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The dictionary defines codependency as…
Excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner, typically a partner who requires support due to an illness or addiction.
However, codependency does not require an illness or addiction but is often an unhealthy way of relating to others. Codependency is a trait often learned in the childhood years, by observing caretakers. It may come from mimicking a parent who had problems with boundaries and had trouble communicating.
This is common in women because they usually feel it’s their duty to take care of everyone and fix their mistakes without regard to their own time and health. And we repeat their mistakes.
It may also come from a childhood with no emotionally available parents around. So, we look for relationships where our partner is also emotionally unavailable, hoping to fix them so that everything becomes better. This is usually done in the hopes that we truly believe that the other person will feel the love and metamorphosis into someone change for the better. No matter what happens, we don’t give up on them because focusing on their problems helps us avoid the emptiness we feel inside.

It also a sign of false hope that if we can control them long enough to be able to fix their problems, then ours will magically disappear as well. But the truth is this relationship becomes damaging, one-sided

The problem is that we usually take on so much more than we actually should mainly because we don’t know what a healthy, balanced relationship looks like. Also, we don’t feel worthy of love which makes us settle for us.

Since we seek external validation for our own worth and approval that we’re acceptable human beings. So, we go out of our way to please others, and this makes us afraid to set boundaries for fear of upsetting our partners and friends.

Unfortunately, it’s one of the reasons we take all the mental, emotional and physical abuse from our partners.

Am I codependent?
Here are some characteristics of codependency:
Low self-esteem
Lost touch with personal identity, needs, feelings, and thoughts
Trouble communicating honestly
A need for control
The compelling need to take care of others
Depends on others’ approval for validation of their own self-worth
Puts others’ needs before their own
Makes sacrifices to meet partner’s needs
Strong urge to please others
Makes excuses for others’ behavior
Fear of abandonment
Intimacy issues
Denying one’s own feelings and values

How to break the cycle
You can unlearn how to be codependent. But there are certain changes you have to make first, so you can heal yourself before you can be in a healthy relationship with others. Remember, it’s a long-term plan which will require your commitment and dedication.
Be more accepting of yourself. Loving yourself, flaws and all is key to boosting your self-esteem. The more self-aware you are, the more vivacious and loving of all of life’s experiences you become. You project more positive energy and attract the right kind of people because confidence is a magnet that attracts other confident, independent people.
Stop taking ownership of people’s problems.
Everyone has problems and you can’t be the one solving them all. You are responsible for your own actions and feelings, not anyone else’s. Just as you aren’t responsible for their problems, or the choices that led up to them.

Do your own thing.
Taking a break from your significant other is a healthy step towards figuring out who you really are and what you want out of life. Find something you enjoy doing by yourself like going for a walk, riding a bike, painting – whatever makes you happy. Or you can join an art class, learn a new language or musical instrument. This way you’re doing something away from your partner, yet at the same time meeting new, interesting people.

Establish boundaries.
This is as much for you as it is for them. It’s important in order for you to set about the change you need to become more aware of your own self-worth. It’s a step in the right direction in learning how to communicate your feelings rather than simply pleasing other people.

Seek help.
This could be on an individual level or along with your partner. There are support groups, therapists you can go to where you’ll be able to pinpoint codependent actions – without bias or judgment – that you may not be aware of. This helpful feedback can help guide you to make the changes you need to make.

Remember, that the steps you make in order to break the cycle of codependency may require you to put your needs first before others. This is in no way selfish. It’s a healthy way to grow and thrive and bring out your inner light – what makes you special.

Being in a healthy relationship means you’ve formed a healthy fully-formed identity. So, you must address your own personal mental and emotional health first before thinking of anyone else’s.

