You are about to watch an interview that I granted to the Polish clinical psychologist Darya Zhukovska. It is a fascinating interview, not because I'm in it, also because I'm in it, but because it deals with aspects and facets of codependency which are rarely tackled.
Co-dependency is also known in clinical psychology as dependent personality disorder.
I thought it would help you to understand the interview if I were to provide you with an introduction in bullet point style. So here goes.
Both narcissism and codependency involve a fantasy defense. Within the fantasy, the codependent has a dual role as both a parent, a parental figure, usually a maternal figure, a substitute mother, and a child. So she plays both roles. And this reflects her internal psychological structure.
Because within the codependent, there's a punitive inner parent and a wounded inner child. They cohabit, they share the internal space of the codependent.
The problem is that the co-dependent's inner parent feels betrayed when the co-dependent falls in love or develops a friendship or becomes reliant on someone or has intimacy.
The inner parent feels abandoned, neglected, shunted aside and generally stabbed in the back.
The inner parent then pushes the codependent to punish her newfound partner as a kind of loyalty test to placate the implacable inner parent.
The codependent obliges and complies, and she becomes, at least temporarily, somewhat abusive, but then, riven by guilt and shame, the codependent then punishes herself as well for having transgressed against her partner.
And this is of course a borderline dynamic.
This makes it very difficult to tell borderlines and codependence apart. Very often people with dependent personality disorder are misdiagnosed as borderline.
Co-dependence and their intimate partners engage in co-regulation, co-regulation, an external form of regulation. They merge, infuse, they create a symbiotic relationship.
Within this symbiotic relationship, they offer each other regulatory functions. The intimate partner of the co-dependent regulates her emotions, her moods, some of her cognitions and emotions, exactly as the intimate partner of the borderline does.
Again, in this sense, the codependent is indistinguishable from the borderline. The codependent is indistinguishable from the borderline.
The codependent, exactly like the narcissist and the borderline, suffers from object inconstancy, separation insecurity, also known as abandonment anxiety, and catastrophizing.
She anticipates rejection, hurt, humiliation, abandonment, neglect, and reacts to her own imagination as if it had already happened.
The codependent seeks to attach to a secure base. She seeks to transform her intimate partner into a secure base and she does this using three strategies
People pleasing, catering to the needs of the intimate partner on a regular basis.
Control from the bottom, a form of emotional blackmail. I can't live without you, I'm helpless without you, you owe me, I sacrifice things for you, etc.
So in her interactions with the external object, the codependent rules and controls the external object, but from the bottom, from a position of helplessness, from a position of neediness and clinginess.
And finally, the third technique is aggression directed at an internal object that represents the external object.
By doing so, the codependent is able to avoid aggressing against the intimate partner.
And so these are the techniques she uses.
I say she, because until recently the majority of people with codependency were women. Today we know that many men are codependent as well.
The codependent outsources her ego functions. For example, reality testing. She converts her intimate partner into an externalized ego.
And so for example, when it comes to reality testing, she sees reality, she interacts with reality, she appraises reality, she evaluates reality only through the eyes of the intimate partner.
She resorts to the intimate partner and asks him, for example, is this real? Is this true? Is this a fact? Should I believe that? Should I trust him? Should I trust someone?
So he becomes her filter, her firewall, her interface with reality.
And that's one example of one ego function.
The codependent feels alive only when she is in a relationship. She maintains a vicarious life. She lives through the existence and the agency of her intimate partner.
In solitude, she finds her constricted life intolerable. She loves herself by proxy through the gaze and agency of her intimate partner.
You can see already the enormous similarities, behavioral similarities, and psychodynamic similarities between borderline personality disorder and dependent personality disorder, which is one of the reasons that both diagnoses are now being contested, and that a third approach would be to consider both of them the outcomes of complex trauma, adverse childhood experiences.
But this is for another interview.
These are the topics I'm going to discuss now with Darya Jukovska. Enjoy.
So hello everyone and hello professor because today our guest is a professor Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. Hello.
Yes, hello. Thank you for having me again.
Thank you for agreeing and thank you for your time. Sam.
You're very patient woman and very courageous to have me so many times.
Am I? Am I?
Yes, I think I'm courageous.
I have a couple of questions about dependent personality because I can tell that, especially on a Polish background and a Polish, you know, community, we have a lot of confusing things around this personality and I would like to elaborate about that with you because who can explain us better than you about dependent personality and other personalities.
Keep going. I like it.
I know.
So the first question is, Sam, where is the boundary to have needs and to be needy? Where is the healthy boundary?
Well, the co-dependent regulates her internal environment through the partner. This is known as external regulation.
