[2022-04-24] Codependent No More
Yesterday was World Book Day, a United Nations holiday sponsored by UNESCO. Celebrated every April 23, World Book Day is dedicated to promoting reading and its benefits.
Books have been instrumental in my life, helping me to recognize and understand unhealthy coping mechanisms and to replace them with healthier approaches. One of the most influential books I ever read was Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself by Melody Beattie. A recovering alcoholic and former chemical dependency counselor, Beattie explains in her book what codependency is and offers suggestions on how to detach from the people and situations we are trying to control and to focus instead on taking care of ourselves.
I bought Codependent No More in September 1989, at about the time that I chose to leave a dysfunctional relationship. I can't recall whether the book helped me to walk away or whether my walking away made me more open to the ideas presented in the book, but the timing was right. As helpful as Beattie's book was when I was 23, it would take me several more decades to fully comprehend and apply the ideas she presented.
Beattie defines codependency as follows:
A codependent person is one who has let another person's behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person's behavior.
She notes that there are degrees of codependency and many different characteristics among codependents. While she shares several stories of people who are codependent, she points out:
No single example illustrates the typical codependent or his or her experience.... Some people have extremely painful and debilitating experiences with codependency. Others don't and may be only mildly affected.... [A] common thread runs through all stories of codependency. It involves our responses and reactions to people around us.
Beattie states that codependents are reactionary by nature. They overreact, underreact, but rarely act. They react to other people's problems, behaviours and pains.
The term codependent, writes Beattie, was originally used to describe a person whose life was affected as a consequence of being in a relationship with someone who was chemically dependent. But professionals began to see codependency in other groups: adult children of alcoholics, people in relationships with persons experiencing mental health or emotional issues, people in relationships with chronically ill individuals, parents of children with behaviour problems, and people in helping professions, such as nurses and social workers.
Why do some of us become codependent, taking on the role of rescuers, caretakers and enablers of others? From her own experience with codependents, Beattie found that:
They were controlling because everything around and inside them was out of control. Always, the dam of their lives and the lives of those around them threatened to burst and spew harmful consequences on everyone. And nobody but them seemed to notice or care.
When we grow up in circumstances that feel out of control, we can fall into the habit of trying to oversee everything and everyone around us. We control because we're afraid not to or because we think we have to. This tendency is often motivated by an altruistic desire to prevent those we love from experiencing pain or loss and to similarly prevent ourselves from feeling pain or loss. Beattie writes:
Out of habit, some of us may have developed an attitude of attachment—of worrying, reacting, and obsessively trying to control. Maybe we lived with people and through events that were out of control. Maybe obsessing and controlling is the way we kept things in balance or temporarily kept things from getting worse. And then we just kept on doing it. Maybe we're afraid to let go, because when we let go in the past, terrible, hurtful things happened.
Later in the book, Beattie offers an example of why some of us took on the role of caring for others:
Some of us learned to be caretakers when we were children. Perhaps we were almost forced to as a result of living with an alcoholic parent or some other family problem.... We decided to cope—to survive—the best way we could, by picking up the slack and assuming other people's responsibilities.
But such a coping mechanism can lead to our becoming overly invested in the lives of our loved ones, taking responsibility for things that are not ours to manage, no matter how admirable and heroic such a response may appear to ourselves and others. Indeed, codependents can look hyper responsible. But when we take that role to an extreme, we can become over-committed, exhausted, worried, hurt, unhappy and resentful.
According to Beattie, the first step to recovery from codependency is detachment, which she explains as follows:
Detachment is based on the premises that each person is responsible for himself, that we can't solve problems that aren't ours to solve, and that worrying doesn't help. We adopt a policy of keeping our hands off other people's responsibilities and tend to our own instead. If people have created some disasters for themselves, we allow them to face their own proverbial music. We allow people to be who they are. We give ourselves that same freedom. We live our own lives to the best of our ability. We strive to ascertain what it is we can change and what we cannot change. Then we stop trying to change things we can't.
Beattie goes on to say that detachment involves living in the present, focusing on what is good in our lives today and being grateful for that:
We allow life to happen instead of forcing and trying to control it. We relinquish regrets over the past and fears about the future. We make the most of each day.
This is an incredibly important concept, for all of us, not just those of us who tend towards codependency. I truly believe that focusing on the past leads to depression, and focusing on the future leads to anxiety—whether our concern is for others or ourselves.
Beattie suggests that sometimes when we stop taking responsibility for other people, they pick up the slack and start taking responsibility for themselves and for solving their problems. Detaching does not mean we no longer care about the other person. It means choosing to love the other person in ways that help them while not hurting ourselves. For example, we can learn to say, "It's too bad you're having that problem. What do you need from me?" instead of "Here, let me do that for you." We don't have to fix things for the other person.
Beattie contends that people who are codependent tend to have poor communication skills. She maintains that we can learn to express our wants and needs by, for example, saying: "This is what I need from you. This is what I want from you." She also advises that we learn to say: "I love you, but I love me, too. This is what I need to do to take care of me."
In any given situation, we can detach and ask ourselves "What do I need to do to take care of myself?"
Recovering from codependency is fundamentally about recognizing that someone else can choose to spoil their fun, their day or their life—that's their choice—but we don't need to let it spoil our fun, our day or our life.
A few years ago, I went through my books and gave many of them away, but I hung on to Codependent No More, recognizing it as one of the more helpful books I had read in my lifetime. I would still recommend it today.
