00:00 - Temple (Host)
Codependent cuties. Why do you think that I want to lighten things up around codependency, Davina? Because of what? 

00:08 - Davina (Co-host)
Think of it as like a dirty word. You're dependent on somebody, you need them to be happy, and I feel like that gets so twisted because that's not what it is at all and if we can't look at it from a place of love and vulnerability and acceptance, then it is really hard to talk about. So making it funny helps me feel a little less like you hit me with a bullseye temple. Thank you. 

00:32 - Temple (Host)
Yeah, that's how we do, because you have to have humor, right? Humor, it's the closest thing we can grab, I feel, when I need to change my energy is to be able to laugh or at least make fun of the situation, just to change the vibe. All right, so here's the thing. Let's talk about codependency and why that word feels so heavy. Right, it feels kind of like a shot in the arm. Codependent it's so bleh. Who is codependent? If you've ever been accused of being codependent, raise your hand. Is codependent. If you've ever been accused of being codependent, raise your hand Me. 

01:14
What does codependency affect? First of all, let's talk about how we get there. Okay, because codependent people have good intentions. Let's say that. And the word codependency is also very close to the word nurturer. The energy is very similar. The people that are codependent are also very good at nurturing. So nurturing doesn't sound like a bad word, does it? But codependency, they're telling us you can't be that and it's unhealthy, and it really can be, especially over long periods of time. But you have to look at where you started. It started with the caretakers. Let me read you a little bit about what I was reading about. 

01:53
Codependency comes from a dysfunctional family, and a dysfunctional family is one in which members of the family are suffering from fear, anger, pain or shame, and that it is ignored or denied by the parents or caregivers in the family. Underlining problems may include addiction to drugs or alcohol or work or food or sex or gambling. The presence of physical and emotional or sexual abuse. The presence of a family member that may be suffering from a chronic physical illness or a chronic mental illness. So if you're already feeling triggered, please, you know, take a breath and if this is triggering you, just take a minute to have some grace for yourself and think about the dysfunction from whence we came. Was there fear? Was there anger? Was there pain that you experienced in your early developmental years that was ignored or denied? And was it related to a chronic problem in your home, being that person was chronically emotionally dysregulated? Or was that person chronically physically ill and they couldn't take care of you in the way they should? Or was that person chronically mentally ill, which caused other problems of emotional dysregulation or verbal abuse? 

03:24
So that's the making of a codependent. All right, that's the beginning. So why should we feel bad if it was a program that we were groomed to be? I already know Davina's story and I know many of your stories in this room. So I don't want anybody to feel bad that you've developed codependent behaviors because it wasn't your fault. 

03:48
It was a way to survive and it was a way for you to feel empowered by learning to go along, to get along, by learning to keep the person in the family happy maybe more than one right. So as a result, the family members learn to repress their own emotions, meaning us. You repress the emotions and you disregard your own needs and you become survivors and you develop that if I deny or ignore my own emotions, then I can detach from them and that creates a habit of not talking about your feelings. Has anybody had the parent that says stop crying before I give you something to cry about? I mean, if that's not the making of a codependent, if a child is crying and it's not because they scraped their foot, they're crying because there's an emotional need, but the caregiver or the parent insists that you pull it together before I really give you something that you're going to cry about. What a sad way for little kids to start learning how to emotionally regulate. 

05:01
I find myself doing that now, even at this age where I know that it's okay for me to express feelings, but if I find myself getting over emotional I'm like, hey, pull it together. My inner voice says there was a time when I would shove my tears back into my eyes when my loved one with bipolar would be in the room and I didn't want to cry in front of him because you know what happens there. It's just more of a trigger. So I would just like shove my fingers in my tear ducts to hold the tears in. That's very old programming that says stop crying before you really have something to cry about. And that does bridge right over into what a relationship with somebody with chronic mania, psychosis and severe depression can look like when your emotions are not going to be properly reciprocated and properly supported because they're too sick. So you cram your tears back into your face and you find a way to cope and dismiss them. And then your subconscious realizes that the way things went well at home was when I did my very, very best. When I did everything right, things were better. So now you're grooming perfectionism right, which is an unattainable goal. 

