Ideas in the Wild: Richard Grannon On What It Means To Be Codependent

So many of us find it easier to love other people than to love ourselves. We struggle to put our own needs first and have a hard time asking for what we want, let alone going after it. Instead, we attach ourselves to selfish people, trying over and over to win love from those who simply can’t offer it. If that sounds familiar, you may be the victim of narcissistic abuse.

In A Cult of One, Richard Grannon exposes the insidious effects of narcissistic abuse and shares his own winding road to recognition and recovery. Through martial arts, mysticism, psychedelics, and psychology, spanning over four continents and forty-four years of life, Grannon discovered a systematic discipline for healing. He explains step by step — with courage, humor, and optimism — how we can forge our own path to a better life. I caught up with Richard recently to learn more about the book and the ideas he shares with readers.

What problem do you see people struggling with?

Today many of us are faced with not being able to love or take care of ourselves properly, not being able to put our needs first, not being able to ask for or go for what we truly want, feeling compelled to attach ourselves to selfish people, and trying to win love from those who cannot offer it.

This doesn’t only apply to our personal relationships; it can expand to include our health, our business lives, and even our relationships with our governments. It all comes down to a fractured self, the need to be servile, and the codependent and toxic attachments we form to tyrannical people, institutions, and governing bodies.

I experienced these same problems myself: self-destructive behaviour; trying to please the needs of the worst kinds of people at my own expense; abusive relationships; addictions to sex, violence, and drugs; social anxiety; awkwardness, self-loathing, and depression.

What’s an idea you share that really excites you?

The dangers of codependency. You see, the codependent is obsessed with giving parts of themself away to others. Money, time, attention, love, charisma even. Whatever it is, they become attached, trauma-bonded, and conditioned to give parts of themself away to people who are abusive and tyrannical. Just like they were forced to do in childhood, they’re now unconsciously choosing to relive that trauma again in adulthood.

The codependent child is so attacked and so abused that they cannot find the strength and the determination to become narcissistic and grandiose, perhaps because their reality tests are too strong or perhaps because they have too great a sense of themself in the world. Perhaps they have too high a level of empathy, and they feel compassion for other people when they attack them and hurt them. Whatever it is, they can’t do it.

So what we codependents do is develop a false self, the ultimate prey, the ultimate martyr, the most submissive, the kindest, the most agreeable, the gentlest, the most unharmable person. Why? Because we believe in our childish fantasy, which develops before the age of eight — that if we give ourselves away, the predator will leave us alone. If it works and the abusive parent, teacher, or priest does leave us alone when we acquiesce, we are essentially trained to believe that this response is effective and the best way to handle life.

What happens then? We retreat from reality. We leave a false self, a scarecrow, an avatar, if you like, of the individual outside, visible to others, there to be attacked. And we ourselves withdraw into a cave. We leave the false self outside the cave. You can bite it. You can attack it. You can eat it. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hurt us. Then what do we do? We withdraw farther back into the cave away from the stresses of the world. Then what do we do? Well, we find that the stresses of the world and the threats of the world are getting into the cave. So we shrink.

Then what? We’ve shrunk. We’re in a cave. We’re in the dark. But somehow the predators are still getting in. So we turn ourselves invisible. It doesn’t work. The predators still come. We’re still in distress. So what do we do? We become tiny, invisible, and we hide in a crack in the back of the cave. It’s the only thing that works. Codependent people have an extremely weak self because eradicating themselves and their sense of self is a survival response to the predatory environment they were raised in. We cannot help but to self-eradicate.

How will following your advice improve your readers’ lives?

If you’ve lived an entire life codependently, you will find it very hard to do anything else. But you must. Without a self present, we are not living. Without a self present, we are not being honest. We are not being authentic. We are not telling the truth.

Because we can’t. Because we’re not there. We don’t know what we want or what our preferences are. We don’t know what our morality or our value system is. That’s why we tend to find very aggressive, tyrannical, abusive people to attach to so that we can absorb their value system, or junk value system, and that stops us from feeling numb and invisible and nonexistent.

A true codependent doesn’t live. They haunt their own lives. They live as ghosts. They hang around. They’re like kabuki actors at the back of a Japanese play, dressed in black, just there to help the actors, the narcissists, on the stage itself. We must be brave and strong and learn to summon ourselves back into reality.