Barbara Johnson Quotes

If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.

You can live without me." "I don't want to." I feared a love like this - that made us incomplete without each other. It was beautiful but treacherous, like snow that looked white and pure and lovely from the safety of your window, but when you stepped out to touch the softness, the cold first stole your breath, and then your will to move, until you could just lay down in it and let the numbness take you. yet I didn't want to be without him either, so I didn't chide him for the statement.

Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They under-react. But rarely do they act. They react to the problems, pains, lives, and behaviors of others. They react to their own problems, pains, and behaviors.

Co-dependence...taking someone else's temperature to see how you feel.

It drives me nuts how I rely on my wife for everything. I can't imagine a day without her!

Your whole being is involved in taking care of someone else, worrying about what they think of you, how they treat you, how you can make them treat you better. Right now everyone in the world seems to think that they are codependent and that they come from dysfunctional families. They call it codependency. I call it the human condition.

Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story.

You fixed yourself. You didn’t need me.” “No, Sydney.” My voice was ragged. “I do need you. You have no idea how much I need you.

Why don’t we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do.

When a person goes into a relationship emotionally needy, they are not going to have discernment in choosing people.

Even someone who works with me, like this girl who works with me, her name is Sue. She lives with me and holds the fort; she takes care of all these little things. She takes care of the money situation, and I would not be able to live without someone like that.

Sometimes you kind of lose yourself in someone else's personality.

I just think that sometimes we hang onto people or relationships long after they've ceased to be of any use to either of you.

The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

I look at people in certain circumstances, and I fall into caretaker mode real quick, real easy. I like to shoulder people up and carry them along, and then I end up creating some kind of dependency. I enable. It's really, really hard for me.

It's a recurring thing: It's that I fall really deeply for bad relationships. It's just always been this way and not changing.

I'm a fixer, unfortunately. I'm like, 'Oh, I can fix you.' But it's not just guys I'm dating anymore. It's this entire legion of young girls who tell me they need me to maintain any sort of sanity or peace.

There have been a couple specific instances where I've felt like I couldn't survive without interacting with a certain person. I've been involved with some pretty manipulative people who have told me the same thought: that I can't live without them.

in all codependent relationships, the rescuer needs the victim as much as the victim needs the rescuer.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing.

The ordinary marriage is an unconscious bondage: you cannot live alone so you become dependent on the other; the other cannot live alone so he or she becomes dependent on you. And we hate the person on which we are dependent; nobody likes to depend on anybody. Our deepest desire is to have freedom, total freedom - and dependence is against freedom.

Once two persons are tied together freedom is lost and anger arises. When freedom is lost everything becomes ugly. Love means that freedom remains intact: marriage means that freedom has been dropped. You have bargained for permanence, for security, and you have paid for it with freedom.

It is sad and wrong to be so dependent for the life of my life on any human being as I am on you; but I cannot by any force of logic cure myself at this date, when it has become second nature.

being with someone for over a year can mean that you love them … but it can also mean you’re trapped.

The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.