UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Terri Cole. Terri is a dynamic writer and educator. She has a special gift for making complex psychological concepts actionable and accessible. She’s a licensed psychotherapist, a global relationship expert, and the author of Boundary Boss and The Boundary Boss Workbook. She’s also the host of the popular podcast, The Terri Cole Show, and she’s the author of a new book from Sounds True, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this edition of Insights at the Edge. It’s called Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency, and you can learn more about this new book and receive special bonus gifts when you go to hfc—high-functioning codependency. That’s what the initials stand for. HFCbook.com. That’s HFCbook.com. Terri, welcome.
Terri Cole: Well, thanks for having me, Tami. I’m so excited to be here.
TS: When I first heard the term high-functioning codependency, I thought, wow, I’ve never heard that before, never heard that. And then when I read your new book too much, I was like, oh, I’ve never heard that before because this is a term actually that Terri is introducing into our vernacular. So I’d love to hear how you came to name high-functioning codependency as something that needed to be named in collective experience.
TC: Well, first of all, they say you teach what you most need to learn, which for sure is the case for me. So I was just an indiscriminate, codependent, but I was not aware of what that was in my young life. What I saw though, and once I became a psychotherapist and I was in my practice with very highly capable women in particular, and I would point out, Hey, what you’re describing, this is a codependent relational pattern, and they would immediately reject the notion and say, oh no, not me, because I’m not dependent on squat lady, everyone’s dependent on me. I’m making all the dough, I’m managing all the people, I’m doing all the emotional labor. I’m moving everything forward. So what I realized is that my clients, they didn’t know what codependency was because they were thinking of the codependent no more Melody Beatty. You have to be enabling an alcoholic basically, which that’s not even what Melody says it is anymore.
She’s certainly expanded her view of it. But what I realized is that I couldn’t help them if they didn’t see themselves in the problem. And then I started really doing my research, taking copious notes and realized that this was a new flavor, so to speak, of codependency. I was expanding on what was there when I added high-functioning to codependency. My clients, inevitably, all of them without shame, were able to raise their hand and say, not to quote Taylor, but I will me, I’m the problem. It’s me. They were able to own it because they saw themselves in that description. So the irony with high-functioning codependency is that the more capable you are, the less codependency looks like codependency, but it’s still codependency. So I felt like there was a need to clarify
TS: What is your working definition of high-functioning codependency?
TC: True codependency start with that. According to me is when you are overly invested in the feeling states, the outcomes, the situations, the circumstances, the relationships, the finances, the careers of the people in your life to the detriment of your own internal piece. So when you’re high-functioning and when you’re high-functioning codependent, you just make it all look easy. Nobody’s checking in on you. You are overly invested in these things, meaning you feel like you are responsible for other people’s outcomes. Your friend calls you with a problem. How quickly, if you’re wondering people who are watching listening now or after the fact, how quickly does your friend’s crisis become your crisis? It’s not the same as saying, how quickly are you concerned about your friend? How quickly are you feeling responsible to find the answer, to fix it, to Google something, to call someone to that is codependency and with high-functioning, nobody looks at us, nobody even thinks there’s a problem.
You know what I mean? Tami, nobody’s checking in on me. Nobody’s like, I hope Terri’s okay. You know why? Because she’s always okay, which is what HFCs are. We’ve got this very pulled together facade. It doesn’t mean we’re not suffering in some ways, but this is just the way our own dysfunction presents in our relationships and in our lives. I also noticed something different, which is that listen, codependents come in all shapes and sizes, just HFCs do as well, more extroverted, more introverted, but with high-functioning, not just codependently attached to the people, the close people in their lives. They could be come codependent with lots of people. It’s almost like the possibility of becoming codependent or feeling overly responsible for the world at large. And I actually opened the book with a story and the introduction where it was the late eighties and I was waiting on a train platform in Long Island and I was coming home from therapy.
Don’t ask me why I lived in Manhattan and went to Long Island for therapy. I cannot explain that. But I was standing on the train platform and I see this kid and he’s holding a little blanket and I’m immediately, my helper radar is like, what is that kid doing? Keep in mind I was probably 22, maybe this kid was 19, but I wasn’t 40, but I was like, this kid should not be alone this late at night. So I start chatting him up on the train. I was like, oh, where are you going? And he said, oh, I was hired to drive a car from Long Island back to Indiana. So I came here and then they canceled the job. I go, so what are you doing? He was like, oh, I’m going to the station. I go, wait, what? He’s like, I’m going to go sleep in the station.
