Life and Work

“Oh, you mean your co-dependence.”

This was the response I heard from a colleague when I tried to explain my sense of empathy for the emotional pain of a fellow therapist who shared my Filipina identity. We were living through the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and processing the emotional impact of the events and following protests. In contrast to the sympathetic response I was expecting, my colleagues’ dismissive words left me stunned: somehow this integral sense of connection I had learned as part of my cultural upbringing had been pathologized.

I corrected him: “Not co-dependence. More-so interdependence.”

For years as a clinician, I had been acknowledged by co-workers for my particular approach to others that allowed people to be as they were with warmth. One colleague once told me she loved coming into my office at the clinic because she never felt rushed or unwanted in my room, she appreciated by tendency to drop whatever task I was doing to give her my attention, something I was willing to do because I believe honoring our interconnection and mutual care for one another takes precedence, a concept in Filipino culture called Kapwa, our shared inner self.

I didn’t realize until this conversation with my colleague that my inherited understanding of Kapwa and how we treat one another had been turned upside down by western psychology. The strong sense of generosity and care that nearly every Filipinx I’ve meet exudes had been misconstrued in the western perspective as co-dependent behavior. I am writing now to say the two are not the same.
My favorite definition of Kapwa is by writer Eileen Tabios, “A Filipino cultural concept of interconnectedness whereby other people are not “others” but part of what one is.” In that moment of hearing my Filipina colleague speak her pain, it tapped into my own pain, and her willingness to share as in part what emboldened me to do the same.

I wanted to get a good look at the concept of co-dependence and picked up Melody Beatie’s book Co-Dependent No More. A self-proclaimed co-dependent in recovery, Beattie takes several pages in the beginning of the book to outline different facets of co- dependence.

“Anticipating another’s needs… Feeling responsible for the affect one has on another one’s feelings… Seeing oneself as failing if they are unable to fulfill on the emotional, physical, spiritual needs of another.”
Prior to this experience, I may have agreed that these as signs of weakness or malady, but after that conversation with my supervisor, I was determined to underline and emphasize the differences.

This is what I’ve found:

Within Kapwa we are interconnected and to care for another is akin to caring for ourselves. Allowing time for self-care and accepting the care of others cyclically makes our own caring for others sustainable. We need one another.
The facets of “co-dependent” traits are lovely and even healthful on their own. These traits cross into malady when they get in the way of the individual care-giver being able to be at peace in their own health. Essentially, one has become co-dependent when caring for another inhibits their own care for self. With this understanding, I gathered that as long as the individual is provided for and caring for themselves in the ways they need, co-dependence need not apply.