def: The false belief that I cannot be okay unless someone else is okay.
In codependency, I mistakenly see your sense of well-being as the source of my well-being: my peace, my purpose, my belonging, my acceptance, my safety, etc. And in that false belief, I cede all of my power to you. I falsely place my okayness in your hands.
It’s innocent confusion. You cannot be in charge of my okayness. Only I can be. You can neither make me okay nor hurt me. That’s my job.
Because the thing is, I cannot actually know if you’re okay or not. I can only know whether I think you’re okay or not. You could tell me to my face that you’re okay and you could be lying through your teeth. If I knew you were lying, would it be enough for me to hear from you that you’re okay? I find that it wouldn’t.
I want to know you’re okay, but I recognize that whenever I tell myself I “know” you’re okay all that’s really happening is that I THINK and BELIEVE you are. So what am I left with? My own capacity to think and believe you’re okay. It’s all done from my side. In my world, “you” are nothing more than my story of a “you.” The “you” I “know” comes entirely from “me.”
There is no situation where I can confirm you are doing anything that I am not telling myself you’re doing in my mind. So in that way, everything I see you doing is MY doing. In that way, I am not dependent on you. I create you (for me). (…and it would stand to reason that you create you, for you. But I can’t confirm that.)
So it makes no sense for me to look to you for approval except as a barometer of my own state of mind: if I think you don’t approve of me, it’s because I am unsure of my place in the world and I’m projecting my self-doubts and self-judgments onto you. It’s literally the only way I can experience your disapproval.
So the only reason I am ever “not okay” in relation to you is that I’m telling myself I am not okay and blaming you for it. And I can clear that up all on my own. In fact, the only way I can clear it up is on my own. “You” don’t need to do it. You can’t do it. Because it has nothing to do with “you.”
When I recognize that we are one perfectly okay thing before I think a stressful thought and believe it, I can question the thinking that puts you in control of my okayness and return to the peace of our eternal wholeness in my mind. And when I can do that, I see that I am always okay. I just sometimes think I’m not. And I can love that. I can sit with anyone suffering that confusion, including myself. I can be okay with all of it.
And then I’m free.
Then I can play in all this imaginary separation just for the fun of it, the way I do when I’m playing a video game: enjoying the fantasy but never believing it. And then returning to reality whenever it stops being fun.