External regulation means that the emotions of the codependent, the moods of the co-dependent, and sometimes the thoughts, the thinking, the cognitions of the codependent, depend critically on input from the intimate partner.
And this is a pathology. Our internal world should not be determined by outside people, by external people.
The co-dependent seeks to merge or to fuse or to become one, to create a symbiosis with the intimate partner.
Because that way she can outsource what we call ego functions to the intimate partner. The intimate partner becomes her ego. The intimate partner becomes a substitute for herself.
So it's as if she deactivates herself. She disables her ego.
And from that moment on, the intimate partner becomes her ego, becomes herself.
But to accomplish this, she needs to grant the intimate partner total access to her mind, to her emotions, to her moods, and so on and she needs to give the intimate partner total power over her.
So it's a position of complete submissiveness, utter complete domination by the intimate partner.
Even when the intimate partner is healthy, not an abuser, even then the co-dependent forces her intimate partner to take over, to possess her, to own her.
So this is the first thing that separates having needs, which is legitimate, from being needy or being clinging this external regulation.
The outsourcing of ego functions means that the intimate partner fulfills all the psychological processes that normally happen internally in healthy people.
So for example, reality testing. Reality testing is an ego function.
Our ability to perceive reality appropriately, to evaluate it correctly, and to act in reality and on reality in a way that yields outcomes and results beneficial to us, this is known as self-efficacy, these are known together as reality testing.
And the codependent, her reality testing is through the partner.
So the co-dependent views reality, evaluates reality, and acts in reality through the partner.
The codependent is likely to ask the partner, is it true? Is this real? Do you think I should believe this? Do you think I should trust him?
So the judgment of the partner substitutes for the judgment of the codependent.
That's an example of outsourcing of ego functions.
The codependent lives through the partner. She has a kind of vicarious life. Her life is through the partner.
Only when she is with someone, she feels alive. When the codependent is alone, when the codependent is single, she feels dead.
That's why she's depressed. She's dysfunctional.
And so the co-dependent cannot stand being alone. She cannot stand solitude. And she lives her life through the agency of the intimate partner.
And also she loves herself through the agency of the intimate partner and also she loves herself through the partner's eyes she loves herself through the partner's gaze she sees herself in the partner's eyes in the partner's gaze and she falls in love with herself through his gaze through his eyes.
To summarize this very long answer, the codependent is, as the name implies, dependent.
Whereas a healthy person is not dependent. A healthy person is independent. A healthy person regulates his or her internal environment alone. A healthy person is capable of being in solitude, being solitary without any problem. A healthy person judges reality by himself or herself.
Thedependent cannot do any of these things.
She is like an extension of the intimate partner. She is a reflection of the intimate partner. She suspends her existence and her life and her autonomy, personal autonomy, and her independence and her agency. She suspends all this.
The minute she is with someone, she is a reflection. She is a shadow. She is no longer fully functional as a human being.
Okay.
Thank you for this answer. Even if it's long. We need it, definitely.
My second question is, what does the internal dialogue of a dependent person look like? How does she see herself?
You already answered that right through the guise of the partner but how does the internal dialogue look like?
That's a very interesting question actually.
First of all we must make a distinction, codependent is not a clinical term. Yes.
It's a popular term. It's like psychopath or sociopath. These are not clinical terms. And of course, empath, the nonsensical empath.
But this is not a clinical term.
The clinical term is someone with dependent personality disorder, which is a personality disorder in the diagnostic and statistical manual. And there is an equivalent in the ICD 11.
So someone with dependent personality disorder, it's not a question of being dependent on someone to do something for you. It's not a question of being dependent on someone to have fun or to have money or to travel around the world or to make children together or it's not about fun. It's not about anything external.
The dependency is internal, not external.
And so within the co-dependent, there is a war, there is a conflict going on.
Between a parent and a child, the codependent exactly like the narcissists and exactly like the borderline, grows up usually within dysfunctional families, where there's a lot of abuse, a lot of trauma, a lot of instrumentalization, parentification.
The parents don't know how to raise the child appropriately, or the mother is what we call a dead mother, metaphorically, a mother who is emotionally absent, who is depressive, who is selfish, and so on so forth.
The child is not getting what the child needs. He is not getting the mother's needs. He is not getting the mother's gaze. He is not getting the mother's presence, emotional involvement, compassion, caring, unconditional love. He's not getting a newness, the child.
So what the child does to compensate, the child creates an internal parent, a parent inside. There's a compensation for the fact that there is no functioning external parent.
So the child begins to parent itself.
But you cannot be your own parent if you are not also a child.
So the minute you have an internal parent, you also have an internal child.