06:20
Another subheader of codependency is feeling that the only way I'm going to be able to relax and really enjoy this relationship is if I make sure that everything that that person needs is in place and if those needs are met, then we're good, we can really enjoy each other. Now we live with people that have a mental illness that in itself, when they're sick, they are not satisfied with life right, they're not satisfied with the circumstance they're in, they're not satisfied with you, the relationship, their job, the amount of money that they have, the way their body looks, what car they drive, whatever it is. They're not satisfied because their brain is in mania and mania is a driving force that has it's like a well that never ends. You can never fill it up enough for them to feel satisfied. So we have to wait for those manic episodes to pass before that person comes back to a place of reciprocity that I'm loving you, you're loving me. But when they're in their illness, when they're in their symptoms, when they're in their symptoms, it's kind of a one-way street where you just have to keep loving them. 

07:29
For those of you that have a very deep well that you could keep giving, or maybe a very large cup that keeps running over, you could probably give for a really long time and not notice that you've been depleted Codependent cuties. We were built this way. It's nobody's fault. All right, let's get some of you to talk to me a little bit. Okay, how many of you had relationships with caregivers that you felt you just never could fill up their well, no matter what. And how did that spill over? Trying to fill up somebody's emotional reservoir with something that can't be filled? 

08:06 - Guest One (Guest)
Hi, teresa Come on up how you doing. Hi, I'm recovering codependent. 

08:13 - Temple (Host)
Yes, thank you. 

08:15 - Guest One (Guest)
One of these strange things that I heard. I go to Al-Anon and I heard in these meetings when somebody would come to the podium, especially at the conventions, and say I'm a grateful member of Al-Anon, I'm grateful to be this way. I guess I'm just grateful that I was drawn to my ex-husband because of the behaviors were so familiar. What I grew up with and my father you never knew what side of the bed he woke up on You're always walking around on eggshells and a lot of people from my dad's generation. They weren't diagnosed with bipolar or the things like that. That's what I grew up around, you know. And so my dad and my mom had a very codependent interrelationship. And then when I was dating in college, I met a lot of nice people and, for whatever reason you know, things didn't work out. I'm like no, no matter, there's so many guys on campus, you know so. 

09:11
But then I was drawn to this behavior from my ex-husband because it was familiar. It's what I grew up with, you know. And then he was self-medicating his bipolar I found this out later with the pot and the alcohol, because he had never gotten diagnosed or treated for it when he was growing up. And he still sometimes struggles today, you know, and so I get it and I've been going to Al-Anon for 24 years and unfortunately, because of the way I grew up, I passed on some of this stuff to my son, where, you know. Sometimes if I wasn't in a good mood it's like is mom okay? And I didn't want to do that. So I just try to do better. But I'm really appreciative of the room today and the topic. It's great. Thank you, and I'm complete. 

09:50 - Temple (Host)
Thank you, teresa, and I'm glad you came up and it's good to hear your voice and I'm always glad that you come in to get a little love. I'm not going to feel bad for my codependent ways anymore. You know why? Because majority rules and when I take a look around at the majority of my relationships, the majority of them are reciprocal, majority of them are reciprocal. You know, there are people that I can trust with my emotions. There are people that you know would lift me up if I needed it. There are people that I can be honest about what's going on in my life. I would say I probably have close to 80%, so that's pretty good, and there's 20% that I have to be very particular about what I share, how I share, and that it's more of a vacuum situation that if I were to try to have any demands, it might backfire or set boundaries. They basically go up in smoke and we know that that is a common denominator when you're living with somebody that has active symptoms of bipolar. So it's different, you know, and I think us in this room are people that understand that and have more grace than our neuro normative friends out in the world that are like why would you tolerate that? You know why would you keep showing up? Why are you still calling their doctor? Why are you still showing up to appointments? You know like he doesn't even appreciate it. The only way I can keep going with my bipolar loved one as his advocate is by having that other 80% in my life of reciprocal relationships that I know I can have an argument with somebody. She's probably not just going to hang up on me and never talk to me again. We're probably going to take a minute and find out why there was tension and then re-approach like adult people do that have some emotion regulation. I know that I have some a fair amount of people in my life that are emotionally mature enough to go through something tough with me if we disagree or if we have an argument that we'll be all right. So not every relationship is going to look 100% healthy. As a matter of fact, it's probably an 80-20 split on most relationships. So let me ask you a couple questions. Nobody wants to come up and talk to me today, so I'm going to keep talking. 

