Am I Codependent, Toxic, Bad at Relationships, or Something Else?

Have you ever wondered, “Am I codependent or bad at relationships? Am I a toxic person?” Where do you go to figure yourself out, including your patterns of relating? We do (and don’t) want to know why we tend to be conflict-avoidant, often angry at people, or desperately clingy, fearful, and insecure. The internet will quickly supply (through professional organizations and credentialed experts) compelling identity labels and diagnoses for your relational tendencies—even those that are particularly harmful, if not destructive. Just drop questions like the following into the search bar, and you’ll have thousands of diagnostic tools and solutions:

Am I narcissistic or just a little self-focused?

Am I codependent?

How do I know if I’m a toxic person?

Why am I so obsessed with certain people?

Also, new personality tests are available regularly that promise to help you discover who you really are and why you do what you do. Full disclosure: I’ve taken several of these tests, and often they do provide insights into our tendencies. Yet most of us want easy, no-effort-on-our-part diagnoses of why we struggle with unhealthy relational patterns—and we often want to be affirmed in what the Lord says to repent from!

In the 1980s, self-help books popularized the term “codependent” to describe dysfunctional relationships in which an individual excessively relies upon others for worth, approval, and self-identity. Professional organizations made diagnoses for personality and relationship-based disorders. One example was dependent personality disorder, described as an “excessive and pervasive need to be taken care of; submissive, clinging, needy behavior due to fear of abandonment.”¹ Tragically, the American Psychiatric Association offers little hope because it says, “personality disorders are resistant to treatment.”²

Am I Codependent? What Does the Bible Say?³

The word “codependent” isn’t in the Bible, and yet Scripture addresses unholy relationship patterns. What the world calls codependency, God’s Word calls “idolatry,” and it’s the worship of anything or anyone other than him. When we displace God with human relationships, relational idolatry happens. In one way, this is the quick definition of a ‘toxic’ relationship or person: governed by the worst toxin of all—sin!

God’s explicit command is that we have no other gods, including people, before him in our lives (Ex. 20:2–3). The sin is subtle, but the idolatry that fuels codependent behavior happens when relationships entice us away from the Lord and we selfishly demand that someone give us, or receive from us, love, attention, and affirmation. It’s basically “anti-Exodus 20:3.” Not to mention these sobering words:

If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” which neither you nor your fathers have known . . . you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. (Deut. 13:6, 8)

Our closest relationships can present the fiercest temptation to turn from the Giver to his gifts. And so, of course, we want to know why we keep getting into relational messes. But there’s more going on here. Codependent relationships are idolatrous because they usurp Jesus’s rightful place. Instead of yielding to the Lord who loves us, we yield our sense of well-being to a person. Even though these connections at first feel emotionally intoxicating or comforting, a painful harvest of discontentment, anxiety, and insecurity eventually develops because people can’t fill, heal, or satisfy our hearts.

Applying God’s Word to Our Self-Understanding

Proverbs 3:5–6 is a popularly quoted passage, and for good reason. Packed into two verses are life-giving commands and promises. Solomon wrote,

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
    and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
    and he will make straight your paths.

Paul applied Solomon’s wisdom in 2 Corinthians 5: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (vv. 16, 17).

Paul was urging believers to understand themselves and others through their new identity in Christ. In contemporary English, we might say it this way:

Hey believer, you’re a new person now because of Christ; you live in him and have his mind to think his thoughts, his Spirit to walk by faith and understand not only who he is, but who you are! Don’t rely on your self-perceptions, or what the world says about who you are or why you do what you do. Look to Jesus, and not a mirror, personality test, or worldly insights about your relational patterns. Look to the comforting, heart-piercing Word of God for these things.

Delighting in People vs. Selfishly Craving What You Want from Them

Codependency, or relational idolatry, is something I personally know well.⁴ God used Psalm 16, particularly the first four verses, to help me step away from sinful patterns of relating to people:

Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight. The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply.

David looks to God as his refuge, the One apart from whom there is “no good!” This echoes Jesus teaching his disciples that the truest intimacy and security could only be found in relationship with him: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). When we abide in Jesus alone, he will bear good fruit in our relationships.

Having proclaimed God as his true refuge and Lord, David expresses a godly heart-posture toward people: he has a holy delight in and affection for them. He cautions that when we behave codependently and desperately run after anyone to feel good about ourselves, devastating consequences will result—sorrow, pain, and grief.

Jesus’s Example: Loving People and Trusting God

When you “watch” Jesus relate to people in the Gospels, he is never aloof or selfishly distant. His relationships weren’t fueled by flattery, people-pleasing, or demands that people make him feel good about himself. John 2:24–25 explains how Jesus lived out Psalm 16:1–4: “But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.”

Jesus loved, served, and enjoyed people without “entrusting” himself to them in the same way that he entrusted himself to his Father. He compassionately and selflessly loved people and obeyed the command to love God alone with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength.

For all of the Bible’s commands regarding marriage, friendship, parenting, and neighbors, God never said to place our trust in people with our whole being—yet we are to love as he has loved us (John 15:12). That kind of love and trust is rightly focused on our Savior, who refused to allow people to capture his heart’s focus and sideline God.

God-Dependency Displaces Being Codependent

If you struggle with idolatry in your relationships and recognize the symptoms of codependent behavior in your life, take heart! Worldly wisdom cannot offer effective treatment for a spiritual matter, but the gospel can. Jesus offers all that we need to grow into healthy and holy people—he offers you himself! Our Savior makes a home in us through an eternal union based on his grace. This is the most intimate, satisfying, and healthy relationship anyone could ever enjoy.

Jesus also forgives us when we sin in our relationships, and he heals our broken hearts. Many people were never taught what healthy connections look like, much less how to cultivate relationships fueled by rightly-ordered love. Pray that God would guide you to love others in a way that abounds with knowledge and discernment.

Jesus came to transform your heart so that you would be captivated by his love and freed to move toward people with God-honoring motives rather than selfish demands. With Jesus in his rightful place as our loving Lord, other people will increasingly take their proper place as gifts to be enjoyed.

1. David Porter, “Dependent Personality Disorder,” Theravive.
   https://www.theravive.com/therapedia/dependent-personality-disorder-dsm–5-301.6-(f60.7) Accessed August 8, 2025. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Adapted from https://harvestusa.org/codependent-no-more-encouragement-for-keeping-christ-central-in-our-relationships/, July 14, 2025. ↩︎
4. I wrote a devotional book about it! Check out the Harvest USA store for Toxic Relationships: Taking Refuge in Christ. ↩︎