And then the parent part, parents, the child part. The parent part becomes the parent of the child part.
And then within the co-dependent, there are these two parts, the child part and the parent part.
The parent part inside the codependent is a bad object. It's a punitive parent. It's a parent that is always criticizing, always demeaning, always humiliating, always shaming, always doubting, and so on. The parental part in the codependent reflects the real parents.
The child doesn't know any other form of parents. The child knows only the parents that it has. So it internalizes these parents as they are. These are bad parents.
So he has a bad parental part. And this bad parental part is obstructive, is sabotaging the child, hates the child.
The child part inside the codependent is trying to please the parent part inside the codependent. The child part in the codependent is trying to avoid the punishment of the parent part.
Parent, yeah.
So there is a parent part and a child part.
The parent part is a very bad parent, and the child part is trying to walk on eggshells, trying to behave in a way that will not trigger the parent part to be punitive to, and so on.
So what happens is that this dual role of parent and child, this is the only relationship that the codependent knows. This is her only experience of a relationship, and it is an internal experience, not external.
The only relationship the codependent is aware of, the only relationship he's ever experienced was inside herself, between the parent part, which is a bad, threatening, hateful parent, and the child part, which is terrified, intimidated, frightened, people-pleasing, trying to avoid conflict.
And this is the only relationship that codependent knows.
So when she comes across an intimate partner, she's trying to replicate the only relationship she knows.
She is trying to convert the intimate partner into a parent figure, and she is trying to become a child. She's trying to recreate the internal process.
This is known in psychoanalysis as identification. Identification process.
So the intimate partner is forced to become the co-dependence mother or father. And the co-dependent becomes more and more regressive, more and more childlike.
And this is why she is dependent because she becomes childlike. And she pushes the intimate partner to become a mother or a father.
And not only a mother or a father, but a mother or a father who is in control, mother or father who are limiting her and criticizing her and controlling her.
So this is the only type of relationship she's aware of. This is her internal dialogue.
There is another complication here.
When the codependent falls in love with someone, the parent part of the codependent is very unhappy.
When the codependent finds an intimate partner, the parent part of the codependent feels betrayed, feels abandoned.
It's like the parent part says, you used to love me. Now you love someone else. You are betraying me. You are cheating on me. You should love only me.
So the child part in the codependent is trying to compensate the parent part. When she falls in love, when she has a relationship, intimate relationship, and so on so forth, she immediately tries to compensate the parental part inside her.
Because the parental part becomes very angry and very frustrated that she gave up on the parental part and found someone else. That she is now having another parent, an outside parent.
There is a competition between the parent part of the codependent and the intimate partner, who is now the new parent. There is a conflict between them.
So the co-dependent tries to prove to the parental part that she did not betray. She did not abandon the parental part. She's committed to the relationship with the parental part.
And she does this by punishing the intimate partner. She becomes aggressive and punitive towards the intimate partner.
She says, you see, I haven't abandoned you. My internal parent, my internal father, my internal mother, I haven't abandoned you here. I'm punishing my partner. I'm rejecting him.
So the typical codependent relationship resembles very much a relationship with the borderline, but for different reasons.
The borderline approaches and avoids. The borderline says, I hate you, don't leave me.
The codependent also approaches and avoids, but not for the same reason like the borderline.
The codependence approaches and avoids because the internal parent in the codependent wants to sabotage the external relationship.
There is a competition between the internal pair and the intimate partner, the new parent.
With the borderline, the reason the borderline approaches and avoids is because of engulfment anxiety. The borderline is afraid that the partner will take over, consume her, digest her.
So she feels suffocated. She feels like she's dying. Too much intimacy. Too much intimacy. And she runs away.
So from the outside, it looks identical approach avoidance. And many, many diagnosticians make the mistake. They misdiagnose codependency as borderline. Or they misdiagnose borderline as codependence.
But the internal dynamic is completely different.
I do agree I can see this during the session with clients and this inner dialogue of a dependent person.
It's so difficult. I can tell how much energy they're losing to cope with this, especially when the conflict is between the inner parent and the partner.
It's really difficult and that's why I have also another question because I think that can be the reason why it's so difficult for a dependent person to try new things, to do new projects, to do something just new, to set a little bit higher goal.
Because I can tell that it's really difficult for this personality to do these things.
Why it's like that? Is it the reason?
Yes, this is the dynamic, but it is true that co-dependents are indecisive, very difficult for them to make decisions.
That's why they want the intimate partner to make decisions. That's why they are needy.
They are needy because they cannot satisfy or gratify their own needs. They need someone outside to satisfy their needs.