– Scott Blessing

When many of us were children we were taught about the importance of sharing. Many of us attended or still attend services at religious institutions that regularly teach us to put the needs of others before our own.
We grew up into a world that seems increasingly devoted to inclusion and comfort, sometimes seemingly at the cost of our own self-expression. It all kind of begs the question, are others’ feelings more important than yours? There’s no one answer, and all of the answers are more complicated than one might at first think.
No
For many of us, the instinctual answer to that question is “No, it is natural for me to privilege my own needs before those of others.” That’s a perfectly valid response.
While many societies these days are moving towards an emphasis that we should put the feelings of others before our own, there is also a growing “self-care” movement that encourages us to put our own feelings first. After all, we have our own needs and we are most attuned to those needs and often best equipped to fulfill them.
If our needs must be met but we put the needs of others first, doesn’t that mean that we are expecting others to fulfill our needs, which sounds kind of selfish? The logic gets complicated, though there are those who have tried to simplify it.
20th-century philosopher Alistair Crowley wrote that if every person put their own needs first, then every person’s needs would be met. In fact, Crowley regularly advocated for abolishing government and laws on the grounds that if every person watched out for themselves, their instincts of self-preservation would keep them from violating the rights and needs of others.
It’s a drastic and alien principal that many of us are likely to find issue with, but from an academic perspective, it’s an interesting argument.
Yes
The idea that others’ feelings are more important than your own is taught in most, if not all world religions. Most of us are taught selflessness – the opposite of selfishness – from a very early age, often from our parents.
That others’ feelings are more important than our own is in many ways the background of successful relationships between friends, between couples, and between parents and children.
There is also the idea of our relationship with others as a sort of “social contract.” The term “social contract” was coined by the 17th-century philosopher John Locke to describe the nature of organized government in which the members willingly give up certain rights in exchange for certain services and protections.
Our relationships with others are like a social contract in that if we all put the needs of others before those of ourselves, there would always be someone watching out for us.
You would be able to put others needs before yours and your needs would still be met because other people would put their needs before yours. This sentiment is expressed by concepts like the “Pay it Forward” program, where good deeds are performed for other people, just because.
Sort Of
In the end, everyone’s feelings are important. Utilitarianism, a branch of ethics that promotes that every decision that we make should maximize the amount of happiness in the world, holds that no one person’s needs or wants are more important than any other person’s needs or wants. Following this line of thought, you can put yourself first unless putting someone else’s feelings before your own would be significantly better for them than it is for us.
The pay it forward idea discussed above also means that if everyone put everyone else’s needs first we would, in a way, be serving ourselves because other people would pay it forward to us. Of course, in the world that we live in, not everyone is going to pay it forward.
In the end, no one’s feelings are more important than yours, and your feelings are not more important than anyone else’s. You don’t always need to put other people first, but there are times when putting other people first is the right thing to do.

– Scott Blessing

One of the quickest ways to have problems with your emotional health is to take it for granted.
These days, many of us don’t pay as much attention to our emotional health as we should, whether it is because we undervalue it, focus on other things, or figure that if it was bad enough to worry about we would notice it.
The problem with this is that emotional health problems don’t always come on all of a sudden. While a sudden trauma might upset your mental health in a hurry, problems are more often caused by gradual changes.
When change happens gradually, we are more likely to assume that things have always been that way, who can lead to potential problems going unaddressed. That’s why it’s important to practice emotional awareness all the time, not just when we already think that something is already wrong.

Ask Yourself How You Are Feeling
Being aware of our own emotions can be very similar to being aware of other people’s emotions. In addition to making us more able to avoid stress by making us more aware of emotional repercussions to various circumstances, we can check our own emotional wellness in much the same way that we the check emotional wellness of others: by asking.
When other people ask you how you are doing, it can be most efficient and polite to just say “okay” or “fine” but if you literally ask yourself you may reply with something a little more informative.
You don’t have to carry on a whole conversation with yourself, but if you ask yourself “How are you doing?” and you respond with “Well, I’ve been better,” it might be something to spend more time thinking about.

Be More Comfortable Talking About Your Own Feelings
Etiquette may have gotten in the way of our emotional awareness in another way: it keeps us from talking about ourselves, which may keep us from thinking about ourselves.
Consider stating how you feel with statements like “I’m glad to hear that,” or “that makes me frustrated.” This kind of talking about your own feelings helps you focus and think more about how you feel and how you react to things, but it also will help other people to understand how you are feeling.
It’s important to keep focused on the topic, however, as it can be carried away. When your “I’s” get too close together it can become rude, but it may also distort your outlook and lead you to think about yourself too much.

