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Notes -
What have you heard about codependency in popular culture or your circles, what have you heard about Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, and do you know why I’m asking about both together?
I’ll post more on this after church this morning, whether this gets any replies or not.
Codependency is a word with a misleading etymology (like schizophrenia meaning “split mind” and being confused with dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly multiple personality disorder). It comes from the discovery that most people in relationships with substance dependents (the less judgmental term for drug addicts and alcoholics) tend to have some personal issues and patterns of behavior of their own keeping them in the relationship. It was later discovered to be the same thought patterns and patterns of behavior of serial divorcees, serial victims of abuse, people with chronic loneliness, and other people with constant relationship troubles. It tends to run generationally in families with issues of abuse, divorce, and substance use. For every visible relationship addict or drama addict, there’s a dozen functional codependents struggling through their day-to-day life. It is a known failure mode of human socialization.
At its core, much of codependency is boundary issues: the inability to separate one’s thoughts and feelings from one’s perception of what others think, feel, or opine. Actively codependent relationships tend to be characterized by enmeshment, where one partner/friend is trying to run or fix some part of the other’s life, and the other is letting them, each for their own reasons. Not all toxic relationships are codependent, but most codependent relationships are at least somewhat toxic. Most codependents feel hollow or empty, and use other people, or attempts to help someone live their life, to try to fill the void.
Ayn Rand was a Russian Jew born in 1905. Her family lost their small business under Lenin’s rule, and her family lost their lives under Stalin. She hated Communism more than most people will ever hate anything in their lives, and made it her life’s ambition to eradicate socialism through art and philosophy.
She traced the philosophical roots of socialism to two concepts: collectivism and altruism. Collectivism is the belief/worldview/way of setting up societies in which groups are treated more important than individuals and their rights. Altruism proper is the belief that a person’s life is only worthwhile if it is lived for others (not the mere belief or value judgment that helping other people is a good and worthwhile thing to do). She made it clear that these stand in contrast to individualism, the belief that individuals have rights that no group can take away justly, and egoism, the belief that a person’s life is rightly to be lived for their own values, happiness, and worth.
Objectivism, her philosophy, is based on the belief that humans are the most amazing and glorious creatures to walk the Earth, when driven by objective values and living through reason, rational self-interest in the short and long term, and the most suffering or cruel creatures on Earth when they are not. (This is a very brief and extremely reductive description of Objectivism. The real thing is best absorbed through her essay anthology The Virtue of Selfishness.)
Her former disciple Nathaniel Branden (from whom she was estranged over specific relationship issues, ironically) wrote extensively on the psychological roots of what would come to be known as codependency. Some have called him the father of the self-esteem movement. Here’s a list of some of his best insight porn.. His well-known Six Pillars of Self-Esteem are useful reading for anyone with codependency:
From Branden’s introduction:
(Tagging @comicsansstein @non_radical_centrist @George_E_Hale and @cjet79 instead of individual replies.)
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