And they are risk averse. They're very afraid of risks.
Uncertainty.
Uncertainty, they have very low tolerance for uncertainty. They have huge, huge abandonment anxiety, exactly like the borderline. They have huge abandonment anxiety.
They react very badly to abandonment and rejection, real or imagined. Even when they anticipate, they predict, fundamental, they react as if it has happened. They catastrophize a lot.
So they immediately see the worst possible outcomes and they panic.
Many co-dependents also suffer from anxiety disorders. So they panic.
They are very insecure. They are insecure not only about circumstances and about the environment, but they're highly insecure about their ability to bond with the intimate partner, to keep the intimate partner in their lives.
They always anticipate rejection and abandonment, like the borderline.
But they're also insecure about who they are and their identity, their core identity.
Because there is essentially a splitting personality between a parent part and a child part, there is really not cohesive, coherent core identity. Truly, the identity is in flux all the time. And at any given moment, a parent can take over or a child can take over and it's pretty unpredictable.
So, by the way, those of you who would like to study or learn more about this, you could read work on internal family system theory, on transactional analysis theory.
Oh yes.
And you can even go to the earliest writings in Gestalt, Pearls and his wife, and so on.
This conceptualization of parent and child parts who are at conflict is not mine. It's not new. It's pretty common in many psychological schools.
So when you have a parent part and a child part, and the parent part is not your friend, the parent part is harsh, critical, obstructive, hateful, rejects you internally, always criticizes you, doesn't stand on your side, doesn't have your back, sabotages your work and your hopes and dreams and so on.
When you have an internal enemy who is also your parent, it's very difficult to make decisions, very difficult to, if you try to satisfy your needs, the parent part will say you are spoiled. You're self-indulgent.
If you try to buy something for yourself, if you try to find a partner to be happy with, if you try to learn something new, immediately the parent part will tell you, don't do it. You will fail. You're stupid. You're ugly, you're unlovable. You shouldn't buy this thing because you don't deserve it, you are spoiled, you don't think far in advance, you don't see the consequences of your actions, be very careful, etc.
This internal, constant internal voice, known in object relation theories, it is known as the bad internalized or introjected bad object.
This group of voices inside you that keeps sabotaging you make it very difficult for the codependent to decide, to be decisive, make it difficult for her to cater to her own needs, make it difficult for her to love herself.
And so this is one part.
The second part is the child.
The codependent can either be the hateful parent or the helpless child. These are the two modes of the codependent.
Sometimes she's a hateful parent and sometimes she's a helpless child.
Of course a helpless child should not make decision. A helpless child doesn't know what is good for it. A helpless child should rely on others, for example, on the intimate partner, to tell them what is real and what is good for it. A helpless child should rely on others, for example, on the intimate partner, to tell them what is real and what is not, what is good and what is no, what is right and what is wrong.
So both parts of the co-dependent paralyze her. They simply paralyze her. They don't allow her to exist independently, only through someone else.
And even when she finds someone else, the parent part is very unhappy because the parent part wants the codependent to be dependent. The parent part wants the codependent to be dependent on the parent part.
So the parent part is very unhappy when there is an intimate partner who loves the co-dependent and helps her.
Because that means the codependent is no longer dependent on the parent part.
This is very important to understand and I will finish this answer.
The dependency of the codependent is not so much on outside people.
The dependency of the co-dependent is on the internal dynamic between a hateful parent and a helpless child.
She depends on the dynamic.
What she does is she externalizes this dynamic.
She simply externalizes it like she externalizes this dynamic. She simply externalizes it. Like she externalizes everything else. She externalizes ego functions.
So she externalizes this dynamic and imposes it or superimposes it on an intimate partner.
Now she says this internal dynamic will become external. You will be the parent. I will be the child. I will be helpless. I will be needy. I will be clinging. And because I'm helpless and needy and clinging, you will serve my needs. You will cater to my needs.
We call this phenomenon control from the bottom.
The co-dependent controls her intimate partner via emotional blackmail.
She comes to the intimate partner and she says, I can't live without you. If you go away, I'll commit suicide. I will die.
Or she tells the intimate partner, I am so helpless, I don't know how to do this. Only you can do this for me.
So this is emotional blackmail. And she uses it to control the partner, but she controls him from a position of submissiveness, from a position of the bottom, from a position of a baby or a child.
Because the partner, the intimate partner of the co-dependent feels obligated to help this child. How can you abandon a child? How can you neglect a child? That's not okay.
And the codependent becomes the intimate partner's child. And that way she controls.
The co-dependent has a problem with what is known as secure base.
The mother of the co-dependent or the parents of the co-dependent did not make her feel safe. She could feel safe with them. She couldn't feel secure.
