Cover photograph supplied by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
Ignoring someone is a small wish for their death.
Deep inside a phobia lies a desire. A phobia is a dream of desire.
The neurotic wish to become the main character in your own life, but have other people make you one.
The counterdependent fear: everything I strongly desire might make me dependent, so I will live in a way that lets me desire as little as possible.
Self-blame in response to criticism — “yes, I know I’m bad” — is a passive defensive strategy: choosing an excuse and inaction instead of apologies and change.
The codependent person does not want the dependent person to become independent. They want that person to depend on them just as much as on whatever they are hooked on.
For the codependent person, the desire for control defeats the desire for freedom and a life of their own. The more helpless the dependent person, the more power the codependent person has. A very dubious pleasure, that power.
The more complex the task we undertake, the more often things will not work. Tolerating the frustration of not succeeding immediately is one foundation of adaptability.
In dependency, autonomy feels like a threat rather than freedom. Dependency makes the choice for you, leaving no choice to make. In autonomy, you must decide for yourself, and your own decisions mean responsibility for your choice.
A lack of separation means being unable to recognise another person’s right to any feelings, even difficult ones — dissatisfaction, for instance. Trying to prevent unwanted feelings then shifts responsibility for your choices onto the person you supposedly want to protect.
The wish to hand choices to others or have a ready-made template reflects a lack of confidence that you can cope if the choice disappoints, or grieve if an unsuitable choice cannot be changed. Adulthood means being able to cope.
An adult differs from a child in having the possibility of choosing how to build a life. If someone is well past legal adulthood but has no choices, closer examination may reveal a choice to remain in a childlike or even infantile position.
The basis of codependency is excessive involvement in another person’s needs and disconnection from your own. Behind it is the belief that meeting your own needs is improper, selfish and shameful. Care must therefore become a mutual obligation: I will rescue the dependent person now, and then they will take care of me.
Internal conflict can drive us through life. You want to lie down, but great things await; ambition defeats laziness and you move towards your goal. Yet a conflict that becomes too bitter, offers no resolution and wears you out can turn from an engine into a source of chronic stress.
Sometimes I treat people not for stress, but with stress.
A good image of the freeze response: trying to fall asleep between the rails while a train passes over you. Then the train has gone, but you are still lying there.
Dependency is avoidance behaviour. Instead of encountering their own feelings, the dependent person takes to their heels.
Besides freeze, flight and fight, there are also cling and submit responses. Submission is the basis of codependency.
In hypochondria, ordinary bodily signals are interpreted as symptoms of illness. A twinge here, a rumble there — clearly, the dreaded cancer. The body as a traitor.
Part of therapy is simply educational work. People’s ideas about how human beings and the psyche work can be very hazy.
Psychology Notebook is a translated personal archive of observations, study and lecture notes, paraphrases, quotations and remembered ideas. A fragment’s presence here does not establish exclusive authorship or scientific consensus. These are notebook fragments, not clinical guidance.
About Psychology Notebook · Fragments from a Therapist’s Notebook