12:09
But have you heard of this term, ego boundary? We talk about healthy boundaries, we talk about just boundaries in general, but this is a new boundary word that's come across just recently about ego boundary, and it's a psychoanalytic term that refers to the ego function of distinguishing between the self and the non-self, the self and the non-self. So, basically, one example of an ego boundary problem is that the person who invades your privacy or violates your dignity by making like gratuitous remarks about you people that are misogynist or racist or in some way they are offensive in the way that they speak to you, they're demeaning and aggressive. Okay, so by taking that, it's violating your ego boundary. Let's now refer it back to our loved ones with bipolar. 

13:07
How many of you have ever had your bipolar loved one say something very demeaning about you? That wasn't true, but you took it. We took it because there was an illness in place, there's a symptom in place and at some point you learn to differentiate between a symptom and the person. However, why is it that you, why is it that you, me, all us codependent cuties have these skills to differentiate, have the power to compartmentalize those things Like? That's a superpower that was developed from the beginning. We were groomed to be this way. Are you kind of seeing the story here, where you were born this way and it almost was a destiny that we would end up in relationships where we would have to compartmentalize what was actually true about us and what was a falsehood that was coming out of a person that was not well. 

14:09 - Davina (Co-host)
I mean that was really profound and as much as like I want to believe it was destiny, that I end up with somebody who continually tries to like dismantle my self-worth. It's frustrating to continually like take that kind of garbage treatment from somebody. So I think it's very important for us to recover from said codependency, because that's what it really breaks down to is somebody else's opinion of you matters more than your own, because that's how you've had to survive. If you can just act right, there won't be chaos. And what was it? You can't think clearly when you're in crisis, or you can't be rational when you're in crisis, right, so you just shut it down. You don't have feelings, you don't have needs, because if you don't have those, then you can't get hurt again. 

14:56 - Temple (Host)
Do you feel bad about yourself that you weren't on to this sooner? 

15:01 - Davina (Co-host)
Oh no, I downloaded Codependence Anonymous their guidebook, like four or five years ago when I was with somebody who was an alcoholic, who told me I was codependent. I'm like, no, I'm not. 

15:27 - Temple (Host)
Because I'm not clingy and I'm not needy and I don't make you do things. And now that me offensive. And when I look around this room, I know I think I know everybody in this room I don't see any weak people here. You know what I mean Very strong, very intelligent, highly functioning, accomplished, career driven, educated, driven. You know all the things. Yet codependency relates to a weakness and I don't like that. All right, annabelle. What do you think, annabelle? 

16:00 - Guest Two (Guest)
Yeah. So I have known about codependency for about seven to eight years and every time I hear that word, I remember exactly where I was when I was listening to the audio book by Melissa Beatty, or what's her first name? Codependent no More, I think, is her melody. That's it, yeah, and I just, I'd like I literally can feel, smell the everything. I was filling up my gas tank in Colorado and it was so visceral to me that, oh, this is, this is my life. I am so codependent and I need to learn about this. And so I think that's where my journey of growth really started. 

