Codependency Support Group

I have felt trapped in a pattern of co-dependency my entire life, but it has never been so bad as it is right now. I've lived in NYC for a few years, since relocating after my boyfriend was offered a job here. When I moved I was in the process of applying to masters programs in Occupational Therapy. Though I tried to pursue that goal here, I ended up instead with two years of work in mental health, both poorly paid and volunteer, and a ton of debt from a year of additional undergrad electives the program forced me to take. When I began the grad program they yanked half of my loan and I had to leave at the end of the semester due to financial distress.

So now I'm finishing a second degree in psychology, much to my chagrin. Potential employers were adamant about my needing a degree in either art, computers, or psych to do what I want and the latter was the only one I had real experience in. Here is how my co-dependency has manifested itself: I had almost a 4.0 GPA, but no hands-on experience with testing. I needed to get into a closed capstone course in order to finish my degree. So I asked one of my professors to let me into his class and he strongly hinted that he could only do this if I helped him out in the lab. I thought this would entail assisting him or other grad students and he assured me that it was prep and that much of it could be done at home.

I have now done 3 months of unpaid work, including constant reworks of test protocol. Nothing is ever good enough. Finally, after seeing 50 people the experiment was scrapped completely. Now, as I get ready to enter my last class of the program, I find that he wants me to do a new round of testing on my own which will take 2+ hours for each participant. The new routine is extremely complicated and if I don't get everything perfect each time i will need get a new subject to replace them. If I do this I will be stuck taking his class 2x/wk in the middle of the day plus be committed to a minimum of 4 subjects a week for 8 weeks. This will require 2 more full days on site. The work is stressful and unpaid, and it will make finding paid work impossible for the next four months.

I'm terrible at saying no (as you might have guessed) but I'm sick of being taken advantage of . My temptation at this moment is to back out of the research, drop his class and do the best I can with the job market. At least then I'd be paid. The cycle I see in my life is this: People ask me for a small favor, I say yes. The favor then grows until it's a huge undertaking, I realize I've over-committed and don't perform up to expectations. The person gets pissed at me for not fulfilling all of their requirements and tells me that I'm incompetent of that they will write me a bad recommendation. it's really making me hate dealing with people at all. Any recommenations?
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Posted on 08/02/08, 03:08 pm