Practice Mindfulness
Another great way to stay aware of your emotional wellness is through mindfulness.
This practice encourages you to be aware of your thoughts and feelings, as well as how they make you feel physical, particularly through tense muscles and changed breathing. Many of these practices also include exercises that teach you to control your breathing and relax your muscles to decrease your level of stress and increase your emotional health.
Fortunately, mindfulness is increasing in popularity these days, so the internet is full of quality resources and mobile apps full of information and tools.
If you are concerned about trusting these resources, or just want to be sure that you are finding the best available resources, consider talking to your primary care provider about your interest in learning more about mindfulness. While not all doctors are likely to be experts in the field, most will be able to give you helpful advice in furthering your own research.

4. Meditate
Many people are reluctant to get into meditation because it often has religious connotations. While the oldest forms of meditation are explicitly religious, more modern forms of meditation focus exclusively on the secular benefits of meditation.
Related to but slightly different from mindfulness, mediation involves taking a part of the day, as little as a few minutes, to clear your mind.
Clearing your mind can bring its own benefits, although it is very difficult. Recognizing what thoughts or feelings make it difficult to clear your mind can help you to recognize which things in your life are giving you the most trouble.
As was the case with mindfulness, there are a lot of great resources online regarding meditation, but the best place to start may be a friendly conversation with your primary care provider.

5. Write
Many people who write fiction find that they include aspects of their own lives in their stories and characters. Writing yourself, especially fiction can help you to express your feelings in a safe and healthy way, but re-reading your own work can also help you to see your own experiences from a new perspective. This can help you to understand your feelings and can allow you to identify creative solutions to your problems.

– Scott Blessing

There are different aspects of intelligence, including emotional intelligence. You can’t exactly measure how much you know about emotions in the same way that you can measure how much you know about history or science or math, but there are a couple of key signs that you have high emotional intelligence. This article will discuss five of those signs and will also lay out ways in which you can strengthen your own emotional intelligence.

Having High Emotional Literacy
One way in which you might be emotionally intelligent without knowing it is by knowing the lingo. Also called emotional literacy, the ability to verbally express emotions is largely under-rated. Words like “happy,” “mad,” or “sad” are good enough sometimes but sometimes a more exact word like “fulfilled,” “provoked,” or “isolated” will be better at getting your point across.
Knowing how to verbally express your emotions might seem more academic than practical, but this is not the case. Adequately expressing our emotions to those around us can help us to create a healthier and more productive atmosphere by encouraging those around us to promote emotional health.

Being Willing And Able To Communicate Emotions
Emotional intelligence isn’t all about knowing the right words, it’s also about knowing when to use them. Many of us tend to try to ignore certain emotions or don’t take the time the really appreciate the emotions that they are feeling.
Allowing yourself to process your emotions in a more meaningful way will help you to understand the ways that certain things make you and others feel, including the sometimes-obscure links between activities and the emotions that they invoke.

Empathy
Emotional intelligence also extends beyond your own emotions. Being able to understand and interpret the emotions of other people, often called “empathy,” is a skill that is difficult to master but that can help you help those around you by allowing you to foster a more emotionally healthy environment or more adequately care for people around you who may need support.
The best way to develop empathy is by encouraging other people to express their emotional wellbeing. By being there for people who need you, you can help others to overcome difficult times in their lives while learning more about humans in general and how to help others and yourself through times of future difficulty. Some studies have also found that reading novels can increase empathy because they allow you to see events through another perspective, even if the event and characters are fictional.

Knowing How Emotions Mix And Build
Understanding individual emotions are important but being able to understand how emotions can build and act on each other and lead from one to another is also important.
Understanding how emotions can develop from one to another is important for predicting how people may feel in certain situations, but it can also be important for actively moving yourself or others through healthy and positive emotional progressions.
This skill can be learned the old-fashioned way by reading psychology books and resources, or by monitoring the way that emotions change in ourselves and others in our actual experiences.

Using Emotions Practically
Similarly, emotional intelligence can be a mechanical skill that dictates how to use which emotion in a given situation. This can be done in order to keep people’s emotional health up while doing difficult tasks, or it can even be manipulated so that people work against unpleasant emotions in order to push themselves to achieve great feats.
This is a difficult and sensitive area of emotional intelligence and is best developed through observation of those who have already honed it, or by experience – beginning in situations with little risk. It can often be developed by using it on yourself by imposing reward or punishment systems on your own activities.

