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hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here on this channel we talk about different models and different methods for understanding ourselves and other people in order to get more of
Heidi Priebe outlines five thought distortions that keep people in codependent patterns and explains how to recognize and heal them for healthier, more secure relationships.
Key Takeaways
- Codependent patterns are often internalized as 'love' from childhood, requiring conscious unlearning.
- Allowing others to experience natural consequences supports their growth and your healthier relating.
- Honest expression of hurt or discontent is more loving than protective distortion of reality.
- Secure relationships tolerate difference, boundaries, and temporary disconnection without panic.
- Self-awareness of your motives (e.g., rescuing to relieve your own discomfort) is key to change.
What the video covers
- Codependency often stems from internalizing 'wrong' relational patterns (thought distortions) learned in childhood, not just missing knowledge of healthy behavior.
- Distortion 1: believing love means saving someone from the consequences of their actions, which robs them of learning and growth.
- Rushing to fix others' pain is often driven by our own discomfort watching them struggle; naming this internally helps us stay aware.
- Distortion 2: believing it is unkind to express anger or hurt, leading to warping reality to protect others' feelings.
- Honest, direct communication about impact preserves trust and closeness, while inaccurate reassurance undermines it.
- Distortion 3 and beyond concern guilt-based apologizing and deceptive kindness, which keep relationships inauthentic.
- Romantic attraction often draws us to difference, while a relationship with someone identical offers little room for growth.
- Healthy intimacy requires clear boundaries, a sense of inner security, and the willingness to accept differences without treating them as threats.
- Falling out of connection briefly is not an emergency; secure relationships allow repair and reconnection.
- Secure love means offering forgiving, available connection and supporting others through learning rather than controlling their outcomes.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Right vs. Wrong Internalization in Relationships
- 01:30Why Knowing Healthy Behavior Isn't Enough
- 02:34Thought Distortion #1: Saving Others From Consequences
- 05:18Naming Your Rescuing Impulse
- 06:38Thought Distortion #2: Suppressing Anger to Protect Others
- 09:36Honesty, Reality, and Trust
- 12:00Differences, Boundaries, and Intimacy
- 17:58Secure Love and Forgiving Reconnection
- 19:43Recap and Closing
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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what we want out of our lives and our relationships and less of what we don't want and today what I want to talk about specifically is codependent relationships and some of the unhealthy or distorted thought patterns that we
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may have developed and internalized from a very young age that make it difficult for us to understand what a healthy relationship looks like so when it comes to attachment wounding developmental relational trauma anything that gets in the way of us relating directly and
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authentically to other people I think that there's often a couple different sides to a problem one is that we may not have had an example growing up of what a healthy relationship looked like so we didn't have the opportunity to
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observe and internalize secure attachment skills which I call not into internalizing the right thing right there's a knowledge Gap around what to do and I think that if that's the only challenge we're working with when it comes to building healthy relationships
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it's a little bit easier to correct the problem because as soon as we get those examples as soon as we're in relationship with secure others it can feel fairly straightforward to start internalizing that behavior but a lot of
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the time the problem runs much deeper than just not having internalized the right thing because often in the absence of the right or secure thing we also actively internalize the wrong thing as the right thing and if you've been
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around this channel for a while you know that I don't love using the words right and wrong in relation to Human Relationships I prefer to talk about what you want and what you don't want and how to get more of that so I just
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want to make it clear that in this case when I say the right thing versus the wrong thing I'm using the right thing as a placeholder for the more secure thing to do and the wrong thing is the more
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insecure and that's not to say that those things are inherently good or bad bad it's just to say that if our end goal is healthy secure relationships we're going to want to internalize as much of the secure thing as possible and
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be as aware as possible of when we're behaving from a more insecure place so when we internalize the wrong thing as the right thing what I'm going to call that throughout the remainder of this video is a thought Distortion so some
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area in which what we have learned or internalized to be loving and secure and healthy in relationship is actually getting us less of the secure Dynamic that we're looking for and without going any further into that we're going to
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jump right into five thought distortions that I personally had to work my way out of in order to understand the difference between a codependent relationship and a healthy secure relationship so all of these are taken from personal experience
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but I wanted to share them in case anyone else is still actively in the thick of these thought distortions and might benefit from having another perspective offered so without further Ado thought Distortion number one that might lead us to internalizing a
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codependent pattern of thinking and behaving as a secure one is the distorted belief that to love someone means to save them from the consequences of their own actions so if you grow up with early enmeshment or in a
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codependent family unit you may have learned love means rushing in the moment someone regrets one of their actions and kind of savioring that situation so that they don't have to feel the pain of what they have done now every once in a while
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is this a loving thing to do sure however there is a point where saving someone from the consequences of their own actions becomes enabling nobody ever really deeply learns anything until they are present with the consequences of what happens and so if someone we love
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has gotten themselves in a mess and we are swooping in to save them from the consequences of that mess before they have the chance to really understand what damage that mess caused for themselves in other people what we are
