Post Induction Therapy for Codependence
Children enter the world needing nurturing, affirmation, support and direction to healthfully navigate the journey from childhood, through adolescence and into adulthood. When children are inadequately assisted, due to trauma or something lacking in major caregivers, they will adapt to survive. Although those adaptations work to get through childhood, they impact adult life in a way that often creates unproductive and destructive patterns. Earlier life events can impact the way adults experience the world, manage stress, their sense of self-esteem, the way in which they relate to others, and ability to manage emotions sometimes leading to physical symptoms, addictions or painful relationships.
What is Codependency?
Codependency is an emotional disorder that causes sufferers to ignore their own needs while constantly fulfilling the needs of others. A sufferer may forfeit his or her own well-being and values in the pursuit of assisting someone else.
After experiencing relationship trauma, individuals often form unhealthy relationships due to feelings of low self-worth. People with difficult childhood experiences often enter relationships with individuals who are irresponsible, emotionally detached or excessively needy. Such relationships are likely to be emotionally and sometimes physically abusive. As a result, those with codependent traits tend to be downtrodden and oppressed in their relationships.
What are the Effects of Codependency?
Individuals suffering from codependency may repress their emotions and needs to the point that they are vulnerable to painful and unsatisfying relationships, relationship trauma and extremely low self-esteem.
If unaddressed, codependency continues, and individuals may cope with their emotions through perfectionism, work addiction, gambling, abusing alcohol, drugs, sex or food.
Treatment
Post Induction Therapy is a therapy modality designed to treat the effects of childhood trauma and resulting issues of developmental immaturity. Trauma is defined as experiences of emotional, physical, sexual, spiritual, intellectual abuse or neglect a person has experienced from birth through eighteen. Whether in the family of origin or from others outside the home, abuse can have an impact on adults in a variety of ways that impact relationships in adulthood.
The intervention strategies which compromise Post Induction Therapy originated from the experimental application of strategies developed to treat the effects of childhood trauma. These strategies were developed by Pia Mellody through her work at The Meadows inpatient treatment center. Central to her approach is the concept that those dealing with codependent traits require healing from trauma inflicted in childhood. Recovery from codependence involves both cleaning up the toxic emotions left over from these painful childhood experiences, as well as learning how to intervene in one’s own adult symptoms of codependence.
The PIT treatment model can provide an effective approach to recovery. It helps clients learn to deal with their history of trauma and the effects in their daily lives by identifying codependent thinking, processing and regulating emotions and managing behavior. We believe that individuals who have experienced suffering in their lives can receive relief, healing and experience joy.