Fall in love with you.
Lately I’ve been leaning into the world of ‘co-dependency’. Co-dependancy in the context that I’m referring to is an emotional reliance on other people (romantic partner, friends, family etc) as a source of validating ones own self worth, and it ties in with people pleasing and fawning. For those of us who are autistic, we tend to already have a foundation of low self worth that makes us particularly vulnerable to being co-dependant, alongside having a poor understanding or maintenance of boundaries.
I remember being asked by the primary school bully if I loved myself. At the time I didn’t understand the social context of this question so I took it literally. “Well I don’t hate myself so that would mean yes, I do love myself”. Social death. A big mistake. That was a key moment in consciously learning to not loving myself. Clearly having my own self worth wasn’t the goal, the goal must be to have other people determine this for me. This meant I needed to craft myself into what they liked, what they wanted and get my validation of self worth that way. These social understandings took a long time for me to figure out through negative feedback, but eventually this key to succeeding in life had been handed to me: prioritise what other people want over what you want and that way you’ll have friends. I knew suppressing myself and my needs were important, but up until this point, I hadn’t realised just how crucial it was to socially survive.