I go, what station? And he says, Penn Station. I was like, dude, you are not doing that. It is so dangerous. This was the 80. I mean, listen, it’s dangerous now, but it was really dangerous then. And he said, well, I don’t know anyone in New York. I was like, yes, you do. You know me. And that’s how Billy came to come to my apartment that I shared with a woman, another woman, a friend. It was a studio apartment. I just took a perfect stranger home because I couldn’t bear the thought that he would sleep in Penn Station. I knew he’d get mugged. It was like I took responsibility and was like, this is what’s happening. Obviously that’s unhealthy, and maybe you guys watching or listening have never gone to that extreme, but if you’re a high-functioning codependent, you have your own Billy stories about people that you felt overly responsible for in your life, even though perhaps you shouldn’t have.
TS: Now it’s interesting this category of HFCs, because at first in telling a story like that, and at first I was reading your new book, Too Much, I thought, I don’t really identify with this. I’m not the kind of person who would take Billy home with me. I mean, I wouldn’t. But you described also people who have a tendency to overachieve and overdue for people and take on more than their fair share in a situation. It’s like, okay, I’ll be the person to solve this for all of us. And so I’m wondering if you could maybe describe, if you will, different avatars of HFC. You just described one type, you as a young person who is not going to let someone. And so some people express it that way, but there are these other expressions or ways that it comes out in people’s lives.
TC: Yes. So let’s do it this way. If it’s all right, let’s talk about some traits and then we’ll talk about specific behaviors because I feel like this makes it easy to go. Either that’s me or not me. We’ll talk about costs and then we’ll talk about fixes if people are interested.
TS: I want to travel with you. You take me, Terri.
TC: Let’s go. So let’s talk about traits. Feeling overly responsible for fixing other people’s problems. We already hit that one. Giving going above and beyond, giving till it hurts, I call it. And even sometimes when you’re not asked, right, we’re just doing it on our own. I’m always ready to jump into damage control mode kind of. We can be a little judge ish around other people if they don’t take our good advice. So we have great advice and we kind of get mad or frustrated if Betty’s coming back, she wants to talk about the same thing that you talked about two weeks ago. You gave her the perfect plan to get out of that relationship or to get out of her debt or whatever it is. And she didn’t take it, but she still wants to talk about it. We don’t have a lot of patience for that. Getting frustrated or angry when people don’t take your advice, feeling exhausted, resentful, maybe a little bit bitter, maybe a little bit underappreciated for all that you do, for all the people that you do it for in your life. And another trait is inadvertently because trust me, I’m a recovering HFC, which is all we can hope for is being in recovery.
So we’re not getting cured, but we can be in recovery. So our hearts are in the right place. But it’s like what we’re doing inadvertently is not respecting other people’s right to be autonomous. It’s like when we are jumping in. So those are the traits, but what do the behaviors look like? What are the actual behaviors? So giving unsolicited advice. So that’s the auto advice giver where we literally can’t stop. It could be someone asking for advice. For a lot of us, for me, I was an indiscriminate I ideas for everybody. I had thoughts, I don’t want you to be in pain. You’re having a problem, I can help. So auto advice giving is something that’s super common for HFCs, being overly sacrificing, almost always willing to take one for the team, especially if it’s a scenario like let’s say you and your wife are both going out to go to work and your wife goes out first and there’s a flat tire. She says there’s a flat tire. If you’re an HFC, you go, you take the other car, I’ll Uber just go, go. Let’s go efficiency, let’s get it done. But it’s like we’re addicted to problem solving and we are conflict averse. We don’t want there to be a problem when the problem, if it means I take one for the team, it’s not a problem. You know what I mean? No problem.
Auto accommodating is another behavior. So you can think about being on a plane and seeing that two people want to sit together and inserting yourself, and I’ll move if you guys want to sit or seeing that somebody auto accommodating a situation. How I came up with this terminology was that I was actually in a hair salon getting on a busy Saturday, and I had something on my hair that you have to leave on for 10 minutes. So I’m laying in a sink with a mask on my hair, and the longer that line is getting, they’re so busy, the more anxious I’m becoming now. The sink line is long and I’m just laying there and I’m like, I’ve got to tell them I could move. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not efficient. I don’t even need to be in the sink right now. So anyway, I raised my hand, the assistant comes over and I’m like, I could move.
She’s like, yeah, okay, we got it. We do this every Saturday and everything is fine. And I had this massive epiphany. First of all, if after the amount of therapy I’ve had in my life, I’m still doing this. I cannot possibly be the only person because as HFCs, a lot of times we’re very dialed into our environment. The whole salon is my side of the street. According to me. What makes me Terri Cole think that I should be weighing in on the sink flow of my salon? I shouldn’t have been, but the important part of that story, so that’s auto accommodating. I see a problem and I’m trying to wrap myself around it. So the problem will no longer exist, but what is the cost? And we’ll get to bigger costs later. But even right there in that scenario, the cost was, I could have been listening to a podcast, resting my extremely tired brain calling my mom.
