Facing Reality

“I’d like to make a motion that we face reality” – Bob Newhart, from the Bob Newhart show

               I have always liked Bob and watched the Bob Newhart show regularly when it aired in the 1980’s and 1990’s.  Bob Newhart (the actor) played Bob Newhart (the psychologist) and the show portrayed the frustrations of that kind-hearted psychologist as he struggled to help everyone around him to function productively in the world – and forgot to help himself.  Bob, though a professional psychologist who saw clients in an office setting and during regular working hours, seemed unable to turn off his helping behavior during his other waking hours.  Every person in his life, client and otherwise, looked to Bob for help and expected him to solve their problems.  And Bob tried to do just that most of the time.  Once in a while, Bob would rebel and try to extricate himself when overload occurred but most of the time Bob just went along and did what others expected of him.

               Folks like Bob have a learned urge to help others and sometimes this urge takes them into dangerous and unhealthy waters.  Even though Bob was a professional, and he must have been aware of the meanings for and importance of concepts such as personal boundaries, self-esteem, self-awareness and such, he was not able to put them into practice much of the time.  Bob was a co-dependent personality.

               The world loves co-dependent folks most of the time.  They display passive, excessively caretaking, and compliant behaviors.  They put the needs of others ahead of their own, often to their personal detriment.  They do this NOT because they are striving to imitate Mother Teresa, but because they have learned and been conditioned to be preoccupied with the needs of others.  At some point in their lives they were told or otherwise conditioned to:

ü  Deny their own feelings in order to take on and deal with the feelings of others

ü  Compromise their own values and integrity in order to maintain an intimate relationship

ü  Solve the emotions, needs, and life problems of others because they were expected to

ü  Deny and hide their own needs and life problems in order to focus on others

ü  Need, seek out,  and value others’ approval of their thinking, feelings and behavior over their own

ü  Fear abandonment and rejection and avoid confrontation because of this

ü  Accept abuse and negative patterns of behavior from others and place the blame for it on themselves

ü  Believe that if they did not do the above, they were selfish, ungrateful wretches

               Codependent Bob rarely smiled.  He was often very irritable.  Sometimes he would hide from his clients and other ‘needy’ people.  Bob’s wife was constantly frustrated with him and his inability to deal with life.  Bob just could not relax and have fun because he was consumed with worry about others.  He frequently judged himself and others negatively and asked ‘why can’t we face reality and fix our problems?’  Bob frequently stated that his best efforts to help others were not good enough because others refused to face their own problems and so he must not be working hard enough, doing enough, or being enough for them.  Bob saw everyone in his life as a victim to some degree and he their ‘fixer of problems’.  Poor Bob felt responsible for everyone and everything around him and when he went into overload he became fearful, angry, insecure, compulsive, etc. – he took on the exact issues of those he was trying so hard to help.  Something in Bob’s thinking caused him to fear serious repercussions if he tried to take even one tiny step away from being the raging codependent he was.  It’s no wonder that Bob rarely smiled and that Bob was often in a bad mood!

               How Bob became a raging codependent is important but not nearly as important as his need to recognize his emotional maladjustment and to address it.  Therapy, meds, and other means are available to Bob – if he would only make that first tiny step towards recovery.  But Bob was full of fear of ‘what if’. 

               Bob had some cause to fear serious repercussions because Bob’s very codependent traits made him the natural target for narcissists.  Narcissists crave compliance, admiration, and control and codependent people crave being needed and looking to another for validation of their worth.  This type of relationship creates an unhealthy ‘dance’ wherein the codependent subordinates herself to the narcissist.  This causes the codependent to believe that she must be supportive of the narcissist at all times and no matter what and cannot let go of the narcissist even when he is:

• Unavailable emotionally or sexually
• Afraid to commit and keeps one foot out the door at all times
• Cannot communicate effectively
• Is unloving, distant, abusive, controlling, dictatorial, ego-centric, or
• Addicted to something outside the relationship such as drugs, alcohol, etc.

               Love between partners cannot endure when these types of behaviors are practiced by the narcissist upon the codependent.  The codependent becomes fearful of abandonment, clingy, prone to panic, angry, depressed, and no longer unable to cope.  The relationship is then characterized as ‘I hate you but please don’t leave me.’  The codependent is no longer in love with the narcissist – but is afraid to let go.  Even though the extremely unhealthy relationship has damaged her health and emotional well-being, the codependent is so afraid of being alone, of change, of possibly hurting her narcissistic partner – that she becomes like a deer in the headlights and freezes in misery.

               This can be the situation for years.  For some, it will never change.  But for some, a significant event will occur that will ‘wake up’ the codependent and bring about a brief understanding of her situation.  If she is able to summon a good deal of will, courage, and strength, she will then seek out assistance.  She will seek therapy, attend meetings such as Al-Anon or other 12-step programs, read and take classes, and otherwise begin the process of understand how she learned codependency, how this brought her to her unhealthy relationship, and what she must do to recover.  Note that recovery does not involve the narcissist in any way.  Remember, narcissists will not change, believe that they do not have a problem, and will seek to sideline or otherwise stop the codependent’s efforts to grow stronger.  The codependent must be willing to admit her own shortcomings and that her codependent behaviors are of her own making and can be changed.  Learning to focus on her own behaviors and shortcomings, to stop attempting to control or ‘fix’ the results of the negative behaviors of the narcissist, and to stop denying that her life is out of control because she is fixated upon others, will allow her to find peace of mind and begin a new, positive chapter in life. 

               Al-anon teaches that by practicing loving detatchment from narcissistic personalities, one can again find hope and joy in life.  Codependency, like other learned problem behaviors such as alcoholism, is never cured but can be effectively managed.