So she learned, I'm saying she because until recently majority were women. Although today many, many more men are diagnosed with dependent personalities.
Anyhow, because she didn't have the experience of feeling safe with mother and father, it was not secure base.
What she learned, the lesson she learned is the only way to feel safe is to control someone. If I'm in control, I can feel safe.
So I need to control. How can I control? By becoming helpless, by becoming childlike, by becoming needy? That way I can control.
And when she fails to control, the codependent actually becomes aggressive and even sometimes violent and that is also very reminiscent of the borderline.
The control part is externalized. The codependent tries to control someone outside.
The aggression part is sometimes internalized, and then the dependent becomes depressive and so on.
Thank you for that, and I do agree working with transaction analysis. I can tell that it's helping especially dependent personalities to understand this dynamic, this inner dialogue. And I can tell that you can see results with this approach to help these personalities.
I have two questions, but I don't know that if we still have enough time.
But another question is, what are the similarities and differences between dependent personality and covert NPD?
Because I don't know why, but people sometimes are, especially when I can see on YouTube the comments or the messages that I received they're confusing these two personalities.
Yeah they're confusing for good reason.
For good reason because externally they look the same.
They are fragile, they're vulnerable, they're shy, they're reticent, they are avoidant.
So externally, you could easily confuse a covert narcissist with a codependent, and with a borderline, by the way.
Yes.
The dynamics are totally different.
The covert narcissism is driven by grandiosity. Frustrated, a state that is known as collapsed narcissism.
The covert line is someone who believes that he is godlike, that he's amazing, unique, unprecedented, a genius.
A covert NPD.
A covert NPD.
Did I say covert NPD?
The covert narcissist believes all this.
It's just that the environment doesn't provide this feedback.
He believes that he's a genius, but he's not getting any feedback from anyone that agrees with him. No one agrees with him.
And this frustration that he knows that he's godlike, but no one else does, this frustration creates a lot of passiveaggression.
So the covert borderline is envious. The covert, I'm sorry, narcissism, is envious. It's envious, is aggressive, passive aggressive, and so on, so forth.
All this is missing with the codependent. The codependent is not grandiose, on the very contrary. The opposite of grandiose. The codependent doesn't seek external feedback in order to sustain an inflated, fantastic self-image. She seeks external feedback in order to regulate her internal environment. These are two totally different phenomena. So the therapist should go deep into the motivation, into the internal world.
Because to observe only behaviors, it often leads to misdiagnosis. And that is the big problem of the DSM. The diagnostic and statistical manual is behavior-based. It describes behaviors. And that's a huge mistake because CPTSD, people with complex trauma, borderlines, covert narcissists, and codependence share 90% of the same behavior.
So how would you diagnose?
You have to talk to them.
At some point, the covert narcissists would tell you how great he is, how Godlike is.
At some point, the codependent will tell you about the battle between the internal parent and the internal child.
At some point, the codependent will tell you about the battle between the internal parent and the internal child. At some point, the borderline will tell you how afraid she is to get too close to someone, how terrified she is of intimacy. At some point, the person with complex trauma will describe a pattern of regular abuse and regular trauma over a long period of time. You need to go deeper. It's not enough to observe behavior.
I do agree and thank you absolutely for that and for described these three personalities because this is the main foundation, the intention, the motivation, only observing the outside, it's not enough.
That's why we cannot, and especially I'm speaking to Polish community, we cannot judge someone only by observing the behavior. We just have to ask so.
Just, yeah, I think it's important to, to, you know, let this diagnosis to clinicians and not to judge. That's always about that. Because it's, it's not okay. Maybe, yeah, we can make it. How can people with this personality dependent can help themselves? Or how can they cope with this?
Only therapy. Only therapy. Because each time they enter an intimate relationship, they're triggered. Co-dependency becomes worse with time. The more intimate relationships you have, the worse the codependency becomes because many of these relationships end in trauma. So the trauma creates even worse codependency. It's the same dynamic in borderline, same dynamic in narcissism. People need to stop diagnosing other people if they are not qualified to do so. People need to stop treating themselves through online self-styled experts and coaches and other nonsense. People need to book clinicians and professionals to get help. This is not a matter of common sense. You can't be treated by your grandmother or by a good friend. You can get a lot of support, a lot of succor, but treatment is a structured process of reorganizing the furniture in the living room of your mind. And only an expert knows how to do this.
Thank you for that and I'm so grateful some and so happy that we can learn from you for free. This is such an honor, and I can tell that Polish people are also really grateful because I received lots of messages and comments. So thank you. Thank you for having me.