the Three Gifts We All Receive

I've sat in rooms where codependency is the frame for everything. Somebody names a pattern, everybody nods, and the assignment is to admit it.

Here's the frame, in case you've been spared it: codependent people organize their lives around other people. They caretake. They manage. They read the room and adjust. Their sense of worth runs on being needed. That pattern is the thing to name, admit, and recover from.

Every time I encounter the codependency framework my system swears and refuses to engage. Not because it's wrong about how I walk through the world. It's absurdly accurate.

My system balks because the framework defines the behavior as wrong before anybody asks what it was for. In that gap, between the defining and the asking, the behavior turns into a defect I'm supposed to confess.

I'm not confessing. I built that behavior as a kid to stay attached to the people keeping me alive.

In the rooms I sat in, nobody asked who built it. The behavior showed up fully grown and inconvenient, and admitting it was the assignment. I'd rather start with the kid holding the tools.

So I start way earlier. I start with the three gifts we come into the world with.

The first gift is an imperative to survive. We want to see tomorrow. As children, we will do everything within our capacity and power to stay alive.

The survival imperative activates our second gift, the impulse to connect. We arrive with an innate 'knowing' that proximity to our caregivers is required to stay alive. Over time, we notice and adjust our behavior in hopes we might get our needs met.

The impulse to connect hands us our third gift, the instinct to tell stories. Watching alone doesn't tell us what to do next. We need the pattern behind what we watched, so we build one. Then we write rules so we know what to do. The rules, unconscious and blunt, become the tattooed stories we run to survive.

These three gifts working together kept us alive as children.

That imperative to survive said, "We want to be here tomorrow!"

Our little brains then went, "To do that, I need somebody to take care of me."

We looked around at the people in our world, at how they responded when we did this and how they responded when we did that. We made decisions about what actually worked. What got us the attention we wanted, or what got us attention, whether it was the kind we wanted or not. People knew we were there. We were going to stay alive.

With that information, we told ourselves stories. Stories about who we were and who we had to be to survive.

Most of the stories aren't conscious. The seeds of most of them are sown without words before we even have language. They're unconsciously written stories we put words to later. The words become things like:

• If I want my mom to love me, I have to make sure I'm cleaning the kitchen exactly this way.

• If I want my friends to think I'm okay, to think of me as someone they want to be around, I have to stop asking them all these "why" questions I have going on in my head.

• If I want that girl to like me, that guy to like me, then I have to stop being this derpy person that I feel like on the outside.

They kept us alive then.

And.

Today we're still following rules we wrote decades ago for rooms we no longer live in. Those rules have us beating ourselves up because the kitchen doesn't meet mom's expectations, contorting ourselves when bending would do, and rejecting our derpiness.

As people who live in community, we need those old rules sometimes, just not as often as we reach for them.

Understanding where the stories come from creates room for grace so we can say to ourselves,

Oh, of course I did that. I couldn't see another way.

Understanding what those stories were for creates space for choice so we can say to ourselves,

I don't want to keep doing that because it's not working for me right now, so I need to find another way.

Recognition of how long those patterns have been in play allows us to say to ourselves,

I've been practicing that behavior for a long time, it's going to take time to shift to a new way of being.

By grounding ourselves in what these three beautiful, magical gifts built for us, we acknowledge and honor the younger selves who did the building.

A defect is something you confess. A story is something you adjust. That's what the third gift buys us.

That kid was working with what they had. They got us here.

So when I catch myself running an old story, I'm trying to say thank you before I say no. Thank you for the instinct. We're going to try it another way this time.

Some days that takes. Some days it doesn't and I run the old story anyway. Both of those are the work.