I have been living with codependent behavior since I was a kid. I did not grow up with active addiction, but I did grow up with two adult children.
I started working my eating disorder recovery 12 years ago this summer, and codependent stuff came up and I started to work.
Three years into recovery I met my exAH and a whole new level of my behavior was uncovered. I do know this though, I don't know that I would have survived the marriage without the work I had done previously.
I have improved the whole time. Like a non-healing wound if I don't clean this stuff out it will continue to infect my life. But healing and cleaning sometimes happen at the same time.
If you have seen the movie Shrek he talks about being a complicated ogre and he has many layers like an onion.
I am a complicated human, but my layers are like an artichoke. The tough stuff is on the outside, but as I remove layers something else might come up again....it is a deeper and more fullfilling layer. The end result is getting to the delicious heart of the artichoke though.