Codependent No More Workbook (3 page)

Codependents and codependency got a bad reputation. Many people attended Twelve Step groups week after week, year after year, but didn’t change. Some got worse. While some people stepped into freedom and connected with true power, others clung to a victim self-image. They didn’t want to take responsibility for themselves. They preferred making their pain someone else’s fault.

Many people took recovery only partway. They stopped giving compulsively, but didn’t learn how to give in healthy ways. They became afraid to love, care for, and nurture people, which were all important parts of a healthy life. Some insisted they’d be sick all their lives, instead of allowing themselves to develop a healthy self-image. Other people blatantly insisted everyone had to attend meetings all their lives for codependency, when that isn’t true. Some people may only need to attend groups for a while, some intermittently, some all their lives, and some may not need to attend Twelve Step meetings at all. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all problem or solution.

Attendance at some groups, especially the unhealthy ones, dwindled while other groups worked hard to stay healthy and on track. New kinds of support groups sprang up, offering support for people involved in legitimate caretaking to help them remember to take care of themselves. They didn’t need Twelve Step meetings, but they could use some encouragement and support.

By then, computers had become standard fixtures in most people’s homes. After the millennium, people easily attended support groups or Step meetings online.

But many people tired of working on themselves. They thought initially it might take a few months to change. Then they discovered it could take decades to let go of habitual patterns. Added to that was that dealing with feelings became more dangerous than opening Pandora’s box. In Pandora’s box, everything is gone except hope. There was no hope for an ending to emotions. As soon as we
feel one, another one, two, or three more emotions appear.

People became confused about codependency. Two people can do the same behavior, but in one person the behavior is codependent, and in the other person the behavior is a healthy choice. People wanted clear rules to determine what’s codependent and what’s not, instead of having to trust themselves. But it’s not the external behaviors that determine codependency. The test for what’s codependent is
What’s the motivation for what you’re doing?
Are you doing something because you made a conscious choice to do it, or are you acting from guilt and obligation? Are you choosing to give or giving compulsively without thinking about what you’re doing? Are you hoping someone will like or love you if you do something for, or give something to, her or him? Do you feel lovable and likable, and have self-esteem? Or do you have to prove those things to other people and yourself? How do you feel when you’re done doing the behavior? Do you feel resentful, used, and victimized? Or do you feel comfortable with and responsible for your choices?

Many factors caused people to become disillusioned with recovery, but the biggest reason that people don’t get what they can out of recovery is that many codependents do not work the Twelve Steps. Most recovering addicts attend Twelve Step meetings and work the Steps as if their lives depend on it, because their lives do. Often, codependents don’t apply the recovery principles to their lives to replace codependent behaviors and reactions.

People can go to groups, talk recovery talk, but continue to stay stuck in their sighing, victimized codependent ways. People may know how to sound therapeutically correct. They know the right things to say. But their behaviors do not match their words.

Instead of learning to trust themselves, groups and people in recovery wanted rules. Some groups became as repressive and dysfunctional as the family systems that originally helped people develop codependency, operating by the same unhealthy rules:
Don’t think, don’t feel, don’t be who you are, don’t trust yourself.
Some people stopped taking codependency recovery seriously, calling it the popular “illness of the week.”

But codependency recovery—whether it involves an alcoholic or addicted person or not—is more than a trend. It helps people get and keep a life. Sometimes it saves their lives too.

What many people with codependency issues don’t understand is that their lives depend on them working the Steps. They deserve to heal from their pain just as much as alcoholics and addicts do. If they earnestly begin working the Steps—and in many cases
only
if they work the Steps—they’ll heal too.

We no longer have only first-generation codependents recovering. Now we have multiple generations of people displaying codependent behaviors. Many people show signs of classic codependency, no matter what generation they’re in: people-pleasing, caretaking, controlling, lack of boundaries, and believing they’re deprived and undeserving.

But many people now demonstrate a mutated form of codependency.
Deprived
and
undeserving
don’t describe them. They feel entitled to everything, whether they work for it or not. It’s the other side of the coin. They’d been overprotected and overindulged. I’ve repeatedly had people contact me after a therapist or friend suggested they read
Codependent No More.
“I’m in pain, all messed up. I need to talk to you right away,” they insist.