16:40
And this was before addictions and eating disorder and before all the shit hit the fan. Right, but I knew that I couldn't get him to take the ADHD meds and man did. I want to control it, just I to be in control. And it was such a hard road. He's sober now, but, man, when he was drinking, man, you wanted to control it. I was always like on the detective hunt to find some bottles or marijuana. Like you know, just I didn't want that to be me and it's taken so much work and therapy and reminders, but now, if I were to find something, I would just say, well what's really going on. I finally learned that it's not about me, that's about him and I can't control him. And I mean, you guys all know you can't control someone with bipolar, why try? It's going to change in two minutes how they feel, you know. 

17:31 - Temple (Host)
Let me ask a question relating to that. Where's the differentiator there for you that you had to find between bipolar and addiction and related to codependency? 

17:42 - Guest Two (Guest)
I didn't know he had bipolar when he was going through his addictions, and so for me it was very separate. It was. This is what we're dealing with right now. I know he doesn't want to be drinking he says that but he is an addict and so how do we help them? I can't really give you like how I I deal with both of them the same. Now, the other day we went to Costco and he was really grumpy and I was like I'm not going to argue with bipolar, and then he apologized. 

18:10
I think I told you guys that story, but I learned not to argue with an addict too and that I can't control it. And I think the biggest thing for me was realizing it's a him thing and so when it comes to bipolar, he needs help, where with the addictions, I felt like that was more of a choice. That's how I felt it back in the day All the time. It's always been bipolar, right and so, but right, but he did, you know, choose to get sober, and now he's just addicted to video games. But I'd rather have him be sober and addicted to video games than be drunk and a jerk. So, yeah, so you kind of pick and choose, but, man, this subject is so hard. 

18:46
Like I grew up in a, in a household where it was survival davina, like your emotions don't count. They still don't count. I once told my mom, mom, do you remember when I was suicidal in middle school? And she's like no, you weren't. And I was like Sounds good, we're still there, are we like? And so I've just learned to let go a lot and control what I can control and find that line of what I can't control. I hope that helps. 

19:11 - Temple (Host)
Oh no, that's. That's really helpful and I'm really glad you shared that. Annabelle, especially the part where it comes to you know his choices, my choices. I go through that a lot what are his choices, what are my choices? But I always have to go to the next step of that. Where is he in control of his choices? 

19:29 - Guest Two (Guest)
Right. 

19:30 - Temple (Host)
And I think that helps me define the difference between addiction and bipolar and maybe I'm completely wrong. You know it's okay for me to be wrong about this, but no, I like that are in. They need support. The difference for me is that and I do have an education on addiction, my degrees in addictions, and I have very conflicting opinions about addiction. Compared to what's in the books and compared to what people talk about in AA, it's addressed as a disease often, and that part I can support. 

20:09
What comes first, the chicken or the egg Behind every addiction, is an illness. There is a mental illness. People are born addicted to drugs. Okay, maybe they have the tendency from your lineage and there's people that will want to say it's in your DNA. If your grandpa was an addict and your dad was an addict, then you're probably going to be an addict. Okay, but the foundation of your growth, your emotional maturity, is what's going to dictate that there was already something happening before we started self-medicating. Now, why is there a difference? 

20:49
I self-medicated, I smoked weed cigarettes, drank alcohol as a teenager and all through my 20s and 30s. Why is it that I was able to let go of those things without going to rehab and without having to go to meetings. I don't know, maybe because I had a different route, maybe my DNA just doesn't have the tendency towards addiction, but I felt like I was able to make other, harder choices around substance abuse and doing the work that it would take. Rather than going to AA, I went to church and I went to bookstores and I went to healers groups and I went to women's support groups and I went to therapy and I did all those things and I was able to harm, reduce myself away from the abusive levels of usage of things in my life. Now some people can't do it that way. They have to go through rehab and they have to have, you know, things removed from them completely and they can't ever touch it again or it's going to relapse. So I think there is a choice inside addiction on the method of recovery and the method of your lifestyle. 

