Do You Think A High Percentage of Nurses Have Co-dependent Personalities?

[Guest343211]

I have thought of this several times over the years, and I look at how nurses allow themselves to be treated and how they treat each other? So how many here think that a good percentage of nurses are co-depedents that need to be or feel needed? How much do think that affects nurses' treatment overall and nurse-to-nurse relationship dynamics?

[wannabesedated]

Interesting you should bring this topic up. I am currently reading Codependent no more by Melody Beattie.

I recognize a lot of these traits in myself. I would agree that many helping professions are going to have a high prevalence of codependents.

Codependents live to help other people, they put other put people first, obsess about other people's problems, and are basically controlled by other people (usually another person's alcoholism or other destructive behaviors). They try to "fix" the person(s) in their lives with the problem or to help them "see the light."

[Guest343211]

But the interesting this is that they are also highly controlling. In their codependency, they get their needs met by controlling. And I see this with nurses at times, when they feel the need to control, to the point of being inflexible and highly critical of other nurses. It is an interesting set of dynamics going on. It may also explain a lot of the passive-aggressive tendencies.

[ShiphrahPuah]

Absolutely! I sure am one (working on it though), and quite a few of the nurses in my department fit the description perfectly. I felt like I must have been making progress one day after I had been at my new job for about 3 months and happened to mention how one of the doctors acted that was pretty nasty. This other nurse told me that I am very confident and handled it well but that many nurses are codependent and would have acted differently and then went on to describe what a codependent was. I had to stop her and say that I was aware of what codependency was, that I had already spent thousands of dollars on counseling over the years to work past it, and I was thrilled that for at least that moment I came off as not codependent! We had a good laugh over that one and a new cameraderie because we knew we struggled with the same thing.

By the way, Codependent No More and Beyond Codependency by Melodie Beatty are great books!