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robbing them of is the opportunity to learn and grow from their mistakes of course this does not mean we have to leave people completely alone when they're struggling but what it does mean is that we don't want to rush in too
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quickly to right or wrong that someone else has created for themselves if we're doing that there's often a slight air of selfishness about it maybe we want the other person to see us as a little bit of a hero maybe we want them to be
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impressed with how much we can help them maybe we feel like we're developing a reciprocal relationship where each of us helps each other clean up our messes when in reality a healthier more secure Dynamic would be one in which we
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supported each other in feeling the consequences of our own actions cleaning up our own messes and allowing ourselves the opportunity to learn from our mistakes emotional pain has a purpose emotional pain is there to alert us to our nose it shows us when we have
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reached a limit or behaved in a way that causes harm to ourself or other people we need to feel the consequences and the pain of our actions in order to learn and to change for the better and if we
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are swooping in every time someone makes a mistake cleaning up their messes for them and denying them the opportunity to feel and learn where their nose are we are denying them the opportunity to grow and sometimes it just helps to make that
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really explicit internally and even externally because it feels uncomfortable to watch someone we love struggle right so just naming that inside of ourselves when we want to rush in and caretake someone else can I take a moment with myself and go oh I feel so
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uncomfortable allowing this person to be in pain in my presence I really want to rush in and caretake them or I really want to rush in and solve this problem for them and I'm owning that a large part of that is kind of for me and maybe
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I can even let them know that hey I see you're really struggling and I really want to rush in and kind of take your pain away in any way that I can but I'm going to acknowledge that that's not my
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pain to decide what to do it so I want you to know that I care a lot about you and I'm here to support you and talk to you as you navigate through this but I'm not going to act on that part of myself
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that wants to fix this for you and that isn't always a conversation that it's appropriate to have with someone but at least being able to own that in ourselves can help us stay much more aware of what we're trying to do and why
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is it really because we want to help the other person when we try to take away someone's distress or more often than not is it that we feel uncomfortable watching someone be in distress and so we're robbing them of the opportunity to
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learn and grow from their mistakes thought Distortion number two that might lead you to believing codependency is a healthy model of relating rather than security is the belief that it is unkind to express anger or discontent or to
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otherwise let someone know when they have hurt you if you believe that they didn't mean to or there's some reason why they hurt you that they aren't in control of so this can very often be the case if let's say you grew up in a
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family where you have a parent who has mental health issues or other challenges on their plate and you learn to do that exoneration process in order to keep yourself in connection you may have learned to tell yourself something along
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the lines of if someone doesn't intend to hurt you it's unkind to let them know that they did in reality once again this is not true in the long run in the long run it is not kind to warp reality for
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other people in order to protect their feelings because if we do not have access to reality and to the real impact that we are making on other people we don't know how to fix the ways in which we're habitually showing up in a way
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that hurts other people and so we don't know how to stay in real close connection with people it often feels really nice in the moment to warp our internal reality a little bit when we're talking to someone else to make them
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feel better but in the long run all we're doing is giving them inaccurate information that they're going to go ahead and base their future decisions on because that's how learning works and it's important to note here that the
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opposite of this is not to tell someone they're a monster or a terrible person or take something they've done wrong and make it seem like it's a giant unsolvable character flaw for them it can be as simple as kind of slowing down
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in a conversation and going hey I notice that I'm feeling kind of defensive right now and I think that feeling of defensiveness started coming online when you started using this particular tone or when you said X Y or Z or hey the
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last time we were hanging out I left feeling a little uncomfortable like there was something about the way that we were connecting that fell off to me I don't really know what it is and it's not necessarily a huge deal but I just
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wanted to put it out there and maybe we can work together to figure out what's going on or we can just kind of leave that question open for a while but I just want you to have all the
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information that I have about what's alive for me inside of our dynamic or hey I'm noticing some resentment is starting to build for me around this one particular area of our relationship and I want to bring that up because I don't
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want that to be in the way of feeling close to you I really like when we feel close and connected and so I want to see if maybe we can work together to find a creative solution to this if the only
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ways of resolving conflict that we ever had modeled to us were avoidance of the conflict or direct personal and frankly kind of mean attacks on other people's character we're probably going to default most of the time to the former
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because it's what keeps us in connection but there's a way to stay in connection without attacking someone's character and without neglecting our own experience of the relationship and it's simply being honest about what's alive for us when we're in connection with
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someone else and giving that other person the opportunity to see clearly what impact they're having on us and what they do with that information from that point is completely up to them but at least we know we have done our part
