Freeing Our Energy From Codependence
By Kristen Fox
One of the questions most commonly asked in conscious creation is, “How come it’s so easy to manifest what I want in one area of my life but not another?” The fundamental answer here is that in the areas where our energy is free, we easily manifest, where it is not free, we experience struggle.
Looking more closely at this in my own life, the ideas of codependence and emotional manipulation came into my awareness. Energetically, these ideas describe situations where our energy (emotion – energy in motion) is tied either with another person’s or a certain kind of situation. Most often, they are cases where we are giving this other element energy and then getting some kind of energy back. At first, this doesn’t seem so bad, after all, it happens all the time, doesn’t it? But those are the exact situations where our energy isn’t free. Instead our energy is caught up in emotional twistings and a conditional back and forth, cyclical exchange – the drama of a struggle, no matter how “polite” or “normal” it appears on the surface. Getting approval from an authority when we do what they tell us to is an excellent example – party A gets the feeling of approval and acceptance and party B gets the feeling of being in control. An exchange, yes, but it’s not “free” creation.
What we AREN’t doing in a situation like the one above is looking within. Instead, we are looking to another person for that energy. Sometimes others CAN help us find our own source by reflecting something back for us, but what I’m talking about here is a habitual situation of NEED and searching for energy (in whatever form) outside the self.
Then, when we try to create something that falls outside of the narrow conditions of that codependent relationship, that’s where we usually get stuck – If we try to create something that our authority figure would NOT approve of, we are suddenly faced with a situation where we don’t know how to look to ourselves for approval (energetically support). We have this big desire we want to create but our energy and focus keep going back to whether or not our codependent partner would “approve”, etc. We suddenly experience fear of what will happen if we try to do something on our own and often, an energy struggle will ensue – the momentum of old habits and well-trusted patterns trying to reassert itself by upping the anty, either with sweet, tempting words or by threatening some kind of action.
A basic test to see whether or not your energy is free with a person or situation is to ask yourself whether or not it seems to take a lot of work or effort to keep something going as it stands, whether something would stand naturally on its own without “effort” and whether or not you would change it if you could, even a small part of it. For if you are denying a part of your own expression in order to maintain a situation or relationship, your energy is not free to choose/create what you really want. Instead, your energy is going into supporting this structure that is no longer an accurate reflection of where you are in your life. That’s where effort comes from and why all the channeled information out nowadays tells us that life is fundamentally effortless, unless we choose for it not to be. And when we choose struggle, we are struggling against the expression of our own energy, which then gets mirrored in our lives, exhausts us, and makes us wonder why we can’t create what we want.
I think I’m finally on the road to understanding why my “higher self” once said, “By moving to a new level of relatedness and relationship, you alter the basic dynamics of all relationships. Consider this process as the higher road, particularly when compared to the old road of acting out all the scenarios and struggling to understand and interpret them and hoping that others in relationship with you can work with you to overcome the patterns.”
The challenge here isn’t so much in the struggle itself, for we are very used to struggle as a “norm.” It is in what happens when the struggle STOPS – that big, wide-open ballroom we step into when before we were just trying to find a place to sit in a tiny, crowded hallway. Closeness and connection are no longer defined in terms of slowing down our own movement so we can all have a chance (limitation), they are now defined in terms of us each being free to dance however we choose.
And that feels VERY different – and that disfamiliarity can send us running back to what feels comfortable and reliable. We see ourselves letting go of old relationships/situations and having yet to find new ones, and sometimes fear will tell you that if you take one more step ahead, you’ll find yourself all alone.
In undergoing this change in my own life, I found myself actually trying to unconsciously recreate a few codependent situations, unsuccessfully, of course.
The wide-open space, that lack of emotional attachment to conditions and limitations, felt so BLANK at first. This wasn’t “better” I thought – it was… undefined! It actually felt LONELY. However, that loneliness wasn’t caused by lack of connection, it was caused by focusing on what was no longer in my life. If you’re sitting in a bright room, you can still choose to morn the loss of darkness.
Someone once said that in coming into physical reality, we learn to disconnect from our Source and to rely instead on what amounts to a pack mentality. In the old survival frame of mind, codependence was almost a REQUIREMENT. We were free to do what we wanted by following the “rules.” But conscious creation, expressing our energy in physical reality while also integrated with our (nonphysical) Source knows no rules, it only knows desire, joy, and expression. And what was once difficult to create, now easily and effortlessly unfolds before you. Relationships will feel different, that’s for sure, but after the initial shock, we realize how much fun DANCING can be and how many others are dancing happily next to us.
[Originally published in The Edge, September 1999.]