How does family dysfunction produce codependency?
When parents exhibit problems that bring chaos to a family, the children are forced to abandon being children and must enter survival mode. In survival mode, children can become hypervigilent – that is, they compulsively scan their environment to detect the next threat to their safety and well-being. These children quickly learn to ignore their feelings and needs because they perceive their caretakers as too overwhelmed to care about them. Or, worse, they have learned that they will be punished for expressing their feelings and needs. Thus, they reject introspection as a dangerous luxury that might interfere with being alert for the next external threat. Ultimately, these children learn to disconnect from their feelings. Children of dysfunctional families come to believe they are responsible for their parents’ problems. As a result they develop low self-esteem, believing themselves to be incompetent or undeserving of love because they have failed their troubled parents. In other words,