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in allowing them to see reality exactly as it is which in the long run is one of the kindest things we can possibly do for another person if we really care about their growth how health and development as a human being so I like
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to remind myself that overtaking responsibility particularly in relationships with people who tend to undertake responsibility or who tend to really struggle to understand what their responsibility is as an adult it's kind of like handing an alcoholic drink to an
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alcoholic and going there's no alcohol in this we're deceiving them by not being honest if I'm apologizing and saying things were all my fault when I kind of know things were not all my fault and I only really want to take
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responsibility for what was now I'm conspiring and creating this false world for this other person where they don't really understand where it's important for them to take responsibility and start behaving in more pro-social ways now this doesn't mean that I sit them
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down and give them an intense lecture on all of the things they're doing wrong it just means I'm honest about the ways in which they're affecting me and the emotions that are arising in me when I'm in relationship with them so that they
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can have accurate information about what's happening right I'm not saving their ego at the expense of their awareness of reality Ergo their mental health Distortion number three that can often lead us to believing codependent patterns of behavior are secure ones is
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the belief that closeness means being the same as someone else and not deviating from them in any major way particularly if you grew up in a family that had a lot of enmeshment you might have this core belief that in order to
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be close to someone you have to at any cost emphasize the ways in which you think the same things as them believe the same things as them have the same interests as them and you have to shove all of the parts of yourself that are
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different from that other person away and where I see this one tripping people up the most is in romantic relationships because in reality a lot of what attracts us to other people and intrigues Us in relation to other people
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is the ways in which we're different so a lot of the time particularly for those who are more anxious I see this pattern playing out of them meeting someone and kind of getting interested in them and then often without even realizing
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they're doing this kind of shoving aside all of the parts of themselves that differ from this other person and Hyper emphasizing and focusing on all their similarities and in a lot of cases also pretending that they're similar in ways
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that they're really not and as soon as you're doing that your authentic self-expression is gone and there's nothing really there for the other person to be intrigued by or excited by and so that's often the point where attraction starts to naturally fade for
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the other and of course a certain degree of sameness is important even necessary for close relationships but the secure version of this worldview is an understanding that a certain level of sameness is healthy in a relationship but so is a certain level of difference
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and it's those ways in which you are different and in which you're able to both stand strong in your differences that keeps the sense of Attraction and Intrigue alive in relationships as well as the thing that keeps you learning
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from each other right if we meet someone who believes everything we believe thinks everything we think and feels everything we feel we don't really have a lot of growing to do within that relationship we learn through having our
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thoughts and beliefs and feelings contrasted and then figuring out what exists in the in-between that's a lot of the fun parts of getting to know someone and the other thing I want to point out here is that in a lot of ways it's
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actually kind of unkind to hide ourselves from other people when they're genuinely invested in getting to know us because if we are hiding major parts of who we are what we want what we value and what's important to us in life and
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we're pretending that we have a different set of values and interests than we actually do we can't hide those things forever eventually the truth will come out and now this other person may have spent a lot of time and emotion and
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energy getting invested in what was kind of a false promise it's a lot nicer to be upfront with people about what we actually think feel believe value and want out of our relationships than it is to hide the things that are
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non-harmonious with them and then let them Discover It years down on the road when most of the decisions that they've made about the relationship has been based on false information so to be honest with people up front and direct
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about who we are and what matters to us requires a sense of inner security a sense of knowing it's okay if this other person doesn't like parts of me that might just mean we're not the right people for each other and if that's the
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case what a gift it is to know that up front rather than discovering it years down the line when we keep getting into the same conflicts over and over and over again because one or both of us is
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in the habit of not being totally honest learning to not take things personally and to understand that being different from someone in a way that might be incompatible for a close relationship does not make us morally bad people is
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often a really big learning curve for those of us who grew up insecurely attached but learning that lesson allows us to have much more secure Dynamics right from the get-go because our relationships start having honest premises which gives them infinitely
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better chances at succeeding thought Distortion number four that can lead us to internalizing codependent patterns as healthy ones is the belief that falling out of connection with someone in any given moment is an emergency that needs to immediately be solved in order for
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you to remain close I have a video about this that I will link in the description of this video it's specifically related to anxious attachment as those who air anxious tend to be the ones who struggle the most with moments of Disconnect in