22:01
With bipolar it's very different, right, because you watch the person disappear. It's not like they've picked up a meth pipe and smoked it and then you watch them disappear. It's not like they've picked up a meth pipe and smoked it and then you watch them disappear. They literally disappear in front of your eyes, without any drugs or alcohol. Of course, drugs and alcohol make it a million times worse. But there are plenty of people with bipolar that are sober and they still have the same symptoms of aggressive mania and grandiosity and ego boundary bursting and all of those abusive features that come along with mania and with severe depression. 

22:42
So for me, annabelle I had to kind of just put that in perspective that this person is literally having a mind-altering experience organically inside of them, right in front of me, and that they didn't choose it. In the same way that I didn't choose to be codependent, my parent groomed me to be that and it developed. Now were there some neurological repercussions from that? Sure, absolutely Anxiety, some depression, some self-medicating. All those things happened. 

23:17
But I did have some choices because I wasn't neurologically compromised to the extreme where my brain would go into psychosis and mania. 

23:28
So I have a little grace there that I just could act like a shithead and my boyfriends would be like, oh my God, she's crazy. But I wasn't really crazy, it was just the result of my abusive upbringing. But the more counseling, the more healing, the more awareness that I have of where it came from, the less effect it had on me and the less I dumped it on other people. So that's the part that I can hold accountable to my loved ones and to my friends and even to my bipolar loved one is that you're accountable for your healing part. You're accountable for your counseling and for talking about the things that groomed you to have the wounds that you have. So if you're doing those things and you're talking and you're working towards your healing, I can't stay mad when I watch your brain literally transform in front of me, like the Hulk turning green. It's kind of a weird phenomenon, but we've all seen it. Sonia, what do you think about that? 

24:28 - Guest Three (Guest)
Yeah, it was great to witness my husband realize that too, like our last meeting with the psychiatrist. He talked about basically that, because he asked Samuel, how's it going with the kids and everybody being home? And he was like it's been hard but it's good. You know, my, my family left felt unsafe and them coming back was contingent on having a treatment plan and me, like, taking care of this. So it was kind of it's kind of good to have him realize that and I just pray that he keeps on realizing that that's what's needed as we go through like recovery and trying to recover and continue to put all the pieces together. 

25:06
But I wanted to just speak on something really quick, because I'm able to trace back my codependency with my parents. Right, it's, it's pretty blatant. Once I got curious about it I was like, oh, there it is, it's, it's right there. And yeah, melody Beatty was huge and my healing with that as well. And then, of course, I sent the books to my mom because I was like, dang, my mom's got some codependency too, surprise, surprise. Like where did I learn it from? You know, my parents. 

25:31
And then I started to think about what my parents went through and I was like, dang. They definitely got some codependency going on too. And I started to think about my grandparents and what they've been through and I'm like man, are we all just codependent cuties here? Like, really like, how do we walk through this life and not be codependent in one way or another? I can glance back into my ancestral heritage and be like, oh yeah, I could see how we're all dealing with this codependency and the trauma that we've been through. And then it gets passed on right, they talk about generational trauma and all of that. 

26:01
So I'm looking at my children and my future and like how, of course they probably will grow up with some degree of codependency, but how can we try to just maybe minimize some of that? Like moving forward, what do we do? I learned at one point in my life like nonviolent communication where basically like for parents and basically like acknowledging how your kids are feeling and then allowing for that range of emotion and just like holding space Like I've always tried to be like what you're feeling is allowed. You know what I mean Like there's space for those feelings. And I just wanted to ask you like is that one of the ways that we help to heal this? You know? 