– Scott Blessing

In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare writes “nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Similarly, it may not be useful to think of emotions as “positive” or “negative.” Still, there are emotions that we enjoy like happiness and excitement, and emotions that we do not enjoy like fear and sorrow.
While it may not be healthy to dwell on these emotions for too long, it can also be unhealthy to try to ignore them or block them out. These emotions are just as important, or possibly more important, to shaping who we are than emotions that we enjoy more.

1. Learn About The World
Emotions are symptoms of our health and can be just as important as physical symptoms. When we do something and feel happy or excited, it is usually a sign that that thing is good for us. On the other hand, when we do something, and it makes us feel anxious or scared, or guilty, it usually means that that thing is bad for us.
In this way, emotions contribute to self-limiting behavior, they help us to identify when an activity or situation is good so that we can keep it up, or bad so that we can avoid similar instances in the future.

2. Learn About Yourself And Others
As stated above, experiencing unpleasant emotions can instinctively help us to avoid certain situations, but further examining these feelings can also help us to learn about why we experience them.
Asking ourselves why we feel a certain way in a certain situation can help us to understand – and to change – the reasons behind the feeling. Sometimes examining your feelings in a situation can lead you to realize that a person or situation may be dangerous to you but sometimes they can lead you to realize that something in your past or something deep in your personality is leading you to over-react or react in a way that is not fitting.
Focusing on these feelings may be uncomfortable but addressing them and finding the source can be an illuminating experience that prevents future discomfort in the future.

3. Develop Empathy
Taking time to acknowledge and experience our own emotions can also help us to understand the lives and experiences of those around us.
In our society that values some emotions and disvalued other emotions, we tend to look down on people who experience “negative” emotions like sadness or anger as being weak or imbalanced or immature.
By taking note of how often we experience these emotions ourselves, it becomes easier to approach others from a place of understanding and respect when they are feeling down.
This works on ourselves as well. If we feel that we are a week or imbalanced or immature for feeling these emotions, we are less likely to deal with them in a constructive way. Reminding ourselves that everyone periodically feels angry or sad can help us to support and comfort ourselves in our own times of need.

4. Express Yourself
Because our emotions are important parts of who we are as people and it isn’t good to just brush them off, expressing our negative emotions to others can help us to create an optimal environment for our feeling and effective functioning.
Learning to accept and understand “negative” emotions can also help us to express these emotions in a healthy and productive way.

5. Brace Yourself
As mentioned above, emotions are natural things that happen to everyone and happen every day. Emotions can be stronger or weaker, however. Many of us have gotten talented at powering through little unpleasant emotions that happen every day, but we all sooner or later get hit with some life trauma that we can’t help but feel.
If you take time to acknowledge and experience the little emotions that you feel throughout the day, you will be more able to handle those bigger emotions in a healthy and constructive way.
Perhaps you have thought while reading this article that when you feel sad or afraid you are too wrapped up in that emotion to consciously deal with it. If that’s the case with you, it might be because you do not let yourself feel emotions until they become crippling.

– Scott Blessing

We all have emotions – both the good and the bad. They control us physically and psychologically. Emotions can control how we behave, act and think. For some the mere act of feeling can be scary and downright devastating, so we start to think it’s easier to suppress how we feel, instead of learning to express our emotions in healthy and sensible ways.

The truth is that stuffing feelings is not helpful and can be extremely harmful. The goal is not to wipe out your emotions or to suppress them. The goal should be learning how to manage, process and convey them in healthy ways.

Communication is essential. Keeping your emotions bottled up will only lead to a meltdown later on. It can also lead to chronic diseases, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and cholesterol.

Confronting whatever emotion, you may be feeling may be hard, but necessary to maintain your emotional and mental wellness and overall contentment and happiness in life.

In order to be able to move forward, you must find a safe outlet for your emotions where you can express how you feel without fear of judgment or criticism. How you express your emotions is the defining factor in whether you’ll be accepted or shunned by others.

Here are 5 ways to express emotions in a healthy way:

1. Cooldown.
Count to 10, breathe deeply, meditate – all these techniques are great ways to help you regain composure and get some perspective. Exercising is a great way to gain a fresh perspective. It also improves your mood by balancing out your hormones and clears your head, helping you think better.

