Why Women Are Taught to Feel Shame in a Codependent Society + How To Break Free | Vanessa Bennett
What's The Juice
Olivia Amitrano
4.9 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2025
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ep 148. Have you ever felt that you have completely lost your identity inside a relationship? Or ever struggled with identifying your feelings until another person either helps you… or prevents you from having to metabolize those feelings altogether? This episode has been a long time in the making. What is codependency really, and how does it tie into the deep shame that women so often feel in so many parts of our lives— our productivity, our bodies, our relationships? Why does it feel so deeply woven into our lineage + society, and the ways in which we were taught to love and be loved? Vanessa Bennett, relationship therapist and author of The Motherhood Myth, is breaking down the science behind codependency, why romantic relationships are one of the only socially sanctioned addictions in our culture, and tangible tools to address dysfunctional attachment when it does appear. We are diving into what codependency looks like in real, day-to-day relationships, and why we tend to show up differently with different people. She breaks down why both men and women carry a deep "choose me" wound, and how this can evolve into codependency if not questioned. Thank you all so much for listening, and Happy New Year!
HERE'S THE JUICE:
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Why shame and the fear of abandonment are often the two throughlines that exist in everybody who struggles with codependency
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Vanessa takes a deep dive into the science of codependency and what it often looks like day-to-day in romantic relationships
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Why is it so important to identify if the system we are operating in is coming from a place of lack vs. enhancement
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The truth about why we show up differently in different relationships and why attachment styles are often a spectrum with different people, as opposed to a finite label
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The history behind why both men and women often have a "choose me" wound
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How values have changed in the last 100 years and why our lineage often plays into how we experience attachment, highlighting how attachment for women has gone from a place of need to a place of want ONLY in the last 50 years
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So a few weeks before recording this episode, I listened to an interview on Diary of a CEO with Galang Tubton, who's a Buddhist monk, who went on, you know, this very prestigious Diary of a CEO, businessy kind of show to talk about this long con essentially that has been happening in our society for so long where marketers, |
| 0:23.7 | corporations, people empower pretty much everything in our current society has been based around |
| 0:29.9 | making us all feel like we are not enough and constantly need something outside of ourselves |
| 0:37.2 | to regulate to feel better, |
| 0:39.3 | which is how in our society we get sold to so often because so much of selling and hyper-consumers |
| 0:45.6 | in these days is making us feel like we're not okay without this thing. |
| 0:49.5 | We have a deficit, a problem, and we need something to fill it. |
| 0:52.4 | And as we all know, that never, ever works, |
| 0:55.5 | no matter how many orders we place and Amazon Prime packages we get at our doorstep, it never ends up |
| 1:03.0 | filling the hole. And what I didn't realize is that although I identified so deeply with his |
| 1:08.0 | statement, I didn't realize that this connected to another topic that I'm so extremely passionate about and have talked about a zillion times on the show, which is codependency. |
| 1:17.1 | I thought that codependency only existed inside of relationships, you know, maybe romantic relationships predominantly, sometimes friendships. |
| 1:26.4 | As I've examined my life the last few years, |
| 1:28.3 | I've definitely connected codependency or like my own need to look for something outside of myself |
| 1:33.4 | to addictions that I've struggled with, whether it's food or cannabis. But I didn't realize that |
| 1:38.7 | codependency stems into this sort of relational nature of our society. |
| 1:48.3 | And it goes so deep and specifically not only harms everybody, |
| 1:50.3 | but harms women historically. |
| 1:53.8 | And when I had Vanessa Bennett come on the show for this episode, |
| 1:57.5 | she put language to all of these missing pieces in my whole codependency theory. |
| 2:00.0 | And she explained why especially us women are so |
| 2:03.5 | prone to constantly feeling shame and are always looking for ways to say safe outside of ourselves |
... |
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