There was a million better things I could have been doing that might’ve been nurturing for me. But instead, I’m sitting there sweating the sink flow. This need to control is really profound with HFCs or trying to control your environment. So that’s auto accommodating. Then we have anticipatory planning where you’re going to be with certain people or you know, have a big thing coming and you think of everything that could go wrong and you make plans to make sure it doesn’t. So I’m having a Christmas party, uncle Bob is coming, who doesn’t like Uncle Jimmy? I’m going to make sure they don’t sit near each other. I’m going to make sure that Uncle Bob has the booze he likes, so at least he’s in a good mood, like twisting ourselves up in a pretzel, letting ourselves on fire to avoid saying to Uncle Bob, oh hey, you can either behave or get out.
You can either grow up or not come to my party. Or we could be even nicer than that, let’s just say. But what we’re avoiding is dealing with what needs to be dealt with. Instead. We’re like, I can control this. If they just don’t sit near each other, it’ll be fine. But the bandwidth that you’re bleeding for this level of over-functioning, because that’s the next one, is over-functioning, where we’re just doing more than our share, more than we need to be doing. And so much of the time, Tam, we’re doing things for people that they can and should be doing for themselves. And it’s sort of automatic. And there’s so much self abandonment in these behaviors, especially over time. When you’re 22, you got all the bandwidth in the world. And you know what? When you’re 60 less so and less tolerance for the lack of satisfaction that comes from interacting in our relationships in this way.
TS: Now the costs, obviously the costs are something like exhaustion. What else?
TC: Oh, so many things. But burnout is a big one that I see in my therapy practice where women, especially women, perimenopause, menopause, we’re already hitting a wall during that time in life because you’re having physical changes and brain fog and can’t freaking sleep and gaining weight and all the crap that comes along with that. But you just hit a wall of there’s only so much like we are literally doing too much. That’s why I named it that. And we hit a wall where we can’t. So either you’ll have a health crisis. So I see a lot of this autoimmune disorders, insomnia, TMJ, I mean I had someone who had a lock jaw, but just stress like the cortisol that is flooding your system. When you’re so hypervigilant about your surroundings and about your relationships, you’re just literally just your adrenals are just shot.
So what are the costs? Less joy? Because when you live this way, when we have so much on our plates and we have so many balls in the air, even the things that used to be fun or the things we used to like to do can become obligatory. So we are checking boxes. Even sex can become a box. This is another thing with HFCs where sex can become or is for many not that satisfying because the opposite, what is the opposite of controlled sex is not great sex. There needs to be some kind of spontaneity and an ability to be vulnerable. And yet all of this that we’re talking about keeps us from being vulnerable because we are, when you think about codependency, it is an overt or covert bid to control other people’s outcomes. So people will ask me a lot online, is this codependent or caring?
I’m not sure. And I’m like, we need to add controlling in there because so much of the time that’s what it is. But to finish the costs, we end up kind of bitter and we end up not fully self-expressed because we’re too busy managing it. If we look at the costs to other people of us interacting this way, I mean lack of autonomy, no acceptance of where people are. Like if the people are projects, if your friend is crying about something and you can’t stop telling them what to do to make it better, you’re not with them. It’s too painful to be with that person’s pain. And so it’s a compulsion to fix it. And when people online say, I’m just being nice. What’s wrong with being nice? Don’t you want people to be nice? I’m like, dude, if you can’t not do it, it’s not you being nice.
It is a compulsion just like any other compulsion. So mindful giving and caring and compassion, sure, I’m all for that. But when it’s a reaction to protect us, it’s really not about the other people. And this was, I think for me personally, probably the hardest or the most painful part of my own, realizing what I was doing in my life, came with a situation that happened with one of my sisters who was in an abusive relationship and she was living in a shack in the woods without running water and no electricity with a guy who was doing crack and who was abusive. I mean, there’s no need to embellish that story. That was literally the facts. So for an HFC, who we did not have that background in my family every day of my life was a five alarm fire to get her out. What can I do? Going to my therapist, bawling my eyes out all the time? I remember saying to Bev, my therapist, my long-term therapist, I was like, what am I going to do? I’ve done everything. And she was like, Terri, let me ask you something. What makes you think you know what Jenna needs to learn and how she needs to learn it in this lifetime?
And I was like, I don’t know, but I think we can both agree. She doesn’t need to do it with a crack head who’s abusive. Can we agree that she could have running water while she’s learning whatever the lifetime lesson is she needs? And she was like, I kind of can’t agree, Tara, because I’m not God and I don’t know, but do you know what’s happening for you? And I was like, clearly I do not. So please help. And she said, you’ve worked really hard to create a pretty harmonious life and your sister’s life being a bit of a dumpster fire or a total dumpster fire is really messing with your peace and you really want your pain to end. You want her to be fixed so your pain will end. And I was like, you are not lying, Bev. That is the truth. But it was sort of painful because I had to within myself reconcile that my desperation to save Jenna was more about myself than it was about her too.
