My nervous system feels safe when someone is choosing me—even if that someone, especially if that someone, is using me as a mirror.
This is the difficult part in my experience of breaking free from my past as an enmeshed, codependent daughter. Because I learned to get connection by being my mother’s sounding board, and by filling the gaps and the holes emotionally that I intuited were missing.
The role reversal that made me invisible.
The dynamic was a role reversal. And this is the reason—amongst other factors—for why I have felt so invisible in my life. As a child, very young, I learned to be a mirror for other people. And I learned that that is how I could gain connection and love—things that I really, really needed.
But in the process, I didn’t ever learn that there was a place for me to be seen and mirrored. And so I silenced myself and I shut myself down. I existed in the back of my mind. I never felt that I had the space to really learn about myself, or that that was even something that I should be doing.
The pattern repeats in adulthood.
Now, after realizing the truth of this pattern in really painful ways in my adult years—realizing that I was drawn to people who wanted a mirror, drawn to them because that was familiar for me. Someone taking up a lot of emotional space. And they were drawn to me because I was like, “Hey, I’ll be that mirror for you. I’ll be that person for you. Just choose me. As long as you choose me, I’ll feel special. I’ll feel my childhood role. And you can get your needs met of having this unconditional mirror.”
But the cracks begin to show. Or they did for me. Because that’s not actually an agreement that I wanted. It was an unconscious agreement. And the me who longed and yearned to be seen and to express in the world eventually got so bitter and resentful of this dynamic that I had been living in since I was a child.
The career that mirrored the wound.
After really seeing that pattern and seeing the destruction it caused in my life—to constantly be playing the supporting character—that even took me into a career which just mimicked the same wound of, “Here I am, I’ll be your mirror. I’ll be the supporting character.”
But the genuine me, the real me—who has longed to take center stage in her life—I’m finally giving her a chance. But inevitably, it’s terrifying.
The nervous system’s resistance.
My nervous system is so attuned to this relational dynamic that to put myself at the center stage of my own life genuinely feels threatening. And I can feel myself scanning for, “Oh my gosh, is the connection still there? Is the umbilical cord still there? Am I safe?” And then I feel the spiral, the emotional spiral come on. The part of me that looks for that approval and that connection in order to know, “Okay, I’m okay. I’m okay.”
So for me right now, when those spirals come up, I’m having to assure myself that I am safe. It feels emotionally like life or death. And I do crave deep resonance—a really loving type of relationship. But I know that it needs to be forged from a different blueprint than the one that I have stored inside of me, which is built upon the agreement of self-erasure. Of Helena. And her fullness doesn’t get to exist here because she is a supporting character.
The choice to heal.
So anyways, this is the behind the scenes of my disentangling myself from years of codependency. Supporting role, eldest daughter, people pleasing, whatever. It doesn’t matter what you wanna call it. It feels very, very, very challenging. And yet, I am choosing it.