They don’t ask. They impatiently demand my attention.

They may have been coddled for many years, but they can’t hide forever. One by one, reality is finding them. But they write to me, expecting me to give them a way to solve their problem and heal their discomfort in less than a day.

Frequently, when I get these urgent, demanding messages from people who moan they can’t take the way they’re feeling one more second, I’ll ask: “What have you done so far today to take care of yourself? What Steps have you worked? Have you written in your journal, exercised, prayed, or meditated?” The e-mails cease, replaced by silence. “I’ll talk to you,” I write. “But not until you do at least three self-care behaviors first.”

That’s when the person quietly slips away. I don’t have a magic wand. Neither does anyone else.

In the 1990s, instead of calling themselves
codependent,
many people avoided the word and talked about their behaviors as if they were individual, disconnected problems. “I have anxiety and depression.” “I’m an agoraphobic, and I feel depressed.” “I have panic attacks.” “I’m full of fear.” The use of antidepressants and antianxiety medications became popular. Some people certainly do need medications for mental health issues, but I do ask people to consider how they might be able to take better care of themselves if they became sincerely involved in a Twelve Step program. If you have been taking medication, it is critical to
not
stop taking it unless it’s under a doctor’s guidance and care. If you have questions about whether your medication should be continued, talk to your doctor and work closely with him or her in making a decision.

I’ve been saying this for more than thirty years to people, because someone cared enough to teach me:
Being happy means surrendering to and feeling all our feelings, not just feeling happy.
It means being at peace with whatever is and how we feel—angry, upset, sad—each moment in time.

Working the Steps usually leads to doing other recovery work, such as family-of-origin work, going to therapy, or focusing on changing a particular behavior, but the force that moves us forward in recovery, that causes us to go against gravity by going up, not down, has been, is, and likely will continue to be, for most people, working the Steps. Learning these principles and applying them can even benefit people who don’t attend Twelve Step groups.

Alcoholism is described as cunning, baffling, and powerful. But those words
describe codependency too. Codependency can be absolutely and totally exhausting. It drains and depletes people, puts a blindfold on them, spins them around in circles until they’re dizzy. Then people try to go on with their lives and wonder why they can’t.

You’re not crazy. Codependency can make you feel crazy, though. When you look at yourself with eyes of love instead of criticism, you’ll see that everything happens for a reason, including what you do. Your codependent behaviors make perfect sense. Your goal was to survive. You did. Now, by working the Steps, first by going through them in depth, and then by using them as daily life tools, you’ll begin to thrive.

Here are the Twelve Steps used by Co-Dependents Anonymous, based on the original Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, but with slight changes suggested for people who want to create healthy relationships:

TWELVE STEPS OF
CO-DEPENDENTS ANONYMOUS

1. We admitted we were powerless over others—that our lives had become unmanageable.
   
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
   
3. Made a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
   
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
   
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.
   
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
   
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
   
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
   
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
   
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
    
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
    
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other co-dependents, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
    

The Steps are the heart of recovery and this book.

Working the Twelve Steps is how we heal from the different ways codependency hurt and affected us, whether they’re the Twelve Steps of Al-Anon (those affected by another person’s drinking), Co-Dependents Anonymous (people whose behaviors negatively affect their relationships), Codependents of Sex Addicts (people affected by another person’s compulsive sexual behavior), Gam-Anon (people affected by someone’s compulsive gambling), or Nar-Anon (people affected by someone using drugs).

These Steps, or suggested principles for living, will help you replace learned habitual survival behaviors with healthy options that in time will become a new way of life. By working the Steps, you become transformed. But you still have work to do. While the Steps are the means to transformation, they also lead to other activities that bring the specific types of healing each person requires. That might include becoming aware of and changing negative or limiting beliefs, seeing a therapist, attending groups, reading a book, or doing any of many different activities that bring exactly what you need to heal at the right time.

As they say in Twelve Step meetings,
Keep an open mind.