Of course, obviously that’s obvious, but it wasn’t all Mother Teresa. The way that I sort of in my own mind thought that it was. And my most important takeaway from that experience, and this was really where the seeds of high function and codependency were born for me, is understanding that nine months later, my sister called me, I put a boundary in place and said, Hey, I can’t talk about this guy, but if you ever want to get out, I’m your person. Nine months later, she calls, are you still my person? Yes, I am putting on my sneakers, getting in my car, running right now. It’s like, thank God to pick her up. And then my husband and I helped her in an appropriate way to get back on her feet, but she got sober, she went back to school, and Jenna became the hero of her own life instead of her life story centering on her youngest sister being the hero. She got that. And when we are constantly inserting ourselves as the solution to other people’s problems, we are robbing them a lot of times inadvertently. I’m not saying you’re doing it on purpose, I wasn’t doing it on purpose, but intent does not mitigate impact.
TS: Well, let me ask you a question, Terri. When you were determined to help your sister and you said you had the discovery that it wasn’t really Mother Teresa in action, that it was somehow about you. How was it about you? What was it that you could be the successful helper and then glorify? What was it?
TC: No, I couldn’t stand that. My sister was in pain. I couldn’t stand that this piece of shit was abusing her. I couldn’t stand that she was tolerating it. I couldn’t stand her vulnerability. I couldn’t stand what was happening. It really wasn’t. And I’m sure, listen, there was a part of me definitely had a savior complex. No doubt I was into the cape for sure because my whole life was about being of service really to my friends, to neighbor strangers as we see. But what the compulsion was that her being a highly sensitive person and an empath, my projection, the pain that she told me about, and then I was obsessively projecting what I thought might be happening was literally intolerable to me. So that’s really what it was about. I couldn’t rest end. I thought that that was loyalty. I thought that that was love.
And what I didn’t realize until my therapist pointed it out to me, she was like, Terri, it’s not that you shouldn’t save your sister. It’s that you can’t, because it’s literally impossible. It’s an impossible task. You’re setting herself up to fail. She has to get to her own bottom in her own addiction, in her own experience with this guy. She has to get there. And when she does, then she will be able to basically be the hero of her own story. All right, so Nora has a question. How do these boundaries apply to our high school and college age kids? That is so good, Nora. I think you have to be age appropriate with your kids, but with all of them, instead of being so committed to them never feeling pain and never making mistakes, what I would love for you to do is have the first stop when they come to you with a problem, the first thing you say is, okay, so let’s start with what do you think you should do?
Your gut instinct is good. What do you think is the right thing to do in this situation? We can talk about it, but you know what I mean. It’s like instead of giving the answer, and of course with children, our job is to teach them, but it’s also our job to teach them critical thinking and deductive reasoning and problem solving so that they can actually problem solve in life, not just so that they never make mistakes. And I think that when we’re parenting from a place of fear of what will happen if they make this mistake, or if kids, let’s say, don’t do their homework or the thing that’s due and it’s 2:00 AM are you staying up to do it? Or are you allowing them to experience the consequences of their actions? And I think that our job as parents is very much like the poem in the prophet about children and about childhood, where we are the Bose as parents and our children are the arrows.
And our job is to let them go far to give them the skills to actually do that. I feel like with college age kids, it’s sort of the same thing, except what’s appropriate is different. So when you think about high school kids, you want to have some kind of, they need something to step outside of. So why having a curfew, let’s just say is important, is because when kids don’t have something that they can fight against that they can step out of like, Ooh, I’m going to separate and individuate and I’m coming home at 1115 and nine 11. They have something to do to be like, look at me. I’m doing my own thing. When we don’t give them a safe sort of smaller box to step outside of, they have to do something bigger and more dangerous to get our attention, they have to do something.
It could be more like doing drugs or doing something more scary. So I think with raising kids, especially high school kids, we have to expect that they’re going to step outside whatever kind of box we put for them. But it’s so important that we put the box. Okay, anonymous asks. HC sounds like a style that I’ve heard called over-functioning. Are they the same thing or similar? It’s funny in the book and in my description, I talk a lot about over-functioning. And truthfully, I thought I originated that too. Maybe I didn’t. Okay. But yes, there is so much that goes along with being an HFC, and part of what why we’re doing it is because we don’t want to leave anything to chance. We don’t trust that either other people will do it the way we want it done. Because with the HFCs, there could be a level of perfectionism that is impacting that we could not want to be vulnerable by asking.
Think about it. If you identify at all as an HFC, really think about how good are you at asking other people for help? How good at you, how good are you at delegating to others? And my feeling is probably not that great. Yes. Okay, Tracy said, I feel like everyone expects me to pay because I’m the one who’s traditionally successful. So I feel guilty and always offer, alright, so this is a financial boundary and it is very HFC because you want to avoid the awkward conversation. And here’s the thing with the expectations, I think that a really important aspect of this, Tracy could be having a conversation, right? It isn’t fair. And you’re not the only one who feels this way. When I met my husband, when I met Vic, he was very successful and he paid for everything for everybody. And I did not like it.
