Why are codependents drawn to emotionally unavailable and inconsistent partners? This article explores how childhood conditioning, low self-worth and nervous system activation shape attraction, causing healthy love to feel unfamiliar. Learn why codependents mistake drama for connection and how recovery begins by judging behaviour, not chemistry.
In Therapy Shorts 81, Dr Nicholas Jenner appears on The Good Men Project to discuss codependency recovery. This interview explores how codependent patterns form, why people-pleasing persists, and what healthy boundaries actually look like in real relationships. Practical insights cover self-worth, attachment, and small steps to shift from rescuing to relating.
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Explore how early relationships shape our reactions to modern life, and learn ways to navigate anxiety with awareness and new strategies.
Understanding how childhood shapes adult relationships is key to healing attachment wounds, breaking unhealthy patterns, and building secure, fulfilling connections.
Codependency often looks like kindness, but underneath it lies quiet, anxious control. In this piece, I explore how fear drives fixing, rescuing, and over-functioning and why reclaiming individuality is the true path to healing. If you’ve ever lost yourself in relationships, this will resonate deeply.
People-pleasing isn’t a personality trait. It’s a survival strategy. It’s something you learned early, in environments where being agreeable wasn’t optional , it was necessary.
Many people in therapy don’t always like it or agree when their therapist tells them (If they don’t, they should) that real self-love looks a lot like self-accountability. It’s not glamorous at all, it’s not Instagram worthy. It can be deeply unsettling and sometimes lonely. The “glamour” is just a way to avoid the pain of the work needed.
Welcome to Therapy Shorts: small moments of reflection to help you steady yourself in a world that never stops moving. I’m Dr Nicholas Jenner, and in each of these brief episodes, we’ll take a simple idea and look at how it actually plays out in real life… in your relationships, your choices, and the way you speak to yourself.
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