He chose to deal with things by relying on something to ease the pain of life, depression, suicidal tendencies and while doing so, it helped him deal with my co-dependency. We both were aware of his issues and I always thought I was the one to live with the burden of his addiction. I felt so much love for him that I made his problems mine, because both of us took on each others pain, depression, etc. In a healthy relationship, when one is down, the other is there to lift them back up and help them see things differently. We did not function that way.
I found myself so tired of taking on his emotions and trying to walk on egg shells to keep him from going over the edge. Things that bothered me were not talked about, I learned to keep them in. Too long of doing this causes resentment and detachment.
What I haven't mentioned is that, he never asked me to take these things on. There is no fault or blame today. I struggled silently with my own pain and depression and, unknowingly, my own co-dependency. It's so much easier to avoid your own issues when you are so focused on making someone else better and then resenting them for their mistakes.
If you are like me and have misconceptions or are unsure of what it means to be codependent, let me give you it's meaning:
A codependent person is one who has let another
person's behavior affect him or her, and who is
obsessed with controlling that person's behavior.
So all those times that I prided myself on being a caring, compassionate, empathetic person, I was taking it a little too far. I worried so much about trying to do the right thing in my relationship and for my kids, that I just needed to step back and let the man that I still, to this day love, handle his own shit!
