If I’m angry, but I want to protect the other person from my anger, I don’t trust them to be able to breath and have an experience (or not), so I hold back my anger.
Codependency is managing the emotions of the other person because you don’t trust them to survive the experience of their own emotions.
Sometimes people DO in fact require you to dim yourself, and in doing so they are requiring codependency in their relationships.
To remain authentic this needs to be named as dishonest.
They aren’t going to like it.
And yet some are humble enough to move through the experience with the relating container intact.
Some need it to be a problem.
Codependency needs there to be a problem with an uncomfortable experience and may not even go so far as to admit discomfort.
It is all a protection mechanism which needs to be outed one way or another for a genuine intimate connection to take place.