Featured image by Nicolas Raymond under Creative Commons License

The original publishing date of this article was August 2021 on Substack. I’m in the process of migrating my publication to this site and I will periodically publish my old articles here.

This followed one of the most tumultuous breakups of my entire life – it was my wakeup call to get serious about patterns I had long ignored. Things I thought were good and noble about myself were not; things I believed I did out of pure intentions clearly had other motives that I didn’t acknowledge. It was a hard pill to swallow, but if I kept finding myself in toxic relationships, I had to admit the common factor was me.

This was the catalyst that got me into energy work and using magick to explore and mend my heart and mind. If you purchase my services, you have every right to know who you are doing business with – without this experience, I wouldn’t running this site today. This is not a call for anyone to be ashamed but to shake the bed so hard it’s impossible to sleep. Owning your mistakes doesn’t mean you’re at fault for what other people have done to you, and an honest look in the mirror is the only way to create a future that does not repeat the past.

I am a codependent.

That means I take pride in being wounded. I serve as the doormat for others, beaming at every footprint pounded into my back. I present a version of myself too perfect to be believed (fitting, as I don’t believe it myself) – too perfect in the sense that nothing ever bothers him and he has no needs, he only serves.

My real self rages beneath as I passively accept whatever people do, and I congratulate myself for being beyond such petty emotions as anger. I present an invulnerable facade and fear the world can see through it.

Predators can, but the world at large doesn’t care enough to take note of what I obsess over. Perhaps I am naked, but others are too concerned with their problems to notice.

I think myself deeply empathic, but I cannot see other people as they are because I project myself into their gaps. I proclaim I am not controlling but I won’t let things go; I talk myself into thinking I am bringing something up strictly because I think it’s interesting but in reality I am subtly hoping the people around me will change, and they feel the pressure behind my friendly smile.

When others insult or aggress against me, I want to call them out… But I hesitate and talk myself into thinking back on all the mistakes I’ve ever made. I convince myself that I need to do better and that what they’re doing is about their pain and not me so I should let it go.

What I frame as healing is actually enabling, and what I call selfless stems from a deeply selfish desire to be needed in a way that the other person would never abandon me.

I want to be another’s personal supply of heroin.

“Why can’t I quit you?” We both ask, our lives stagnant, our relationship slowly falling apart. We both know the answer, but neither of us wants to speak it for fear of shattering the illusion and facing all the lies we’ve told ourselves and each other.

It’s so much better to spin it into more insufferable lovey-dovey gushing so that the looming storm can build up enough charge to completely destroy us when we can no longer hold it back.

Glass House, Meet Stone

I say all this so I do not appear to cast aspersions from a high horse. I’m in the muck like everyone else.

I am not the pure, all good, all loving scion of insight and healing I thought myself to be. I have made mistakes – grave mistakes. I am not the victim of those who abused me – I also abused.

I never raised my voice. I never used gifts I gave for leverage. I never tried to guilt anyone into anything, but simply by enabling them I was abusive and grew resentful. I was passive aggressive. I was deeply critical. I never meant to be, but intentions and actions need to align, and being hurt was no excuse to hurt in turn.

I placed myself in a superior position by playing savior, and that meant I was always pursuing companionship with people I believed were beneath me. I placed myself in a position where real intimacy was impossible and wondered why I struggled to find love.

“I’m a Giver”

The spiritual community has a problem with narcissists and codependents. Instead of dealing with real life, spirituality becomes another escape.

“I forgave my boyfriend for cheating because I know he’s been hurt and he’s acting out that pain.”

“I let them shout at me because I’m a healer and everything they did was about them, not me.”

“Twin flames hurt each other, but I know we’ll heal and be together.”

“All these toxic relationships are preparing me for my soulmate.”

“It’s the will of my Higher Self that I’m demeaned in this dead-end job. I’ll be rewarded with my dream career someday!”

I’ll admit, there’s a little exaggeration on my part, but time and again people chalk their shortcomings and poor choices up to divine guidance or intervention.

It’s all part of some “plan” not unlike Jehovah stranding the Israelites in the desert for 40 years.

It can’t be that you screwed up. You’re a “healer,” or an “empath,” and that makes you a magnet for abusers. Your dharma is to heal every last piece of shit you come across by turning the other cheek to every form of abuse imaginable.

It’s Always Them – Never You

It’s true that if you’re a healer, bad people will be drawn to you.

But they are only in your life because you let them in.

You can have the best of intentions, but the moment you remove yourself and your needs from the equation, you open the door for all the shadows in yourself and the other person to take over the relationship.

What the codependent calls “the high road” is a pathological aversion to conflict and negative emotions within themselves and others.

They believe that by fostering an environment that is 100% positive all those negative things can be washed away and they can heal themselves and others without digging into all that nasty repressed stuff we’ve got bottled inside us.

But the paradox of healing is that sometimes in order for another to heal, they have to feel like shit.

They aren’t made better when they’re allowed to bully or verbally abuse people. They aren’t made better when they run up the balance on your credit card and you say nothing. They aren’t made better when they disappear for several days and act like nothing happened.

They aren’t made better when the person they’re with is a total non-entity that only reflects back to them what they’re willing to see.

We cannot self-actualize without contrasting ourselves with others. The codependent, in the name of healing, keeps others sick because they’re afraid they won’t be needed and don’t feel they’re good enough to maintain relationships because of who they are.

Having a Spine is Spiritual

None of the great teachers tell you to accept abuse. Every book, every scripture, cautions the acolyte to be careful about who they allow into their circle.

Of course, this is terrifying. Boundaries are terrifying. To become codependent, you have to grow up in a situation where you were expected to perfectly meet another’s demands – often ever-changing with no rhyme or reason to what was expected each day – and all vulnerability was treated as a grave offense.

The codependent takes responsibility for everything, including things so far outside their control no human being could influence it. I felt like my father blamed me when the weather was bad, so for a long time I carried a deep sadness and was hyper-alert when it rained heavily. This is something I’m intimately familiar with.

And when any negative emotion is triggered in others, it’s easy to see yourself as being the same as those who abused you. It’s an incredible double-bind, and it takes years upon years to undo it fully.

But You Don’t Stand a Chance if You Won’t Face Yourself

When people get out of relationships with narcissists, borderlines, abusers, they look for the red flags. They try to understand them. They watch hundreds of hours of videos and read dozens of books, all in the name of trying to diagnose the people they’ve been with and somehow stop the pain within themselves.

You can’t stem the bleeding by analyzing the hell out of mental health issues the experts don’t even fully agree on.

And you’re not going to spontaneously discover a magic key to heal things with an ex or a toxic friend you’re hoping will pop back into your life.

You can’t heal them. Even if they’re capable and willing to make that journey, you’re in too deep. You want something they can’t give you, and you’ve seen how your shadows dance.

Maybe you can have fond conversations years down the line when you’ve both healed and moved on in life, but in the meantime, you have to accept that what you had with them wasn’t real. Not fully.

It couldn’t be, not with two incomplete people projecting parts of themselves into the other to fill in the gaps.

You will never escape abuse and toxic situations strictly by understanding the other. The only solution – and the only true closure and healing – is in understanding and accepting yourself.

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