I felt like it was weird. It was like it made the friendships out of balance according to me. And the longer I got in there, I was still a very active HFC that changed. But I can understand that feeling, and I have seen this with a lot of therapy clients, if they’re sort of the first to go to college or the first to do well in their family, the family expects. And I’ve been in this situation myself too, Tracy, where, but actually once I got into recovery from HFC, I was able to give in a healthy way. And the question is always this, can I give without being resentful? Because if we can’t give without being resentful, then we shouldn’t do it. And I think that you guys know, if you’re wondering, if you are watching this now or later and you’re wondering, I wonder if I’m a high-functioning codependent, how will I know?
Well, we could start with you taking a resentment inventory because this is a way that you’ll be guided to areas and relationships in your life that perhaps you are overgiving. And again, this isn’t about blaming the other people in our lives. It’s like we’re really not doing that. When you get into recovery from being a high-functioning codependent, you start to really understand, wow, Taylor Swift is right. Me, I’m the problem. It’s me. I actually am. And we feel so obligated in this overdeveloped sense of responsibility. So I feel like if you do a resentment inventory, you go, okay, who am I feeling resentment towards? Alright, you get that. Then you go, what is my 50% of this scenario? Because it’s always both. It takes two to tango. It’s always 50 you and 50 them, even if you’re 50% is just staying in a relationship.
And then once we look at it, so let’s just say you’re mad at your sister because she comes to your house and borrow something but doesn’t ask you about it. She doesn’t tell you about it. That is something where you have to go, I’m resentful, right? The irony though, a little bit of irony with HFCs is that I wrote a whole book on boundaries and in that book, a lot of the positioning was how do we make other people stop trampling on our boundaries? Then I come to realize by writing a book on high-functioning codependency, and actually there’s one chapter in Boundary Boss on high-functioning codependency that we can be the little boundary, but we didn’t really know it. We don’t think it we’re like, well, I had a client who had an adult son who was terrible with money, and she was like, well, I just transferred money to his account at the end of the month, so make sure that he’s not short.
And I’m like, you’ve realized that you’re not really helping him, right? He’s got to figure out his money. Crap, he’s 38 and you doing that. What we’re saying to kids when we over parent them, when we can’t stop fixing for them, what we’re saying to kids are the kid is saying, help me. I think I’m a loser. I can’t do it. And when you go, okay, I’ll fix it. You’re saying, I agree with you. I actually think you’re a loser too. We both know you can’t do it. And as a parent, your job is to go is to see the highest and best in your kid and go, you know what? This might suck, but I think you could do it. I believe in you. You are resourceful. I’m not paying your rent because I have no doubt that you can do it. And that is more loving and more anxiety inducing for an HFC. But it is definitely more loving than saving them because the self-esteem that you don’t have when that’s happening is not great.
TS: Okay. There’s a lot I want to talk to you about here, Terri, because part of what I want to do is I want to get underneath, if you will, what the drivers are in our character formation in our early life such that we fall into these HFC compulsions. What’s driving those traits and behaviors?
TC: Well, if we were to just speak from an emotional point of view, it’s fear. It’s fear of being rejected. It’s fear of chaos. It’s fear of being out of control. It’s fear of bad things happening. So the driver from an emotional point of view, even though when I was an active HFC wouldn’t have told you I was afraid I wasn’t, that was in the basement, that was in my unconscious mind, that’s what was driving me. I would just say, I’m just generous like that. I just care about people. I’m just Mother Teresa like that. You know me, Tami.
So that’s the feeling or that’s the emotion that’s driving. But let’s talk about what environmental circumstances create this drive. I hate to have to say let’s back to the scene of the crime, otherwise known as your family of origin, but we must because this is where these seeds are planted. And even if you had no abuse in your background, none, let’s just say you had no actual abuse, but you were raised as a woman. You were a little girl and raised as a woman, you were literally trained to be accommodating. Where’s my happy girl? Turn that Fran around. Hey, if you don’t have anything nice to say, little one say anything at all. Nobody is encouraging us to tell the truth about how we feel to assert ourselves. Nobody’s like, oh my God, grow up and become a CFO. That wasn’t happening. It was be nice.
Make sure everyone thinks you’re nice and be accommodating. Be compliant, right? Kids should be seen and not heard. There is a lot of this, and it’s not just our families of origin, it’s them and then society. What is considered feminine? How is it okay to be as a woman? And this is one of the top accolades you could get. People would talk about, oh my God, you would love Betty. She would give anyone the shirt off her back. I want to be like Betty, keep your ing shirt on. Why no discernment? Why are we giving anybody our clothes? And why is that being celebrated? Why is that level of self abandonment being like, yeah, Betty. So there’s many reasons, societal, patriarchy, all of the way that we were raised that tell us that the more we do for others, this is what mothers are known for, this is what we do and what we’re expected to do.
