Therapy for Codependency

Codependency often involves a subtle but exhausting need to manage, anticipate, or control relational dynamics — trying to keep things stable, avoid conflict, or prevent disconnection by staying one step ahead.

For many people, it also shows up as over-functioning, people-pleasing, difficulty with boundaries, or feeling overly responsible for others’ emotions and outcomes. These patterns are often driven by care and responsibility, yet can leave you feeling depleted, resentful, or disconnected from yourself.

Many people who struggle with these patterns are capable, insightful, and deeply relational. What’s often missing isn’t awareness or care — it’s space to hold both yourself and others without losing your footing.

You Might Be Here Because…

You may find yourself here if some of the following feel familiar — even if you’ve never identified with the word codependency before.

  • You feel responsible for other people’s emotions, reactions, or well-being

  • You work hard to keep relationships stable by anticipating needs, preventing conflict, or smoothing things over

  • You notice a need to manage situations or dynamics in order to feel safe or connected

  • You struggle to find boundaries that feel both self-respecting and relational — ones that allow closeness without over-responsibility or control

  • You often put your own needs aside, then feel resentful, depleted, or unseen

  • You struggle to trust that relationships will hold if you stop over-functioning — and feel more at ease being needed than simply being yourself

Many people arrive here feeling exhausted by how much effort it takes to manage relationships while trying not to lose themselves in the process. If something about the way you relate feels unbalanced — even if you can’t yet name it — this page is meant to help put language to that experience.

What Is Codependency?

Codependency describes a pattern of relating in which your sense of safety, worth, or stability becomes closely tied to managing relationships. This often includes over-responsibility, difficulty tolerating conflict or distance, and efforts to control outcomes in order to preserve connection.

Codependent patterns often develop in relationships or environments where connection felt uncertain, conditional, or emotionally unpredictable. When closeness, approval, or safety seemed to depend on staying attuned to others, taking responsibility, or preventing disruption, those strategies became ways to preserve connection.

Over time, these adaptations can solidify into automatic relational habits — prioritizing others’ needs, monitoring emotional climates, or minimizing your own experience in order to keep relationships intact. What once helped maintain connection may later feel exhausting or limiting, even when it’s no longer necessary.

How Codependency Can Show Up

Codependent patterns can take many forms and often shift depending on the relationship or situation. You may recognize some of these experiences more strongly than others.

Emotionally

  • Anxiety about others’ reactions or emotional states

  • Guilt or discomfort when prioritizing your own needs

  • Emotional exhaustion from staying attuned to others

In Relationships

  • Feeling responsible for maintaining emotional balance

  • Managing others’ reactions to avoid conflict, distance, or disappointment

  • Over-functioning, people-pleasing, or managing others

With Boundaries

  • Struggling to find a middle ground where you can stay connected without over-giving or controlling

  • Over-accommodating until resentment builds, then lashing out or shutting down

In Your Sense of Self

  • Difficulty identifying your own needs, preferences, or limits

  • Measuring your worth through usefulness, caretaking, or being needed

  • Difficulty trusting yourself when others are upset or dissatisfied

In Your Body

  • Chronic tension, vigilance, or difficulty relaxing

  • Fatigue or shutdown after prolonged relational stress

What matters most is how much effort it takes to manage relationships — and how often that effort comes at the expense of mutual agency, balance, and respect, for both you and others.

How Therapy for Codependency Works Here

Therapy for codependency focuses on slowing things down enough to notice where responsibility and control begin to blur in relationships. Most people aren’t trying to dominate or disappear — they’re trying to stay connected, prevent harm, or keep things from falling apart — and somewhere along the way the lines between care, responsibility, and control become unclear.

Rather than forcing change, the work supports a gradual shift toward relationships that can hold both regard for others and care for yourself at the same time.

Ways This Work Can Take Shape

  • Individual therapy offers space to explore over-responsibility, control, and boundary confusion internally, and in the context of past and present relationships
    → Learn more about individual therapy

  • Couples therapy allows these dynamics to be seen and worked with directly between partners, where patterns of responsibility, control, and mutual agency often play out in real time
    → Learn more about couples therapy

  • Intensive formats provide extended time and structure to slow things down and work more deeply when weekly therapy feels insufficient or stalled
    → Learn more about EMDR intensives

Key Elements of the Work

  • Notice when you’re managing, anticipating, or carrying what isn’t yours

  • Tolerate uncertainty, difference, and others’ choices without stepping in to manage

  • Recognize when helping or managing overrides your own needs or the other person’s agency

  • Rebuild boundaries that allow care without over-functioning or control

  • Ground relationships in equal regard, appropriate responsibility, and choice

Therapy is paced and collaborative, with space to explore what feels risky about letting responsibility rest where it belongs — and what shifts when control gives way to trust, clarity, and mutual regard.

The goal isn’t to stop caring or disengage from relationships, but to relate in ways that feel steadier, more balanced, and more respectful of everyone involved.

FAQs about Codependency

  • No. Many people recognize patterns around over-responsibility, control, or difficulty with boundaries without identifying with the term codependency. Therapy focuses on how you relate, not on labels.

  • People-pleasing can be part of codependent patterns, but codependency often includes a broader mix of caretaking, control, over-responsibility, and difficulty tolerating uncertainty or others’ autonomy in relationships.

  • Therapy focuses on clarifying your role, responsibility, and choices — not on changing others. As responsibility and control become clearer, relationships often shift, even when other people don’t consciously change.

  • Yes. Codependent patterns often show up most clearly in close relationships, whether you attend therapy individually or with a partner. The work can support greater clarity, balance, and self-connection in either case.

Next Steps

If therapy for codependency feels like it might be a fit, the next step is a brief consultation. This is a chance to talk about what you’re noticing in your relationships, ask questions, and get a sense of whether this approach feels supportive and appropriate for you. Therapy is never assumed or rushed. Fit, readiness, and pacing are considered together, with care and transparency.

→ Learn More About Therapy Services

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