26:42 - Temple (Host)
that is a beautiful question that you're thinking about your kids. My mom is in her seventies and when we would go like to a public place and there would be a kid screaming, she would be like I would be whipping that kid autistic and we would take her to Walmart and she would literally scream her head off and not like she was being murdered and nothing was happening to her, and everybody would look at us like what are you doing to that child or why can't you know? And I think that what you're saying is we do have to have grace for people to feel safe enough to feel whatever it is they're feeling, and then we also have to teach discernment for emotional growth, because we do want to be able to feel our feelings. But it's also not healthy just to throw them out in the middle of anybody's street because you don't know who's there. If the people around them, if they go to college and they're just like here's all my emotions, and they're surrounded by kids that do not know how to hold space or have the emotional maturity to hold them up in that moment, then they're going to be in for quite the shit show of roller coasters of emotions up and down, up and down. Up and down not knowing how to self-soothe, not knowing how to talk to people that are emotionally safe for them being able to have the judgment good judgment of that. So there's a lot more layers to it than just allowing and holding space for your child to express themselves. They also need to learn where are the safe places to express themselves, and sometimes not even your parent is the safest place, because what they're going through might be a trigger for you and you might not even be able to appropriately respond. So it's okay for you to even be vulnerable enough to say you know what. I'm not going to have every answer for you, but I want you to feel safe. So maybe we'll start with journaling what you're feeling and then you let me know if we can both look at it together or how much you want to share with me. But children need to learn to have discernment on how to express their emotions, what people are safe to receive it, and do they know how to define what they're going through? 

29:10
The checklist we go through with bipolar have you eaten, have you slept? Are you exhausted? What is the checklist of the biological, physiological things that happen? Did you have an argument with your boyfriend and now you feel defeated. You know like what's going on. Is it an overreaction? Because there are other factors. That's what we have to do with our bipolar loved ones is oh, they're having breakthrough symptoms. Okay, well, why Did something else happen? Did something happen at work? Did you have a conversation with one of your family members that triggered you? What are your triggers? What are your prodromes? 

29:49
What you can do is like what Annabelle said and what Sonia just said is trace back, break out the family map and start tracing back. But we can go all the way back to literally the creation of life. The very first words you know honor your mother and father. How many people have been in really implanted with that into their life as a belief system to honor your parents? But the parents were not healthy and the actions they were doing were damaging. And yet the society you were in, the religion you were in, the culture you were in, was telling you that you better honor them, no matter what. And maybe even that parent in my husband's case, that parent used that as a tool of abuse because it doesn't matter what I do to you, you still respect me, and that is very emotionally damaging long-term for a little child. You cannot hold honor and space for somebody that is abusing you. That is mindfuck 101, okay, you have to trace it back to where were you insisted to act right and treat right and love somebody in spite of their bad behavior? And once you identify that, then you go to the next identifier as to what was wrong with that person. Did they have a mental illness? Were they living with addiction? Did that person also have a history of abuse from their parents? Once you start putting all the pieces together, then you can educate yourself as to why somebody who's living with addiction wasn't a good parent all the time, but could be a good parent some of the time. It could be very loving and very affectionate and sometimes even make you feel like you are the most important thing in the entire world. And then, when they were in their addiction, they were abusive and absent and couldn't meet your emotional needs. So you do get split on what you can expect to receive from your loved ones and your expectation of consistency also gets greatly compromised. So here we are, fast forward in love with somebody that has extreme highs and lows emotionally, psychologically, physiologically and we're the ones that know how to live there. 

32:15
But you also need to differentiate on how much is healthy and at what point. Is it so unhealthy that you have to separate yourself from the result? And this is my struggle, even today. I don't mean like up to today, I mean like today, this moment. How do I make a healthy boundary choice when I know my loved one could potentially be compromised if I don't support them in a certain way, if I make them deal with something that I don't think is healthy for them, but if they don't deal with it, it could result in a psychotic break, and that psychotic break could result in a relapse of his mental capacity, and a relapse of mental capacity at this level could be detrimental to his health. 

