Episode Transcript Hey everyone! Welcome to another episode of Time of Feel. I’m your hostess, Holly Soulie, and today, we’re going to talk about overcoming codependency. When you find out you’re codependent, it can be a little shocking. That was definitely the case for me. But once I knew, I could start taking steps to work on it and try to overcome it. So, to start off, I want to share with you the moment where I realized I wasn’t healthy in my relationships. Back in 2011, I was doing a semester abroad in China. And even though I was studying marketing, I had regularly Skyped with my pharmacist father back home to ask him questions about my homework.  When I went to class the next day, I mentioned to my professor that I had asked my dad about the homework. Her response was, “Is your dad the source for everything in your life?” I had apparently been talking about him a lot, but I didn’t realize it was enough to have ever given someone this impression. Also, it really was silly to ask him questions on the topic I was studying. He had absolutely zero knowledge or expertise about marketing! In that moment, I was so ashamed. I remember going back to my apartment and crying because I was so upset with this realization. At that point, my dad really was the source of everything for me.  The more I thought about it, the more it became clear that I wasn’t very independent from him. In fact, when I researched “how to be independent from your parents,” I discovered codependency. So, what is Codependency? Well, I found on Psychology Today that codependency is defined as a behavioral condition in a relationship where one person enables another person's addiction, poor mental health, immaturity, irresponsibility, or under-achievement. Yikes. Reading that, I knew it described what I was experiencing. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to do. But a switch had been turned on inside of me. So, I decided to start finding ways to become more independent and to emotionally rely less on my friends and loved ones. Here’s how I did that. The first step was that I Started Getting in Touch with Myself as an individual. Because, one of the problems with codependency is something called enmeshment. That’s where you lose sight of where you begin, and where the other person ends. So, I decided to start journaling to figure out who I was. This was the simplest, cheapest way I could start spending quality time with myself. Every day, I wrote down the question, who am I? And each day I would record my response. Sometimes it would be a drawing, sometimes it would be words. Whatever came to me that day is what I would put down. As I started doing this daily exercise in my journal, I began to spend more time with my own ideas of who I truly am in a way that no one else could define for me. Also, I started discovering what I wanted for myself. And it helped me see myself more as an individual, and less as someone who was merely quote on quote codependent. So, step one was that I started getting in touch with my individuality. Step #2 was that I started Addressing all of my Uncomfortable, Repressed Emotions When I was journaling, I realized that I had a lot of repressed emotions toward my dad, especially. And they were really deep and intense.