Co-Dependency Isn’t What You Think, with Rawly Glass, LCSW

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Rawly Glass grew up in a home full of violence. At 16, he made a pact that he would figure out how to do things differently. He earned a master's in social work, built a career in private therapy, and by all appearances was doing the work. But something from his history kept surfacing, quiet and persistent. When someone handed him the word codependent, he turned it over and put it back down. It did not fit. And he needed to understand why.

What Rawly found was that codependency, as commonly taught, is a behavioral label for something much deeper. It has pathologized one of the most beautiful things about people: the capacity to be gentle and caring. Underneath the behavior there is almost always a more fundamental disruption. Trauma, even the quiet kind, interferes with the development of what he calls a relationship with self. When that gets interrupted, we stop orienting inward and start orienting entirely outward, trying to control what we can see because we cannot access what we feel. He calls it external dependency.

Rawly is a therapist and parent educator who has done this work on himself over decades. He brings research, clinical observation, and a deeply personal story to a question most of us have been handed without enough context: what is driving the behavior, and what does real recovery look like?

If you have ever felt like the codependent label did not quite fit but had no other words for it, Rawly Glass has words for it.

You'll learn:

• What Rawly means by external dependency, and why it fits better than codependency
• The rotten potato story, and what it revealed about looking for the source
• The 15 aspects of a relationship with self, and why most of us are missing some
• Why self-care often fails, and what has to come first
• What co-regulation actually looks like when your child is escalating

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Rawly Glass website
• Rawly Glass on YouTube
• Brainstorm - book by Dan Siegel
• Broken Toys, Broken Dreams - book by Terry Kellogg

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