Doing something we really don’t want to do
- Saying “yes” when we really want to say “no”
- Always putting other people first
- Meeting people’s needs without being asked
- Fixing people’s feelings
- Doing people’s thinking for them
- Suffering people’s consequences for them
- Solving people’s problems for them
- Not asking for what we want, need and desire
- Doing something for someone although that person is quite capable of doing it for himself or herself
- Taking the blame for other people’s behaviour
- Giving gifts and favours for approval

Co-dependents are often nice people with thoughtful motives but they attempt to help by continually taking control of other’s lives and doing things that others really need to do for themselves.

A protective, controlling co-dependent will attempt to shield another from the negative consequences of that person’s behaviour. A mother may make excuses for a truant child or a father may “pull some strings” to keep his son from suffering the consequences of delinquent behaviour.

People become dependent upon the co-dependent and as this reliance increases, the co-dependent develops an unconscious sense of “reward” and satisfaction from “being needed.” It feeds their ego (self-image). When a co-dependent’s “needs” are not being met, he or she seeks solace in food and the cycle continues.

Co-dependents view themselves as victims and are attracted to that same weakness in their love and friendship relationships, often ending up in toxic relationships. They may seek relationships with overeaters, alcoholics, gamblers or drug-addicted people, which continues the unhealthy pattern. A partner with an addiction can often be controlled or manipulated and, in turn, may seek out someone who can organise their lives, cover up for their behaviour and clean up their messy life situations.

BRAIN CHEMISTRY AND OBESITY

BRAIN CHEMISTRY AND OBESITY

Brain chemistry is another factor to consider if you are hooked on food. It is the interaction between one’s own manufactured “brain chemicals” and one’s behaviour, whether that be ingesting sugar or other chemicals or “acting out” behaviour, that stimulates the brain to establish compulsive and addictive behavioural patterns. Certain neurotransmitters give us an “excessive rush” when we ingest addictive chemicals, resulting in a compulsion to keep the “feel good” rush coming. We manipulate our moods by looking for stimulants like sugar, alcohol, drugs or nicotine to make us feel better. This behaviour is repeated when we engage in repetitive behaviours like running, overeating, relationship dependency, workaholism, gambling, addictive shopping sprees and sexual activities, to release our inner chemicals that give us that “feel good” rush.

Foods containing sugar are the drug of choice of many co-dependents. Our chemical and behavioural patterns are the results of being co-dependent, not the cause. There is a correlation between brain chemistry, co-dependency and emotional overeating.

Research has shown that overeating may be caused by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical that helps us feel pleasure, thus when we eat, we often feel a slight high. Research has also shown that when we overeat, dopamine receptors are slightly depleted in the brain. In fact, people who have previously had trouble cutting down on food show strong evidence of dopamine receptor depletion. If there are fewer dopamine receptors in the brain, a person will have to eat more just to get that same good feeling. This means that an obese person is going to have to eat a larger amount of food to feel the same amount of pleasure that a slimmer person would feel from a much smaller amount.

Further information regarding the correlation between brain chemistry and obesity is contained in my latest book, Want to Lose Weight ……………But Hooked on Food?