Co-Dependent Relationships and Financial Dependency – Why They Might Persist Despite Our Best Efforts to Change

15 July 2021

Themes: Relationships; Co-dependecy; money; financial independence; love; childhood wounds; trauma; personal growth; true worth; self-esteem

Beneath our co-dependent relationships and financial dependency habits lie our early childhood gaping wounds of a lack of love, attention and value for who we innately are.

If we can see our continued need for support, attention, money, and craving to be seen and valued for what they are: outer symptoms of the aching pain of our empty, inner chasm then we can start to look for ways to address the underlying causes, rather than these symptomatic tendencies.

In the end, we all want and need the same core things: to be valued for who we are; to be attended to and to be loved. It’s just that we go about trying to fill ourselves up with these other things in our adult life to try to be like everyone else. But, if we carry within us a large empty hole then it is that which needs filling, and only love and genuine compassion from ourselves and healthy relationships with the right people can begin to fill up the void.

We avoid our inner void when we try to meet these core emotional, soul wounds through poor relationships and messy transactions. So many people say they have a problem with money. But it’s not money, it’s what the money symbolises – a means of trying to get validation for who we are and what we are worth; a means of control over others to demand they give us what we so desperately need, and a futile method of trying to satiate our true, inner needs through an empty meaningless number.

Always beneath the problems and symptoms lies the real causes and always this comes down to a pervasive feeling that we just weren’t loved enough for who we were. Maybe now we can start to fill this chasm, one kind, self-compassionate act at a time.

^© Angela Dunning, The Horse's Truth, 15th July 2021