@BethRags, your experience reminds me of two stories that I believe contributed to my need to accommodate others and be codependent, which is why codependents easily form one-sided friendships with manipulative people. It's a pattern formed in childhood by dysfunctional parents to their children. I don't know the root cause for you and LilyMop, but that's the root cause for my codependent, passive behavior with strong personalities. I shut down, and accommodate selfish people due to self-preservation and terror. Isn't that funny?

When I moved to China to teach at a university, two of my students took me up into the hills my first weekend to meet and visit with the 3 Buddhist monks who lived in a temple behind the university amongst some beautiful cliffs.

One of the monks offered me a turn with a popular Chinese game of Fortune Telling sticks. Inside a wooden canister there are 100 wooden sticks inscribed with fortunes on them. The purpose of the game is to shake the canister full of sticks, concentrate on a wish, then tilt the canister to its side to spill 1-3 fortune inscribed sticks. One of my fortunes was "You need to ask more people for help and stop being stubborn." I thought that was very eerie because it was as true then, as it is for me now.

My siblings and I learned early in life before age 10 that to show any vulnerability with either of our parents, resulted in being criticized and shamed. We were not allowed to ask for help, even when something random happened to us, that harmed us, it was -- in my mother's view especially -- our own fault.

Two childhood incidents of this stand out:

1. A boy who walked to school with us, used dirty words to describe lumps on trees as womens breasts. We were all in 3rd grade. He got in trouble at home and then blamed me as the child who taught him those words. My mother got a phone call from the boy's mother who accused me of teaching her son these dirty words. Instead of asking me what happened, my mother instantly blamed me and shamed me for doing such a thing. Later that week, the boy walked with some neighborhood kids, two of whom whose parents were friends with my parents. Later that week my mother received a call from one of those parents, that this boy pulled the same stunt blaming her son for teaching him the same dirty words. Well, this parent knew her son didn't do it, so she called the school principal who confronted the boy and his parents about it, and the boy confessed that he blamed me and this other boy to avoid being punished. Did my mother ever apologize to me for falsely accusing me? Nope. She never did. The boy's mother apologized to me later at a BBQ and that temporarily made me feel better. But I felt betrayed by my parental figure. I felt vulnerable and weak.

2. In 4th grade, my father accepted a new job. Rather than sit my siblings and I down and explain the upcoming transition in order to shield his children from the emotional upheaval of leaving a comfortable environment and friendships behind, my father put the responsibility on my 10-year old shoulders. He offered to ride me to school near his university one morning, on his child bike seat.

My mother was unusually nice to me that morning, doting on me like she never did normally. Within about 10 minutes on the way to my elementary school, my father, without stopping or turning around to acknowledge my feelings, blurted out with his back to me, "Blanche, I got a new job and we're moving in 2 months. You will have to tell your sister (who was 8) and your brother (who was 6)." This stunned me. We rode in silence the rest of the way to my elementary school. I felt the tears on my cheeks. I cried silently to myself. When we arrived at my elementary school, my father acted indifferent as he unbuckled me, lifted me down to the ground, and rode away with his back to me, on his bike, off to his university teaching job. He just left me standing there, outside my elementary school, alone.

I have other examples, but those two stand out still, as pivotal to what contributed I believe, to me developing codependent coping skills. It's also why I developed one-sided friendships most of my life with people much like the friend LilyMop described. I had a one-sided friendship with a woman who texted me all the time, needing emotional support for her supposed life problems but was conveniently never available for me. She often accused me of being fragile and weak (I think, to manipulate me and keep me under control). I eventually ended that toxic connection but it took years for me to do it.