Relationship Codependency Signs & Questionnaire

Recognizing codependency red flags is crucial when you have a close bond with an individual with poor mental health. This risk is heightened by poor mental health and other problems like addiction. In addition, codependent relationships may result in guilt, stress, insecurity, and fear of abandonment.

How To Recognize Relationship Codependency?

• Your own needs become secondary. The bulk of your time and energy is spent on the needs of your loved ones. Not only do you acknowledge the significance of your needs, but identifying and speaking up for your needs is a challenge. Excessive caretaking or martyr tendencies enable negative behaviors and mental health symptoms in your loved one, which hinders positive progress.
• You live to please people. Being completely unselfish for yourself is a lifestyle, and helping or serving others is your only sense of self-worth. Yet, you struggle with the willpower to say no, especially to loved ones or significant others.
• You have poor self-esteem. If you have high standards and can't make relationships completely ideal, you may frequently experience guilt or shame. As a result, you tend to rebuke yourself and may feel unworthy of love from others.
• You need to establish boundaries. This can occur by sacrificing your well-being for someone else or maintaining a strict distance from others with rigid boundaries. Poorly set limits are the most common with codependents, which may cause hypersensitivity to the actions and words of others, giving them more meaning, usually harmful, than what was meant by the other person.
• You feel compelled to control your loved one. This behavior results in a better sense of safety and security in your relationship and towards yourself. Unfortunately, controlling behavior can be subtle, often disguised as genuine love and care. A few methods of control involve extreme caretaking in overabundance and people-pleasing tendencies.
• You're obsessive over specific relationship aspects. You tend to hyper analyze due to your fears and insecurities, constantly ruminating over conversations, what was said or done, and how that may relate to you.
• You are terrified of being abandoned. This fear can arise when they leave, threaten to do so, or you are convinced they will without clear evidence. Your life revolves around this person, and living without them feels impossible. Fear of abandonment is a gateway to toxic codependency behaviors, such as obsessiveness and caregiving.

10 Questions To Help Identify Codependency

• Do you keep quiet to keep the peace?
• Do you always care what others think of you?
• Have you ever lived with someone who was abusive or struggled with addiction?
• Do you mostly base your life around the judgments of others?
• Do home or work-related adjustments make you uneasy?
• Do you experience rejection when your partner socializes with others instead of you?
• Do you question your ability to become a better version of yourself?
• Do you have trouble expressing your genuine feelings about others?
• Do you constantly feel inadequate at grasping life?
• Does making a mistake make you feel like a failure or a bad person?