Co-Dependency Isn’t What You Think, with Rawly Glass, LCSW

Co-Dependency Isn’t What You Think, with Rawly Glass, LCSW

From Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction by Brenda Zane

May 7, 2026

About this episode

Rawly Glass discusses the deeper understanding of co-dependency and its roots in trauma.

Episode 324 ABOUT THE EPISODE: Rawly Glass grew up in a home full of violence. At 16, he made a pact that he would figure out how to do things differently. He earned a master's in social work, built a career in private therapy, and by all appearances was doing the work. But something from his history kept surfacing, quiet and persistent. When someone handed him the word codependent, he turned it over and put it back down. It did not fit. And he needed to understand why. What Rawly found was that codependency, as commonly taught, is a behavioral label for something much deeper. It has pathologized one of the most beautiful things about people: the capacity to be gentle and caring. Underneath the behavior there is almost always a more fundamental disruption. Trauma, even the quiet kind, interferes with the development of what he calls a relationship with self. When that gets interrupted, we stop orienting inward and start orienting entirely outward, trying to control what we can see because we cannot access what we feel. He calls it external dependency. Rawly is a therapist and parent educator who has done this work on himself over decades. He brings research, clinical observation…

People in this episode

Host: Brenda Zane

Guest: Rawly Glass

Topics covered

  • co-dependency
  • trauma
  • relationship with self
  • parenting
  • therapy

Keywords

  • co-dependency
  • trauma
  • external dependency
  • relationship
  • recovery

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