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relationships but it's applicable to anyone what the video talks about is the importance of taking space and recognizing your differences in building Intimacy in order for two people to feel close they have to be clear on where their boundaries are and the ways in
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which they are not the same so when we arrive at those moments of either conflict or differences of opinion with someone this can actually be a really great opportunity to pull back a little bit do some reconnecting to ourselves
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into great the ways in which we're different from this other person and what we've learned from that interaction where maybe our thoughts or our beliefs or our values clashed and spend some time asking ourselves with this new information what do I think and believe
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and want how does this land with me and the clearer we can get on that when we're in those periods of Separation with another the more authentic we can be when we do come back into connection because instead of immediately fawning
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in order to get back into a false connection we're really taking the time to connect back to ourselves see the other from a new vantage point and then let them know our honest thoughts and feelings and beliefs about whatever
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happened in those moments of conflict and this process of feeling super close and connected experiencing conflict reconnecting to the self on both sides and then coming back into connection with an increased awareness of the other and an increased understanding of what
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matters to ourself and the other person allows that coming back together process and that re rebuilding of intimacy happen on a much deeper and more meaningful level so this belief that falling out of connection for even a moment in time is an immediate emergency
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that needs to be solved is a big part of what leads us to Fawn or apologize for things we're not really sorry for or whatever it is that keeps that codependent cycle going insecure Dynamics conflict and disagreement are
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major and necessary parts of that intimacy building process it helps you sort of sort out that Venn diagram of what's me what's them and where is the overlap rather than trying to make that thing a circle which once again leads to
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a non-dynamic relationship where one or both parties is just not learning that much because reality is being ignored and the last thought Distortion we're going to talk about today that can lead to the development of codependency in place of secure relationships is the
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belief that love means anticipating other people's limits and not ever expecting more of them so making it decision in our minds that this person just isn't that emotionally mature or they wouldn't be able to handle it if I
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told them that they hurt me or maybe there are these inherent character traits that we just decide are part of someone's personality and we resign ourselves to working around those things forever even if they're getting in the way of connection now I want to be clear
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the opposite of this is not changing a person it's not going up to someone and going you need to do everything differently and you need to change your entire personality to accommodate me but a big part of what secure love is is
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giving the other the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to rise to the occasion in emotionally challenging moments so what that means is instead of writing somebody off and going I'm going to do 200 of the work here because I
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believe that they're not capable of meeting me where I'm at choosing to let them know exactly how you see things from your side of the fence and offering them the opportunity to work with you as a true equal in order to solve problems
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in your relationship maybe they truly do lack the skills that you're anticipating them lacking however maybe you offering them the opportunity to work with you to solve certain problems is going to be the thing that inspires them to finally
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learn that skill and to grow in that direction but if you just assume from the get-go this person isn't capable of X Y and Z so I'm just going to compensate and do double the work for them you're not even giving them the
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opportunity to rise to the challenge of doing something differently and a relationship that is truly loving and secure usually involves two people learning from each other and giving each other opportunities to rise to new occasions with the care and support of a
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loving secure forgiving connection available to them in the process so to recap insecure relationships one we offer people the opportunity to learn from their own mistakes and to support them emotionally in that learning process two we show Love by giving
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people accurate feedback about the way we feel in our connection to them three we're honest about the ways in which we differ from the other person and ideally we learn and grow through those differences four we use periods of
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conflict and disconnection as opportunities to reconnect to ourself and to build long-term intimacy through an awareness of each other's boundaries and differences and five we give people the opportunity to rise to the occasion of loving us in a way that preserves our
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dignity as well as theirs so instead of erasing ourselves in order to cater completely to the other we stay firm in who we are and give the other the opportunity to do the same and if there's areas where our differences get
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in the way of us having a healthy relationship we talk those things out and find Creative Solutions together that is what a secure properly differentiated relationship is made of it requires neither person self-abandoning on a regular basis because as soon as we're doing that the
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truth is going out the window and a secure relationship needs to be built on a foundation of honesty and mutual respect all right that's all I have to say for today on the difference between a codependent and a secure relationship
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and some of the thought distortions that may have led us to internalize one as the other as always let me know in the comments what's coming up for you guys as you're watching this video I love you I hope you're taking care of yourselves
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and each other and I will see you back here again really soon foreign [Music]
Topics:codependencythought distortionshealthy relationshipsattachmentboundariesenmeshmentsecure attachmentemotional growthHeidi Prieberelationship psychology
