Where does compassion end and co-dependency begin? There are some important distinctions here. One is between feeling and behavior.
You might empathize with someone but that doesn't mean you have to DO anything about their plight. It's their plight not yours. Compassion is the ability to feel what others are feeling. It does not imply doing anything. Compassion is a natural sense of identification with others. We are hard-wired through our mirror neuron system to be able to identify with others. Some of us have ultra-developed compassion where we can identify with everyone to a very intense degree.
Co-dependency is the illusion that we're helping someone when we're basically interfering in his or her life and allowing a negative behavior to continue. Co-dependency can be born out of a need to control or can come out of a need for love and attention. Sometimes, co-dependency comes from a fear of conflict and the need for peace.A key word here is: boundaries. Through your compassion you can feel someone's pain and see that they need help. Someone with good boundaries can explain to the person what they see, why help is needed and where to get it. But good boundaries mean that person is not going to provide the help themselves. Obviously, I am not talking about an immediate crisis involving a physical emergency where someone's life is at risk. Then, hopefully you would do all that you reasonably could to help, but not at the expense of your own life. For example, if you saw someone drowning in quicksand, throwing them a rope is a compassionate act, jumping into the quicksand with them is a co-dependent one -- and a stupid one.At the heart of ending co-dependency is knowing (and acting) that while you may identify others' problems, you can't solve them, they have to. That's a difficult realization but an essential one.
Questions:
Do you have good boundaries?
Do you often feel that you are giving yourself and your time away?
Do you feel guilty when you say "no'?
Very good points. I'm a twin and my brother and I were codependent until I was paralyzed in surgery and we parted ways. It was good for both of us, but especially him, because he gained a lot of independence that he didn't have when he relied on me for the first 20 years of his life.
I did learn a lot about sharing though and find that I can share with others without becoming codependent with them quite easily. People think it's quite courageous of me to do that, but I think it's just normal.
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well done
I did learn a lot about sharing though and find that I can share with others without becoming codependent with them quite easily. People think it's quite courageous of me to do that, but I think it's just normal.
Ron