Codependency
A pattern of excessive emotional reliance on a partner, losing your identity and needs to manage theirs. Often develops from childhood with addicted or emotionally unavailable parents.
Codependency is a relational pattern where you orient your entire life around another person — their mood becomes your mood, their problems become your project, and your self-worth depends on being needed.
Key features: inability to say no, chronic people-pleasing, loss of personal identity in relationships, attraction to "projects" (broken people you try to fix), and staying in harmful relationships because being alone feels worse.
In personality terms, codependency maps to: very high Agreeableness (self-sacrificing), high Neuroticism (fear of abandonment), anxious attachment, and low assertiveness. Recovery involves: therapy (CoDA, schema therapy), developing boundaries, rebuilding independent identity, and understanding your attachment style.
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