Look at the whole conversation that’s coming out in the past five to 10 years about emotional labor, the invisible and unpaid work that gets done 99% of the time by women that keeps life going. The food doesn’t shop itself. It doesn’t make itself, the toilet paper doesn’t replace itself. The kids’ dental appointments don’t make themselves. This is all stuff that is marginalized, minimized, not important, but women are doing it on top of also having careers. So I feel like this, you get into this over-functioning vibe, you almost feel like you must do it, especially if you’re a designated parent in a family system. Somebody has got the freedom to go to the gym when they want to.
Someone else knows where the kids are and when they need to be picked up and what’s happening and who’s eating where and who’s sleeping over and what birthday party. This is all it takes bandwidth to do. I think it’s a combination of nature and nurture of why we become high-functioning codependents because some people just become codependents who are less functioning, who are more dependent on the addict. And it’s a different twisted way of relating where with high-functioning codependency, as I want to say, nobody’s checking, nobody’s checking on me. You know what I’m saying? Because people look at me and go, duh, obviously she’s fine. And all the women in my practice, and so many of these women who’ve been interviewing me about this, if I say, who’s checking in on you? They’re all like literally nobody. Maybe my girlfriends, my closest friends, but the illusion is that we have it all together. You know what I mean?
TS: Now, I have a couple questions here just about the language that you’re using, because even the subtitle of Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency, I thought to myself, I’m not sure I really understand what Terri means by cycle. Why is it a cycle? How is it a cycle?
TC: It’s a generational cycle, is what I mean. So this is handed down, where did I learn to be an HFC from Jan Cole, my mother, this is where I learned it. Where did she learn it from? Mildred Weir, her mother. So there is the cycle. It’s really a generational cycle, is what I mean.
TS: Okay, that’s clear. Yes. Okay. And then the use of the word recovery. You’ve said a couple times in my recovery, and this is not about cure, it’s about recovery. And of course recovery is a word that I think most people associate with addiction of some kind. And so you’re describing HFC is an addictive
TC: Pattern in your view. It is, and I’m not going to rename it as an addiction, but here’s the thing. Look at the compulsion that we’re talking about. We are acting in a compulsive way. There is no space between the thought and the action. Someone needs something. I meet a stranger on the train, it’s settled. You’re coming home with me. There’s no thoughts. And it’s the same thing when we’re auto advice giving. We’re just out there doing it. We’re just saying what we see a need. We want to fill the need. We see a problem, we want to avoid that. We want to help diffuse the problem. I’m worried about the sink, right? I see people waiting. I’m so dialed into their frustration or my projection of their frustration that I need to literally raise my hand and tell the girl that I could move. Those are not mindful conscious choices.
These are compulsions. Hey, I might’ve thought about it and still done that, but in that situation I got to a tipping point discomfort and then just was like, Hey, I can move. So I do see them as very similar, and I also talk about this in the book, any behavioral ingrained and habituated behavioral patterns that we have that we’re changing, there are things that happen in life that can kick us back to old behavior. Just like with addiction where we could have a slip, a really rough time, could inspire us to drink even though we’re committed to not, and then we can get back on the wagon. This is the same thing. So I had this experience during the pandemic where I was writing my very first book for you, thank you, during my very first global pandemic, and my mother was diagnosed with cancer, a brutal kind of cancer like five days before the world shut down.
So she waited a month to start treatment because anyway, point was everything I knew about being in recovery from being a high-functioning codependent, the moment my mother was diagnosed just literally flew out the window and I was just micromanaging the crap out. I mean, I’m the youngest of four sisters. I was planning everybody. I had a calendar. It was so much where my old ways came back so fast and I was trying so hard to bind my anxiety around my mother’s mortality, my fear of her dying, my fear of the treatment, killing her, all the things that were there. Now, I got a hold of it a couple of weeks in and I was able to come back from it. But it’s not like your desire when you’re in HFC,
It gets better and better the more you stay on your own side of the street and the more that you healthily help the people in your life and relate to the people in your life where we just don’t assume that we know what everyone should be doing and that we let people, we’re willing to get into the foxhole with people in pain and ask them, Hey, how can I best support you right now? Instead of auto advice giving, we can learn to ask expansive questions. We can let there be silence. We can allow the person to process and think. And even if their answer is, I don’t know, how can I best support you right now? Maybe they say, I don’t know. You say, okay, but I’m here and I’ll just sit with you. I want to talk about what’s required to be able to do that. As in the example with your sister, when there’s someone that you really love and care about and you see that they’re suffering this realization, it’s not yours to do. It’s not on my side of the street to use your metaphor, which I think is a very clear, accessible, that’s just not on my side of the street. What’s required of me to stay on my side.
