Would you recognise a parent interfering in your relationship?
When a parent has not had their needs met as a child, they grow up insecure, holding onto their child/children.
What this looks like is they control every aspect of their child/children’s life, living through their children, not allowing them to make their own decisions.
The child/children learn dependency upon their parent, never separating from them as an adult which is a natural progression.
What this looks like in the dependent adult child’s relationship is the codependent parent hasn’t learnt to respect the boundaries of their adult child. The adult child has no boundaries and continually seeks the approval of their codependent parent. This is because their parent’s love has been conditional, rather than consistent.
For this reason, the child grows up insecure, always needing to please their parent, even as an adult.
Rather than leaning on their partner for support, they turn to their codependent parent which is often their mother.
This can affect both men and women as dependent adult children.
The dependent adult child doesn’t recognise the codependent parent manipulating and controlling their partner because for them, it was normal behaviour in their childhood.
The end result is the couple are divided.
The partner resents their partner’s codependent parent while the dependent child is critical of their partner for rejecting their parent and they don’t understand why.
The codependent parent resents their adult child’s partner for coming in between them and their adult child.
Quite often in these codependent relationships, the adult child and their partner will move within minutes of the codependent parent.
What can add to this decision to live close to the codependent parent is the partner recognises if they moved too far away the codependent parent would stay overnight.
If the couple do choose to live near the codependent parent, the codependent parent with ignore their adult child’s partner’s boundaries and may continually visit them without warning or ignore any request to ask before visiting.
If you are having issues relating to this and would like support, click on the link above for a booking today.
