Parental Codependency: How to Identify and Find Healing from It

Having your parents in your life is a blessing for many reasons. They can be a reservoir of wisdom and support, which we all need as we navigate the complexities of adulthood, parenting, and life in general. However, this doesn’t account for every experience of parents. Sometimes, a person’s relationship with their parents is fractious, or even non-existent. Some parents are too involved, and they may even be codependent.

It is important to address the issues that can exist in your relationship with your parents. How you do this depends on several things, like the nature of the relationship, the issue at hand, its severity, and what leeway your culture or community allows when speaking about such things. To address parental codependency, knowing what it is and identifying it is a great first step.

Parental codependency: What is it?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between two things that look or feel the same. Is the unease you’re feeling due to anxiety, or is it a genuine gut feeling of intuition about a situation? Can you tell the difference between intense attraction and deep affection? The issue with parental codependency is that it can present as dedicated involvement or deep concern.

Parental codependency might look like healthy parental love and involvement, but it isn’t that. At the heart of parental codependence is an excessive emotional reliance on one’s child for a sense of self-worth and well-being. A child’s behavior, emotional state, or achievements are tied heavily to how the parent perceives themselves and whether they are okay.

A parent can and should be affected by the things that impact their child. Empathy helps us to understand others’ experiences and move toward them compassionately. With parental codependence, a parent moves beyond empathy to an over-reliance and an over-identification with their child.

Some Signs of Parental Codependence

Parental codependence can be difficult to differentiate from regular parental involvement or concern. Some of the signs of it would include being disproportionately and chronically worried about your child in a way that doesn’t fit the circumstances. A parent might also have controlling tendencies, like being overly involved in their child’s life and decisions.

Another sign to look out for is when a parent has a pervasive fear of separation from their child, or if they are afraid of their child being independent from them. If a parent experiences difficulty allowing their child to experience the natural consequences of their actions, that could also point to codependent tendencies.

The regular and healthy involvement and concern that a parent has for their child will nurture the child’s independence and growth. Codependency tends to stifle these qualities.

Additionally, healthy parental involvement tends to empower the child so that they can mature and grow their ability to make good decisions, face challenges, and learn from their failures.

A codependent parent will often relate to their child primarily through the desire to rescue, fix, or control the child. These actions aren’t solely fueled by the child’s needs; they are also motivated by the parent’s own unmet emotional needs and anxieties.

These are just some of the ways to discern codependent dynamics in a parent-child relationship. While at first glance codependency looks like the actions of a concerned and involved parent, other factors, such as the motivation behind those actions, would point to something else.

A Parental Checklist for Codependency

It might be helpful for a parent to prayerfully reflect on their relationship dynamic to discern if there’s codependency at work. The Lord can help you to identify unhealthy relationship patterns, including insecure attachment patterns. Some of the things you can do as part of this checklist include the following:

Assess your emotional reliance

Does your sense of value and purpose rest in your child’s behavior, emotional state, or achievements? Do you worry about your child more than the circumstances require?

Evaluate your fears of separation

Do you have unresolved insecurities or a fear of being abandoned by loved ones? Does the thought of your child being away from you, or of them being independent and having a life of their own, unsettle you?

Healthy parental involvement

Consider whether your parental involvement in your child’s life is healthy. Ask yourself if your involvement is helping to nurture your child’s independence and growth. Are you aiming to empower your child to decide on their own as well as face challenges on their own?

Consider any controlling tendencies

Do you struggle to allow your child to make their own choices and to experience the natural consequences of those actions? Does it feel natural to swoop in and rescue your child whenever their choices lead them into trouble? Do you take over and make decisions for your child when they are the sort of decisions individuals usually make for themselves?

Identify your motives

When you move to rescue your child from problems, or when you make decisions on their behalf, do you do it in response to their expressed needs or at their request? Is what’s driving you what your child has said they need, or do you find yourself paying closer attention to your own anxieties or unmet needs? Weigh whether you desire to rescue, control, or “fix” your child.

As you do this work, reflect on the Lord’s design for parent-child relationships. It’s also important to understand that your identity and worth don’t ultimately come from your role as a parent, but from the Lord. You have innate value because of the Lord who created you (Genesis 1; Psalm 8, 139). If you’ve made mistakes in the past, embrace the Lord’s forgiveness and seek reconciliation where it’s needed.

How Codependency Impacts Relationships

A parent’s codependency may be rooted in their own past experiences of trauma or a dysfunctional family dynamic. Their own unmet emotional needs, unresolved personal insecurities, or past experience of relationships where their self-worth was contingent on caring for others may all play a role. This emotional freight, when taken into other relationships, can subtly shift the dynamic from nurturing to dependent.

When a codependent dynamic exists in a relationship, it distorts it. In the parent-child relationship, codependency can create an unhealthy balance. The child, regardless of their age, may feel like they’re being controlled, smothered, or they may feel responsible for their parents’ emotions. It becomes difficult to be independent, to feel self-confident, and to maintain healthy boundaries in this and other relationships.

Codependency also affects the parent, as it can be exhausting to constantly keep rescuing your children. Emotional and physical exhaustion might be one end result. Codependency also fosters endless anxiety, as they become enmeshed with their child.

Another possible outcome is resentment for setting aside their own needs to meet the child’s, and at the same time, feeling compelled to keep setting aside their own needs, as that gives them purpose.

The parent-child relationship is badly distorted by codependency, which has many negative consequences. The good news is that there is a path to recovery from codependency, toward a healthier and more fulfilling relationship.

Finding Healing from Parental Codependency

Parental codependency affects both the parent and their child. The child could perpetuate the same patterns with their own child, and that needs to be addressed, too. The path toward healing and recovery from parental codependency includes the following:

Acknowledgement after self-reflection The checklist for parental codependency above could help in the process of recognizing codependent patterns. It takes the Lord’s wisdom, an open mind, and help from others to identify unhealthy patterns.

Setting healthy boundaries For a codependent parent, setting boundaries might feel tantamount to abandoning their child. Their child setting boundaries might feel like being shut out or rejected. It’s hard, but learning to set your own and respect others’ boundaries fosters mutual respect. A parent should encourage their children’s independence while maintaining a supportive, not controlling, presence in their life.

Seeking support It’s not easy to unlearn your ways of doing things. Mentorship, support groups, and counseling – these are just some of the tools available to help you begin unlearning old patterns and taking up new, healthier ones. Others can also offer you comfort and practical strategies to overcome codependent tendencies. With help, you can root your sense of identity in the Lord, and not in your role or what you do for others.

The Lord can renew minds and hearts (Romans 12:1-2), teaching us new ways of being. With help from a Christian counselor, you can learn to anchor yourself in Christ and to nurture relationships that allow parents and their children to flourish. If there are codependent dynamics in your relationships, reach out to our office to set up an appointment with me or another counselor in our online directory. Seek help today.