Well said, honeypig. I truly believe that a person can act codependently without being a full-fledged Codie.
I know I've said this before - for me I am fully codependent with my FOO but I fall into ACTING codependently with RAH. That's because I can see a greater separation of self between he & I, but my FOO boundaries/roles/definitions are all twisted up & more enmeshed. I see my relationship to him as a Choice in a way that my relationships with my FOO are a Given in life. Much harder to separate.
I think that - again, speaking strictly for ME - it was easy for me to become increasingly codependent in relation to then-AH's escalating addiction..... I was simply repeating what had been modeled for me throughout my entire lifetime. (My mother being severely damaged & codie, coupled with my father being heavily into his addiction before I was ever born means that I do not HAVE a point of reference in life that does not include this dynamic.) I would continually adjust to the new crisis like that frog in a pot of water slowly building to a boil because that's what you do for the people that you "love". (not)
In the end for me, I owe a strange debt of gratitude to RAH because his behaviors are what brought me to a recovery that I needed far more to deal with old, ACoA issues even while both DD & I benefit greatly from it right now as well. I've been thinking about this a LOT lately because I'm coming up on 5 yrs of official Recovery this summer & I can't imagine who I would be right now without it.
All that said, one of the biggest shocks for me was stripping myself bare & realizing that a lot of what I considered non-codie strengths (responsible, financially aware, dependable) weren't born of natural talents but often created out of a need to survive in a dysfunctional family unit. It wasn't who *I* was, on a core level, but pieces of armor I'd picked up along the battlegrounds of my childhood & retrofitted to work in my life. Later I made another personal discovery in that it wasn't even so much about all that as it was the lack of boundaries around it all.