33:04
How do I figure that out? I can't. I'm not smart enough. So what I can do is think about what I can live with. What can Temple live with herself to do? I may not always have the strongest ego boundary up, because the consequence of what's going to happen is too big for me to swallow, maybe today or maybe in the future. So maybe sometimes I compromise I'm a compromising co-defendant cutie today, because the tomorrow problem could look way worse than the today problem. Does that help you at all, sonia, about how we have to have some grace about how we got here. If you trace your roots and you understand that this is where we are now, you're not going to get it right every day, You're absolutely not. And the consequences of what can happen those are real Suicidality, brain function. How many hard boundaries can you hold around those? You know it's tough. Keep talking to each other and make those baby steps that say this is my choice, this is their choice. Today I'm choosing to not fight this battle and it's okay. All right, davina, what do you think? 

34:14 - Davina (Co-host)
I think you approached this with a level of grace and compassion that I guess I should have expected, because that's just how you roll. But it was a very gentle way to explain, I think, what most of us already know that we do too much. But here's why, and sometimes that's okay. But that's why boundaries are so vital to make clear for yourself and your loved one, because you cannot be constantly putting out fires or jumping in pools without floaties or things like that that put you in danger, because at some point you do deserve to not be that rescuer. You deserve to save some of that for you. Whether I'm telling you guys that or myself is up for debate, you know what. 

34:54 - Temple (Host)
I'm glad you said that, because there's one more thing I want to say in relation to that and that's about transparency. One of the biggest obstacles that I've found being a peer support coach through this topic of bipolar is the reluctancy to share their diagnosis, and to me I have seen that it is more detrimental to hold that back, to hide it, than it has been to share it. I mean, for my husband and I it was kind of like there was no way I did anyway, because bipolar made it so blatantly obvious. But there are a lot of people that my husband doesn't want people to know that he has bipolar, especially when it comes to he wants to create a job, do some marketing. He doesn't want people to know. 

35:39
To me the transparency is empowering because, just like somebody with any other chronic illness you have to actually like when you go to a certain job, people with like Hashimoto's or a chronic fatigue syndrome. They sign up for FMLA and their company knows that. Their boss knows that they sign up for FMLA and it's not very hard to put those two things together that, oh, they're signing up for that because they're going to need extra days off throughout the year besides their regular PTO. So they have something that could be a disability, but they're not supposed to not hire or discriminate because of a disability. But here's the thing I would rather tell somebody yeah, I do have something that I have a diagnosis of. 

36:26
It can be a struggle at times. I do everything in my power to manage it, but there are going to be days that it's going to be more difficult and I might have to take an extra day off or an extra two days off or plan things in advance if I know that I's going to be more difficult and I might have to take an extra day off or an extra two days off or, you know, plan things in advance if I know that I'm going to be triggered by it. Derek, what do you think about the transparency with bipolar? 

36:49 - Guest Four (Guest)
For myself it's very important. In fact, I used to go to this well, I still go to the meeting, but it's online now but it used to be in the basement of a hospital that had a psychiatric ward or has a psychiatric ward, and the part I used to really enjoy is that at that meeting, probably once or twice a year, the psychiatric nurses would come down and it was just a wonderful opportunity to share my experience, strength and hope in and around the diagnosis of bipolar. So that part is very meaningful to me. I feel that's where we end up with. 

37:36
A lot of alcoholics that end up suicidal or committing suicide is as a result of not addressing the mental illness side. Because if I don't control that mental illness side, my sobriety is at risk, my way of life is at risk, and it's not to say that I don't get the highs and lows of the bipolar. That happens throughout my year. But the medication is I call the 15% foundational requirement for me to have in order to keep my bipolar in a manageable state. 

38:11
But speaking to the codependent part, because along my journey of being an alcoholic was identifying that I have codependent tendencies, and what I've tried to summarize for myself is, once I started that, I'm feeling I'm in the drama triangle, that I'm being a persecutor within that relationship, or I'm looking at being rescued from that within that relationship, or a victim. That's when my codependency is occurring and it's important for me to realize okay, why am I acting like this? Like, for instance, it's okay for me to go and pick up my kid that's 45 minutes away and bring them here. It's okay when I'm not acting in a codependent way, when I'm wanting to do that. It's once I'm forced into a situation where they have no other way and all of a sudden now I'm compromising myself. That's when I'm now in that codependent triangle and I'm becoming a rescuer to my kid. 

