Codependency During The Perinatal Period
By Elle Murphy, MSW, LSW, PMH-C
"I don't recognize us anymore." That is a statement that parents who have welcomed a child often find themselves thinking or saying. It comes from partners who found loving moments in similar, shared experiences and now find themselves orbiting the same household as two planets whose gravitational pull has fundamentally changed. They are reorganizing, yet, they might feel like they are falling apart.
The Shared Moment That No Longer Feels Shared
Before a baby, couples build their intimacy largely through convergence, seeking out the same experience at the same time. A vacation you both remember. A dinner where you both lingered too long over dessert. A hard season at work that you both survived, side by side. “We were there together, and we felt it together.”
In parenthood, you are still in the same moment, but you are no longer experiencing it the same way. The baby's first night home is the same night for both of you; same dark hours, same small baby in the bassinet and yet, you are having experiences so different they might as well be happening in separate buildings.
The Shift in Relation Structure
During this period parents who are each, in their own way, feeling like they are abandoning themselves and then looking to the other person to make that feel okay.
One caregiver may lose themselves in the child and the logistical demands of new parenthood, then feel resentful that their partner doesn't seem to understand the magnitude of what they are carrying. Why don't you just see it? Why do I have to explain everything?
Another partner may lose themselves in hypervigilance and performance, and then feels invisible, unseen for their effort, shut out from intimacy, uncertain about their role. Nothing I do is ever enough. I don't know how to reach you.
Both are codependent patterns. Both represent a person whose sense of self has become too entangled with the other's response. And yet, because the form these patterns take is so different, partners often cannot recognize each other's distress as distress. They read it instead as evidence of the other's failure to love them correctly.
What Healthy Dependence Can Look Like in This Season
The perinatal period is a season where increased need and mutual reliance is appropriate. What this framework is holding is: the capacity to have a self within the closeness. To need your partner without losing yourself in that need. To be deeply interdependent while still maintaining the thread back to your own interior life.
Naming the asymmetry rather than fighting it. The roles you occupy right now are different. They carry different burdens and different privileges. Acknowledging this openly.
Tending your own experience, not just the relationship. Each partner has an interior life that deserves attention. Individual therapy, journaling, time alone, conversations with friends, these are what make relational presence possible.
Staying curious about the other's form of suffering. When your partner's distress looks different from yours, resist the urge to rank it. Curiosity, not competition, is the gateway.
Witnessing without needing to understand. This one is harder than it sounds, and I invite you to sit with it for a moment. In the pre-baby relationship, empathy often came relatively easily because you were experiencing similar things. You could say I get it because you genuinely did. But in the perinatal period, your partner may be having an experience that is genuinely beyond your reach. And that's okay. Understanding is not a prerequisite for empathy.
What your partner often needs is not for you to have lived their experience, but for you to be able to sit across from it without flinching to look at what they are carrying and say, I can see that this is real for you, even if I can't fully feel it myself. That is holding space. The willingness to let your partner's reality exist without immediately needing to fix it, match it, or translate it into something more familiar to you. When couples can offer this to each other it becomes one of the most profound forms of intimacy available to them in this season.
Renegotiating, not just reacting. Many couples in this period make implicit adjustments to their relationship without ever discussing them. Roles calcify. Resentments accumulate. Regular, low-stakes conversations about how we're doing, not just what we're managing can interrupt this process before it becomes entrenched.
That is the invitation of the perinatal period: not to preserve the relationship you had, but to grow into the relationship you could not have imagined needing, and could not have built any other way.