A lot of self-awareness, which is how everything that I teach starts with raising our self-awareness around the behaviors. What am I doing? Becoming radically curious and compassionate about where am I overstepping or where am I inserting myself? Getting used to being uncomfortable, telling yourself, Hey, you know what? This friend is going to come to me and they’re going to ask me for my advice. And instead of giving it, which may be you’ll give at the end, I’m committing myself to having every conversation start with, well first before we do anything, tell me what you think you should do. What are your thoughts? What are your feelings? You can learn to ask expansive questions. You can learn to witness someone with compassion, to literally hold space. When people in our space love to talk about holding space, do you know what is not holding space, telling people what to do, auto advice giving that’s fixing that is not what holding space is.
Tolerating our own discomfort around their discomfort and being with them anyway, even if we can’t fix them. And that is a tall order. So we do it a little bit at a time, Tim, it’s not something, we don’t change this overnight, and I still the same way some days, I think it would really be nice to have a glass of wine right now, but the difference, because I’m in recovery, I’m not going to have a glass of wine. This is sort of the same thing. Sometimes my gut instinct a lot of times will still kick up where I want to tell my husband what I think he should do or I want to. And it doesn’t mean when we’re brainstorming, of course I can tell him my opinion, right? This is not to say because it’s funny. People online will get all extreme and be like, oh. So I can never, ever, ever, ever tell anyone what I think. I’m like, no. Obviously that makes no sense. It’s not having it be the first stop on the bus is telling them what you think. The first stop on the bus has to be you being genuinely curious as to what they think because their side of the street and it’s their life. We need to learn to let the chips fall where they may when they’re not our chips.
TS: Alright, let’s for a moment, look at applying this principle in intimate relationships where of course, I very much want to please my partner. I want to anticipate her needs. I want her to be thrilled. And then I can see though, when the overgiving comes in through this resentment that you point out, I can see it and you offer an exercise in the book that you can share, make a list of things that bother you that you haven’t shared with your partner, and then pick one of those issues. And I thought, well, actually, I’ve done that in the past. And then my partner says, and I have something I’d like to share with you that’s been bothering me. So one, I have to be prepared for that.
And this is a whole sequence that requires part of me is I think I’d rather just stay slightly fuming and resentful. Then I would have to deal God. Now we’re going to have to sort through all of this really
TC: Well, but here’s the thing, why don’t we change the lens on that? You can reframe it. First of all, this is only for people who feel a lack of satisfaction. They feel like there could be more closeness or more joy or more intimacy or more fun or more laughing. Some people are like, listen, I’m an HFC and I love it. I’m like, go. You do it till you die. This book is not for people who love being a high-functioning codependent and don’t want to change it. This, if you feel that, if that resentment for you starts to feel like it’s getting a little in the way and that might feel more threatening, then the idea of one by one telling the truth about the things that might be bothering you. What my husband and I do, and I talk about this in the book too, I imagine is we have a state of the union, which I’ve been talking about for years, where every other week on a Sunday, we stay in bed and we talk about what are we doing Great.
This was great. You helped me. This was amazing. We fooled around spontaneously, that was awesome. Whatever the things are that we’re doing great. And then what could we be doing better? Is there any way, oh, I just interviewed Gay Hendrix and he had this great thing that he does with his wife where it’s like the question at the end of the day, is there anything I could do to love you better? I was like, oh my God, I’m going to cry right now. That is so sweet. Where’s my tissue? But you could do a state of the union every other week, and it normalizes having these conversations and not making it be, listen, nobody ever wants to talk. When we go, we need to talk. Nobody wants to talk when anyone says, the second we say it, we’re like, I definitely don’t want to talk now. So when you normalize it by having a state of the union, we get the New York Times, we have our coffee, we stay in bed for two hours and shoot the shit that normalizes us talking about things that could be problematic if we let them go. So I say you could do that.
TS: You have a questionnaire in the book questionnaires, but one of them on codependent relationship questionnaires, questions you can ask yourself for reflection. And one of them is, do you become easily defensive if you feel you’re being criticized? And I’d love to learn more about that and how if you do become someone, a friend of mine that I know some
TC: Person, yeah, I have that friend too.
TS: If my friend becomes easily defensive when being criticized, how does that connect them to being an HFC?
TC: Well, we’re teeny bit, we’re a little bit of know-it-alls as HFCs a little bit. And we work extremely hard to be above reproach, which is why we over-function and overgive and overdue, many of us suffer from perfectionism. So we take criticism very personally because we’ve put a lot of bandwidth into doing things right, into being very thorough into thinking of all the things that could go wrong. So I think that part of that is because we’re not just going through life. So we want to explain what our thought pattern was on that. Well, lemme tell you about the reason why I did it, which of course is actually is defending why we did it. I think that a way to combat defensiveness though, because in every relationship defensiveness is bad. We know that. What does Harriet Lerner say? Defensiveness is the arch enemy of listening.
