Codependency

The term grew out of work with the partners and families of people with addiction, where one person's life organized entirely around someone else's. The writer Melody Beattie helped take it mainstream with the idea that you can lose yourself inside the project of looking after another person. The label has widened since, and it gets overused, so hold it loosely. It describes a pattern, not a diagnosis.

It often grows in a home where a child became the steady one, tuned to a parent's needs because someone had to be. Care became the way to earn a place. As an adult, that can look like feeling most useful when someone is struggling, finding it hard to rest while another person is upset, and quietly keeping score of all the looking-after you do.

The cost is a self that only shows up in service of someone else. Your own wants get vague because they were never the point. Noticing where you end and another person begins is slow work, and it is the work that gives you back to yourself.