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Stop walking on eggshells! I would bet you have heard or thought that on more than one occasion. Excuse me for sounding like Susan Powter of a few years ago with her Stop the Insanity! routine, but if you are or have the tendency to be a passive, obsequious, deferent doormat, you need to stop walking on eggshells! Or, you may be intelligent, hard-working, confident, and together, but involved with an addict or alcoholic or otherwise abusive person. Yes, this happens more often than we would guess to such people who find themselves giving in to, feeding, or enabling less than appropriate behaviors and attitudes. As if we are on drugs, are somehow mesmerized, we meet, move in with, and/or marry a damaged soul who takes misery and pain out on us in passive aggressive or just straight up aggressive ways. As if enjoying the befuddling treatment, we get caught up in, immersed in, swept awayÂ…and months or even years pass (all the while we are moving into deeper dysfunction, often unwittingly) before we read something that encourages, hear someone insist, or realize we need to stop walking on eggshells around the offending and offensive partner.
The phenomenon that leads to the when-push-comes-to-shove, telling us we must stop walking on eggshells that belong to the Humpty Dumpty of our lives is called codependency. If person A is dependent on a substance or an illness and person B puts up with, engages in related behaviors with, or enables in ay indirect or direct way, person be is co-dependent. The phenom comprises a collection of negative, responsive behaviors that B has developed to cope with A. B cares “too much,” helps “too often”, tries to control by assisting the illness, disease, or person with either. Melody Beatty, in her book, Codependent No More, defines and describes as well as offers escape/healing from codependency. She lists all of the fifty or sixty behaviors that codependents display or express when they are unable to stop walking on eggshells around the illness or the ill person. She includes cajoling, bribing, weeping, lashing out, begging, overreacting, fearing, avoiding, denying…and many, many more. In similar respect, codependency concerns the loved ones of someone with a mental illness that involves volatile possibilities. The authors of Stop Walking on Eggshells, appropriately, have studied and approached the illness of BPD—BiPolar Disorder—from (or directed at) the point of view of the one who cares about one with BPD. In Stop Walking on Eggshells, Paul T. Mason and Randy Kreger, working on the premise that you need to take your life back, discuss understanding and defining and determining BPD, making internal changes, working on safety plans and treatment options, and resolving special issues…as well as much more supplemental and specific information and material.
It doesn’t matter, I say, whether the loved one is an alcoholic, an addict, a passive-aggressive or Bi-Polar person. If he or she is impacting you and your life with abusive speech, action, attitude or behavior, that unacceptable treatment is, well, unacceptable. You can stop walking on eggshells; you can get help—by way of books and personal therapeutic treatment and care.
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