Difficulty experiencing and expressing our reality moderately

From Facing Codependence by Pia Mellody, Andrea Miller, & J. Keith Miller

Not knowing how to be moderate is possibly the most visible symptom of codependence to other people. This symptom has manifestations in all four areas of reality.

Body

Many codependents dress immoderately

Thinking

Codependents think in terms of black or white, right or wrong, good or bad; there are few gray areas.

Feelings

The heart and soul of codependence lies in the difficulty codependents have knowing what their feelings ar and how to share them. Codependents seem to have the most difficulty experiencing feelings moderately; they feel little or no emotions or have explosive or agonizing ones. There are four different kinds of feeling reality that codependents experience. And until one can recognize these four kinds of feelings and where they come from, life can be very baffling and confusing for a codependent. 1. Adult Feeling Reality - Adult feeling reality is a mature authentic emotional response to your thinking. It is not dysfunctional or codependent. These feelings are usually moderate when you experience them and cause you to feel centered within yourself. 2. Adult-Induced Feeling Reality - In functinoal people, adult-induced feelings are the result of a process called empathy. As a healthy adult, you can be empathetic with someone else as that person shares his or her feelings because you can experience that person's feelings with him or her a little bit. 3. Frozen Feelings From Childhood - One way this occurs is that the feelings elicited in a child during abuse are so overwhelming and miserable that the child shuts down or "freezes" the feelings in order to survive. Another way this might happen is that the child may be attacked physically, verbally, or both for having or showing feelings. The feelings involved are usually anger, pain, or fear. 4. Adult-to-Child Carried Feelings - Children also absorb feelings such as shame, rage, fear, and pain from the adult who is abusing them. These feelings remain within the person into adulthood and are called "carried" feelings, because they've been carried forward from childhood. When you are having this form of codependent feeling reality, you feel overwhelmed and out of control.

Behavior

Extreme behavior is codependent's lives might include trusting everyone or no one at all, letting anyone touch them or allowing no one to touch them at all. Codependent parents may discipline their children severely or not at all.