So we really want to put a cap on that. The way that I did it, or my friend did, it was slowing down as I continued being able to, I’ve had a meditation practice for 20 years, all of that would buy me time and it would buy me reaction and response time when I was feeling defensive. And I would always remind myself in that moment how much Vic loves me. If he’s saying something to me. The truth is he’s my biggest supporter, my husband, we’ve been together 27 years. He’s my favorite person in the world, the most interesting person I’ve ever met. And if he’s saying something to me, it’s important. And being defensive is sort of minimizing it. So I’ve changed it in my mind. And he’s also soft. He’s soft because he knows I’m a little thin skinned. So if he’s got something to say, he does it with a whole bunch of love and adoration wrapped in a big hug, which makes it a little bit better.
TS: Alright. And then I have a different friend who might relate to this part of the questionnaire. I often compare myself to others and feel worse as a result. And how does comparing ourselves to others and then feeling worse, how does that relate to being HFC?
TC: Well, we have very high standards for ourselves. And sometimes we can also, I mean, if I look at my clients and see how accomplished they are, but they’re also the same people who can be jealous or feel threatened by other people. They’re the same people who can write a perfect book, the most amazing book, and then there’ll be like the 2% that wasn’t exactly what they wanted to say is the thing that they obsess over. So if we’re looking at the qualities of being an HFC, having high standards would be one of them. So if you negatively compare yourself to someone, it doesn’t make you feel good, right? And that can be HFC behavior. And again, not everybody though, it depends on how secure and insecure you are.
TS: As we’re having this conversation, and you talked about the very many high-functioning women, primarily that you work with in your practice and how this categorization came actually from your client observations and working with people, it made me think that in a way, and when you talked about breaking the cycle cycle that we’ve inherited from our upbringing, it’s really a type of feminist manifesto. If you could say that in terms of what you’re proposing here. And I wonder how you might comment on that.
TC: I’m going to say yes, because this is paradigm shifting. This could be, and the way people are responding to it, an actual revolution in some way of the same way that we’re having a revolution right now around menopause and the way we’re going to deal with it and how doctors are going to learn something about it. And now the government’s going to put some money into it. My friend just did a documentary about it, like something’s happening in the ether and what’s happening politically in the us, we want something different. And I think that HFC is putting a finger on and words to something that women have been experiencing since the beginning of time, but the cost is so high that we don’t want to, we want the last chapter in the book is called Surrender, right? It’s about we don’t have to control everything.
We are not responsible for everything. We can allow the chips to fall where they may when they’re not our chips. We can enjoy our lives, we can love our people and not fix their problems. We can love our people and not think that we know better than them. It’s so presumptuous too. I mean, Tami, we have to look at it from the truth. Like it’s so presumptuous for me to think that I know what everyone in the world should be doing, that I know what all my friends should be doing, that I know how this person should handle their divorce. Like the yum yucking of it all, the judging of it all. It’s exhausting and presumptuous. So in putting it down the glass ceiling of our own making that is created from bleeding, this level of bandwidth all day, every day comes down. We can smash our own glass ceiling in our relationships, in our careers, in our friendships and our families of origin by taking back so much of our energy and power.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Terri Cole, she’s the author of the new book Too Much instead of too much as you say in the book, just right. Maybe you can explain that what you mean by just right. What is that as the antidote to too much?
TC: It means that we don’t have to over-function. We can function at a level that is loving, that is proper, that is appropriate, that is equitable. We can create interdependent relationships instead of codependent relationships where there’s over and under-functioning dynamics that create resentment, that make people feel unknown. When you’re just right, there’s mutuality. Your relationships are more equitable, not perfectly equitable. We’re humans, but more equitable where your needs the end of the end, Tim, is that what you think? What you want and how you feel matters? And it has to matter to you more than what anyone else wants, thinks or feels. And we were not taught that that’s okay, but that is mandatory. It doesn’t mean we won’t compromise. Of course, you’re in a long-term relationship. So am I. Obviously we compromise all the time, but I think that a lot of women do not go through life thinking what I think what I want and how I feel matters to me the most.
And then what Vic thinks, wants and feels right. And I sacrifice all the time so he gets what he wants or so that I’m a part of his solution, but I can’t expect him to do that for me or anyone else because they can’t. So it’s really a stepping into our power. And without apology, without fear, you are lovable just as you are. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself to be loved. Think about what we’re going to do in the world with all of this gained bandwidth. We’re changing the world, but we need our bandwidth to do it.
TS: The book is called Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency. You can Learn more and there were also special teaching tools and bonus gifts at HFCbook.com, high-functioning codependency: HFCbook.com. Terri, thank you so much.
TC: Thank you so much for having me, Tami.
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