2. Keep a journal.
Writing down thoughts and feelings is a great way to channel your anxiety. Studies show that those who keep a journal tend to have lower stress levels than those who don’t. Also, when you release all those pent-up emotions and put them down on paper, they have less of a hold over you. It also gives you bird’s eye view somewhat, into your life which can help you assimilate your emotions in a healthy way.

3. Understand your emotions.
Think about what’s really making you mad or scared. It could be another underlying emotion which you’ve been holding onto without realizing it, like loss or sorrow. Similarly, you could be feeling unhappy or stressed and you take it out on the first person or situation that rubs you the wrong way. More often than not, it’s usually someone close to you which could be hazardous to your personal relationships.

That’s not to say you should swallow your emotions and not let them out. If you’re sad, allow yourself to recognize it and go through the process of being sad. If you’re angry, take it out on a punching bag or scream into a pillow. Do the same thing with your other emotions, and soon you’ll have a pretty good understanding of your emotions and how you can manage them.

4. Empathize.
Have compassion and try looking at things from the other person’s point-of-view, instead of simply assuming the worst and just lashing out. This can truly open up doors of communication, and help you understand and respect the other person and why they behave or react the way they do.

5. Stay aware.
Self-care should be your number one priority, so you can learn emotional awareness. Being aware means you’re conscious about the types of emotional and mental processes you’re experiencing. Becoming aware of your emotions early on means you can be in control of how you react to them, instead of the other way around.

Learning to feel and process feelings in healthy ways is well worth the effort and struggle it takes, your emotional health will thank you.

– Scott Blessing

If you think that all that there is to health is sleep, exercise, and diet, you’re off to a good start but you still may be neglecting other important factors of your overall wellbeing.
Your overall health is composed of several areas of wellness, including emotional wellness. But what constitutes emotional wellness? These five aspects of emotional wellness have been identified by the National Institute of Health.
While this article aims to offer a brief introduction to this topic and so will not go into great detail on how to improve aspects of your emotional wellness, identifying which of them maybe areas of concern for you can help you identify solutions or resources for further study.

Outlook
How you see the world and your place in it is an important aspect of your emotional wellness, largely because of how it impacts the other aspects. You will form relationships differently, find stress in different places, cope with loss differently, and understand yourself differently if you see yourself as a puppet of fate, a master of your own destiny, or anywhere in between.
Your outlook also includes how you see yourself in relation to other people, which can play a huge part in how you form relationships with those around you.

Relationships
Relationships with romantic interests, friends, coworkers, family members, and even strangers can have a strong impact on emotional wellness. Relationships can be supportive, harmful, or challenging. They can help you out of trouble or get you into it.
Sometimes honing your relationships for better emotional health means pruning less healthy relationships, while other times it means nurturing or pursuing healthier relationships. Understanding other people and where they come from is important to healthier short-term relationships with people that you bump into every day, but this skill is reliant on a realistic outlook.

Stress
Stress can come from issues or imbalances in any of the other aspects of emotional wellness and how you handle it can have serious implications for your emotional and physical wellness.
Your stress and emotional health are closely related – lots of stress can upset your emotional health, and strong emotional health can contribute to controlling stress – but lots of stress can also make you feel physically worse.
Fortunately, developing a better outlook, fostering healthier relationships, developing coping mechanisms, and practicing mindfulness can all help to decrease stress.

Coping
People usually think about coping in terms of recovering from the loss of a loved one, but the loss of a job, of property, of opportunities, can all be traumatic experiences with painful recovery. Also, like stress, grief can have physical symptoms as well as emotional symptoms.
Your outlook and mindfulness can impact your coping mechanisms, stress and coping can impact each other, and your healthy relationships can help you to cope in quicker and healthier ways.

Mindfulness
This aspect of emotional wellness refers to how well you understand your own mental and emotional health. While there are some systems of understanding and control that make mindfulness easier to wrap your head around, it’s less about learning and more about paying attention.
Some people lose touch with their mindfulness because they feel that their emotional health is unimportant, while others may feel that an unhealthy level of emotional distress may be normal, and therefore does not need to be addressed.
Of the other aspects of emotional wellness, mindfulness is most closely tied to stress: the higher your level of mindfulness, the lower your stress.
Hopefully, this brief introduction to the aspects of emotional health will help you to increase your own emotional health and reap the wide array of benefits, both emotional and physical.

– Scott Blessing