I am a double winner, having lived with codependent and eating disorder behaviors since I was a little girl....certainly by the age of six if not before.
I took a training on trauma some time ago, and one thing that helped me was realizing that my addictive behaviors had at one point in my life served me and kept me safe. I did not grow up with active addiction, and overall grew up in a safe and stable home.....except it was unsafe to have emotions.
My eating disorder and my codependent behaviors allowed me to NOT deal with those emotions at the time, for a long time....and they allowed me to try and keep the status quo emotionally in my family. I believe my internal and external environment primed me for this behavior and that I frankly did not have a lot of choice at that time.
When I finally started to deal with my life it was because these maladaptive coping mechanisms were no longer serving me.....now they were not keeping me safe but were creating harm to me, and making me miserable......but it was hard for me to let go of what was known, familiar and had worked so well at one time.
Before I could even DEAL with the root causes of the behaviors I had to break through the wall of "support" that I had created to keep those maladaptive behaviors safe.
Like an oyster makes a pearl when irritated by a sand molecule. I had created walls around my poor coping (though not nearly as pretty as a pearl). They had to come down layer by layer, and only when I was ready and I felt like I had a choice in taking down a layer down was I successful in this process. Prior to this experience I felt like getting better was all a matter of will power, but without my recovery support and structure all the will power in the world would not have caught me when I leaped. I feel like I continue have the choice to choose recovery daily....especially when I had a misstep the day prior.
I have not always enjoyed the lessons this life has presented me with. I may not have a choice of the lessons, but I do have a choice of if I choose to learn or not from them....and the learning around my own recovery from an addiction and codependency has been the best thing I have ever done for me.
Healing from addiction and codependency (which for me is also an addiction) was about regularly choosing that I was important and that self-care did not mean selfish.