What I have seen since I went to my first CoDA meeting in 1990 is...
When two people were conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, normalized and neurally “hard-wired” to sadomasochistic tendencies well before they met -- and they are both willing to race around a mutual Karpman Drama Triangle alternately playing Rescuer, Persecutor and Victim -- they're evidently more likely to keep racing around that thing.
The "classic" codependent needs to be abused to feel seen and heard. (See Associating Abuse with Safety & Security.)
Most severe codependents do get into -- and remain in -- romantic enmeshments with other codependents, and/or with malignant narcissists who almost always play sadist to the codependent's masochist because narcissists of that type direly need someone to abuse to feel better about themselves.
AND, depending upon who's the "alpha dog" in any given relationship, codependents may be sadists in one relationship and masochists in another. ("Caca rolls downhill," after all.)
If intrigued, see also...
The Patterns & Characteristics of Codependence on the Codependents Anonymous website, and notice how a codependent can be one way with some people and the opposite with others. (It's all conditioned, instructed, socialized, habituated, and normalized polarized extremism in a flip-flop set-up that often looks about like this.)
Resources:
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