Conversations of a Co-dependent

“I’ll do it. Let me do it. You look tired.”

“I don’t really need anything new. Why don’t we just make my car do and get you a new one?”

“I’m sorry, I’ll turn the music down; I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get in your way. I was just trying to vacuum.”

“After the drinking and the cheating and the beatings, which he said I deserved so I must have, now I’m divorced and finally have someone who is such a good person. But……why does he insist on helping me with the household chores? I don’t want anyone helping me. I can do it myself. And why does he want to take me shopping for new clothes? He wants to watch me when I play guitar. Doesn’t he know I want to be alone; that I need to crawl into myself and hide? He won’t let me give him his ring back. He tells me he’ll never leave me unless he dies.”

“He has lung cancer; he has four months to live. I am so filled with pain; the shame is suffocating me. It is my fault. Somehow I’m to blame.”

“Someone new is in my life. The men keep coming, one after another. Maybe this one is good. “

“He doesn’t like me wearing shorts if I’m out doing yard work but it’s so hot today so maybe just this once he won’t get angry.”

“I must have done something to make him angry. He’s never hit me before. I try to do everything he says but I know I must have screwed up. What is wrong with me?

“Why does he insist that since I’m his wife it isn’t rape? He wakes me up repeatedly to have sex. Several times a day he has to have sex and I know that means rape because I can’t take it anymore. It brings terrible memories, times when I was 13, laying in the bottom bunk bed and my father comes in in the middle of the night. I can’t take the rapes. I keep fighting back. I feel like I’m losing my mind, buried in terror.”

“He keeps telling me I’m no good, that I’m a bad person. It must be true.”

“I went to my first Co-Dependent meeting tonight with my best friend”. After the meeting she said, ‘I don’t need to go to any more meetings. I think being co-dependent is noble. I know my husband does drugs and cheats on me but I just have to accept it. That’s what my mother told me when my grandfather chased me around the house when I was 13, pulled up my blouse and played with my breasts. She said, ‘He’s just a dirty old man, ignore him.’

“I said, ‘How did they find me?’”

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