39:18 - Temple (Host)
So, using that as an example, oh, thank you so much, Derek, for coming up anyway and just being here with us. I really appreciate your transparency and your honesty about that and I like what you said about the triangle of the rescuer, the persecutor, the victim, and it is easy to get caught up in that emotional cycle of having to pick one of those. But what I was going to ask you if you could help reflect in these last couple of minutes here do you have symptoms of codependency yourself within your relationship? 

39:54 - Guest Four (Guest)
I mean, we're talking about it from the side of the spouse, where we're trying to please bipolar, I have a tendency to go down the path of wanting to be rescued, or trying to, I guess, be that victim and my wife ends up solving problems that I think in a normal relationship I would step up to the plate. But as a result of who I am and what I am, I have a tendency to fall into one of those three areas and that's where I have to try to keep myself out of the triangle and do my part to not get caught up in that. 

40:31 - Temple (Host)
So do you and your wife recognize that when the two of you are kind of trading places between codependency, how do you help each other? 

40:40 - Guest Four (Guest)
Well, we were doing very well when we were both going to Recovering Couples Anonymous and we learned a lot of good tools relationship-wise from that. But we've kind of stopped going after going for six years and we've gone away from using some of those tools on a regular basis and regressed back into some of each other's natural tendencies due to each having rings that had some trauma, I guess you could say, attached to it. 

41:13 - Temple (Host)
Oh, yeah, gosh, you know what. That just breaks my heart. I don't think we are really acknowledging the level of how we cope and how we are interdependent, codependent. That's why I keep bringing up grace, because we have to be more gentle on ourselves and each other, because everybody's in recovery. I just want us to keep loving each other and remembering what you can control and what is not in your control. You fill in that gap of not feeling in control. You fill that in with the things that you can control, like friends that feel safe to you, your church that inspires you, the things that you read, the things that you sing, your animals. What are the things that inspires you? The things that you read, the things that you sing, your animals, what are the things that keep you feeling the reciprocation of love? That is how you continue the journey of recovery. It's life recovery, folks, all of us. 

42:11
Final words here as we close out the recovery of codependency, which I'm going to call it nurturing adjacent, I don't like codependent. But for me to recover from my extreme nurturing habits, not only do I have to open up my family map and follow the roots, and then I have to figure out what were the illnesses that they were living with, were they addictions or mental illnesses or physical illnesses. But also I have to heal from my own addictions, chronic pain and illnesses currently. So you're not going to be the perfect parent, because we all have illnesses. We all have things that we're working on cleaning up. So that's why I wanted to go back to the transparency part, to be able to be as honest with your kids as you can, to be able to say look, I'm not the perfect person. I want you to respect me as your parent. I'm not going to always have the right answer and I'm definitely not always going to have the most appropriate reaction. Sometimes I'm going to have an inappropriate reaction, but I'm going to try really hard to keep my eye on that and together we can do this. 

43:24
If you're feeling afraid of me or you're feeling disappointed or you're feeling unheard, let's find a way to talk about that. Whether you have to write me a note or an email or a text message or a Marco Polo, but as long as we keep talking, we're always going to keep healing. I never want you to be afraid to talk to me. To wrap that up, you codependent cuties, I absolutely love you for who you are. I never want anybody to feel bad that you are the nurturing rescuer type. I mean, how can we groom people 12 years of college and call them doctors and then say you're not going to be codependent? Of course you want to heal people. 

44:04
Your doctors, your nurses, your counselors, energy healers, anything in a position of service comes from a place of wanting to heal other people in service, and that is supposed to be a virtue. There you go. I just fixed it. We're not codependent, we're virtuous. However, there are times when I feel like I'm getting the short end of the stick. I hope that we all have people that we can talk to on days like today where I feel like I just can't catch a break. No matter what I put into the pot, there's a hole in the bottom of it. There's going to be those days, so love yourself through it.