Do you often feel responsible for other people’s happiness? Do you find it hard to say no, even when it’s costing you your energy, your peace, or your health?
If so, you might be caught in a codependent relationship dynamic. Codependency in relationships can include signs, like your sense of worth becoming tightly bound to meeting the needs of others. Over time, this can lead to anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and a sense of losing yourself in your relationships.
You’re certainly not alone. Many of the people I work with are intelligent, high-achieving, and deeply caring individuals who find themselves stuck in roles that revolve around keeping the peace, rescuing others, or earning love through over-giving. These patterns may feel familiar, even safe, but they often come at the cost of your own emotional wellbeing. But the good news is that you can learn how to overcome dependency in counsellingtherapy.
I’m Dr Sonney Gullu-McPhee, a clinical psychologist and an ISST-certified therapist. In this blog, I’ll talk about the meaning of codependency in relationships and explain how therapy could help you overcome it.
Get in touch with me to book a session today.
What is Codependence?
Although it’s not a formal mental health diagnosis, codependence is a well-recognised relational pattern. At its core, it involves an over-reliance on others for emotional stability and a tendency to prioritise others’ needs while minimising your own. Many people who struggle with codependent relationships feel their value lies in being needed. This can make it difficult to leave unhealthy relationships, assert boundaries, or even acknowledge your own needs without guilt or anxiety. Therapies, like schema therapy, can help you understand codependency and its meaning in relationships and help you overcome them.
Many wonder what schema therapy is good for and whether it really helps. From a psychological perspective, your codependent patterns often stem from deep rooted beliefs formed in early life, which is what we call “schemas” in Schema Therapy (Young, Klosko, & Weishaar, 2003).
Some of the most common beliefs linked to codependent relationships include: “If I stop helping, I’ll be rejected,” “My needs don’t matter,” or “I have to earn love by giving.” These beliefs fall under what we call the “Other-Directedness” schema domain, especially involving Self-Sacrifice and Subjugation. These are not personal failings, but rather strategies that once helped you stay emotionally safe in environments where love or security may have felt conditional.
Where Do These Patterns Come From?
Codependence often stems from issues in childhood relationships. Perhaps your emotional needs were neglected or only met when you behaved a certain way. Maybe a parent struggled with addiction, depression, or emotional unpredictability, and your role became that of the peacekeeper or emotional caregiver.
Attachment research (Bowlby, 1980; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007) shows how inconsistent or emotionally unavailable caregiving can lead to insecure attachment patterns, leaving you unsure whether it’s safe to express needs or set limits. Janina Fisher (2017) describes these adaptations as survival-based roles that were protective in childhood but become costly in adulthood. The message that gets internalised is often something like: “I matter only when I make others feel better.”
Over time, this can lead to relationships where your needs remain secondary, and love feels like something that must constantly be earned.
Schema Therapy can help identify how these early dynamics left core emotional needs unmet, such as the need to feel safe, nurtured, seen, and accepted unconditionally. In tandem, Compassion-Focused Therapy (Gilbert, 2010) explores how your threat system, your brain’s internal alarm, has been overactivated by these histories. This creates a loop of self-criticism, shame, and hyper-responsibility. Therapy helps soothe that alarm and strengthen what we call the “soothing system”, the part of the brain that allows for safety, connection, and self-compassion.
How Codependence Affects Your Relationships
Codependent relationship patterns often show up throughout life. In romantic relationships, you might avoid conflict and feel emotionally responsible for your partner’s happiness. In friendships, you may always be the “strong one”, but feel unseen when you’re the one in need. In family dynamics, there may be emotional enmeshment with a parent or sibling, where your own needs get eclipsed. At work, it might show up as over-functioning, people-pleasing, or an inability to say no without guilt.
Although the settings may differ, the emotional message remains the same: “I have to give to be loved.”
The Emotional Weight of Codependence
Many people describe feeling emotionally drained but unable to rest, or ashamed for having their own needs. There’s often a deep fear of disappointing others, paired with a quiet grief around their own emotional needs not being met. Over time, this can lead to chronic stress, burnout, emotional numbness, low self-worth, and symptoms of anxiety or depression.
A study by Dear and Roberts (2005) found that individuals with codependent traits often experience higher levels of psychological distress, especially in relationships. Similarly, Noriega and colleagues (2008) showed that these individuals tend to struggle with emotional regulation, often linked to childhood experiences of unpredictability or neglect.
How Therapy Helps You Reclaim Your Voice and Needs
Understanding codependency and its meaning within relationships can also involve understanding how and why you end up following the same patterns and find yourself in codependent relationships time and time again. Therapy provides a safe, compassionate space to begin unravelling these deeply ingrained patterns. Codependence isn’t simply about saying “no” more often, it’s about understanding where these relational dynamics began and slowly finding your way back to yourself.
In our work together, we begin by gently naming and exploring the relational patterns that have shaped your sense of self. Many clients find it powerful to realise that what once felt like personality traits, such as being the helper, the fixer, the invisible one, are actually adaptations to earlier emotional environments.
Through Schema Therapy and experiential techniques like imagery rescripting, we work directly with the emotional roots of these patterns. You’ll begin to cultivate what we call the Healthy Adult part of the self, an inner voice that can validate your needs, hold boundaries with compassion, and challenge the fear that love will be withdrawn if you stop over-functioning.
Compassion-Focused Therapy helps you develop a kinder, more supportive relationship with yourself. Research shows that learning to activate the brain’s soothing system through compassion-based imagery and mindful practices can help regulate the nervous system and reduce the chronic anxiety often found in codependence (Kirschner et al., 2019).
As therapy progresses, we begin to explore new relational behaviours. Whether that’s saying no without overexplaining, expressing emotional needs without guilt, or simply pausing to check in with how you feel, you’ll begin to notice a shift. Relationships start to feel less draining, more reciprocal, and more grounded in mutual respect.
Reclaiming Your Freedom in Relationships
Healing from codependence isn’t about becoming distant or detached. It’s about returning to yourself.
It means learning to value your needs as much as others’. It means trusting that you are worthy not because of what you do for others, but because of who you are.
Begin Your Healing Journey
I am a Chartered Clinical Psychologist with a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and postdoctoral training in Advanced Schema Therapy. I offer both in-person sessions in Petersfield, Hampshire, and online therapy across the UK.
If you’re unsure whether therapy is the right step for you, I offer a free 15-minute consultation where we can explore what you’re looking for and whether we’d be a good fit. Take the first step towards understanding codependency and its meaning within your relationships and learn how to undo these patterns.
Get in touch with me by calling +44 7584 354041, emailing me at info@drmcphee.co.uk or by filling out the secure contact form here.