Codependent to Secure: Healing Enmeshment

About the Event

Codependency is a relational survival strategy that often begins in childhood, in families where emotional instability, addiction, illness, trauma, or overwhelm require a child to become exquisitely attuned to others in order to stay safe and connected.

When our early environments ask us, implicitly or explicitly, to prioritize someone else’s well-being over our own, we may internalize unconscious contracts such as “I am responsible for other people’s pain,” or “My needs must wait.” Over time, these contracts can shape our attachment patterns, drawing us toward enmeshment, self-sacrifice, people-pleasing, and a profound loss of contact with our own center.

In the body and brain, codependency functions like chronic stress. Our nervous systems become colonized by the distress of the people we love. Executive function narrows, discernment becomes difficult, and panic can arise when the other falters. At the same time, caregiving and self-abandonment are often rewarded neurologically, making these patterns feel both compulsive and deeply entrenched.

In this 7 week course, we will work together to learn and practice:

• How codependent and enmeshed patterns form through attachment, family systems, and nervous-system conditioning.
• The role of parentification, mental illness, addiction, abuse, neglect, and rigid family roles in shaping relational adaptations.
• How unconscious contracts keep us oriented around others’ capacity rather than our own aliveness
• How sensitivity, attunement, and care can become distorted under pressure

Using the Resonant Healing tools of unconscious contract work and time-travel, we will begin the movement from enmeshment toward secure attachment, a place of reclaiming selfhood while staying relationally available.

Together, we will bring compassion to the younger parts of us who learned that love required vigilance and self-erasure, and we will practice releasing the responsibility for others’ suffering that was never ours to carry. As these contracts soften, space opens for a new conviction to emerge: that it is possible, and even likely, to be loved for who we are, not for how well we manage, fix, or disappear.

Participants who struggle with codependent patterns may experience increased self-warmth, greater confidence, reduced commitment to people-pleasing, and a growing trust that their voice, needs, and presence truly matter. This course offers a pathway toward relationships grounded in mutuality, responsiveness, and the felt sense of safety that allows us to rest in connection without losing ourselves.

Cost and How to Register

*PLEASE NOTE:

• Your tuition payment is non-refundable (but it is transferable).
• The course will be recorded for those who want to learn asynchronously for some or all sessions.
• This work is not therapy and is not a substitute for therapy. If you have a sense that you would be destabilized by yourself or others speaking about difficult events, then this event may not be for you. While we hope that the processes and information that we share can be of use in your journey, we do not have the resources to support extreme psychological difficulties.

If you have questions or need support, please email help@sarahpeyton.com

About Sarah and Jaya

Sarah Peyton, Certified Trainer of Nonviolent Communication and neuroscience educator, integrates brain science and the use of resonant language to heal personal and collective trauma with exquisite gentleness.

Sarah is a sought-after expert who brings neuroscience expertise together with depth work, self-compassion, and the transformative potential of language. She works with audiences internationally to create a compassionate understanding of the effects of relational trauma on the brain, and teaches people how words change and heal us.

Sarah teaches and lectures internationally and is the author of four books on relational neuroscience and self-compassion: Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing, the companion Your Resonant Self Workbook: From Self-sabotage to Self-care, and Affirmations for Turbulent Times: Resonant Words to Soothe Body and Mind, and The Antiracist Heart: A Self-Compassion and Activism Handbook, co-authored alongside Roxy Manning, PhD.

Jaya Manske is a transformative healing-centered coach and resonant healing practitioner with a passion for supporting people to cultivate kindness, compassion and gentleness for themselves and reconnect to their wholeness and mattering. She has been an empathetic practitioner since 2001 and is a member of Sarah’s team.

A former educator with a degree focused on developmental theory, Jaya has an in-depth background in attachment theory and how resonance transforms our ability to be in a kinder relationship with ourselves and others.

Informed by developmental theory, relational neuroscience, and the ways trauma impacts the brain and nervous system, Jaya offers resonant empathy, unconscious contracts/sacred vow work, time travel empathy, and is a certified mindfulness and wellness coach.