Esther Perel

When you're hungry, I'm not immediately hungry.

When you're tired or when I'm tired, you're not instantly tired.

We have a different system.

But somehow when you're upset or when you're sad or when you're anxious or worried, that instantly makes me anxious.

Because your feelings are my feelings.

If you're unhappy, that makes me unhappy.

Or I think that you're unhappy because it's me.

What did I do?

What did I do?

What's wrong?

So I use the temperature and the hunger and the tiredness because people immediately understand it.

When it's physical, they understand where I stop and where you start.

We are two separate people.

We are close.

We are not fused.

We are not that enmeshed that what happens to me happens to you.

But when it comes to the emotional level, for many of us, that is not how we grew up either.

We grew up with somebody who wanted their feelings to become our feelings, their needs to become our needs.

And so we have not known where to know where is the line where I stop and you start.

That's where codependency lives.