Codependent No More Workbook (2 page)

I
n 2001, a friend and I traveled to China on our way to make a pilgrimage around Mount Kailash in Tibet. We changed our plans, deciding to climb four holy mountains in mainland China first. We knew we might not pass that way again.

Mountain climbing in China means climbing thousands and thousands of steps. Once, when the stairway became especially steep, I wondered if I was surefooted enough to handle it. At that moment, a scrawny man approached and then passed us from behind carrying about seventy-five pounds of wooden beams on his back. The beams were to repair the temple at the mountaintop. Energized by his devotion, I forgot my fears and tackled the steep stairs.

On the longest and hardest climb of all, I began to tire. I had only climbed about halfway up the mountain, but I felt done. Then a group of elderly women who spoke only Chinese surrounded me. Sensing my weariness, one stood in front of me, one behind, and one on each side. The women on my right and left sides each grabbed one of my hands, and we climbed together. Their energy charged through me. It was exactly what I needed to make it to the top. There’s magic in groups that have a single-minded purpose.

And we’ll get what we need, if we’re committed to our path.

When I wondered why I even wanted to climb all these steps, the answer promptly appeared. It was a spiritual quest and a metaphor for recovery.

If we’re healing or recovering from codependency, we need to climb up Steps. The difference is, in recovery we don’t need to climb thousands of steps. We only need to climb twelve.

Climbing the mountains—or tackling the problems we encounter—continually requires hard work. It can still catch me off guard when, within days of learning a lesson and breathing that trite but welcome breath of relief, a larger, more challenging problem appears. We either experience the same thing over and over until we master the lesson, or one thing after another as new lessons appear, challenging and motivating our spiritual growth.

Change happens in stages, in cycles, or by the pendulum swinging back and forth from extremes until it lands in the sacred, holy middle ground. It surprised many people, including me, to discover that giving up codependent behaviors could take as long as it sometimes does. But if a behavior dominates someone’s life for years or decades, change doesn’t happen overnight. This kind of transformation can take a long time and requires hard work.

This workbook, and the journal you keep along with it, will be your log and documentation of your spiritual pilgrimage. You’ll be taking your lessons directly from the events that have taken place or are happening now in your life. This workbook will provide suggestions on how best to learn and grow from whatever happens to you while you’re on your pilgrimage. It will be targeted particularly at what we call
recovering from codependency.

This workbook, the steps you climb, and the lessons will ask you to look at your life, problems, and relationships in a way that you may not normally do. It will ask you to use the perspective that everything that happens is part of a Greater Plan, one created specifically for you. If you’re ready to begin, sign and date your journal to honor the official beginning of your pilgrimage—this part of your journey. It doesn’t matter if you’re new to recovery and this is your first day, or if you’ve been recovering for twenty or thirty years. Every day is an opportunity for a new beginning, the start of a new journey, and a chance to use every single thing that occurs for your well-being and growth. You may—for memory’s sake—want to include a few notes about how you’re feeling, or about various events taking place, to honor the beginning and help you recall this day.

When I started working at a drug treatment center in 1975, I wanted to work with the addicts, but the program director assigned me to work with their significant others. The center treated male addicts, so family group consisted of women. We didn’t have the word
codependency
yet. We called them
significant others,
but they weren’t significant to anyone, including themselves.

“I don’t know what to do with them,” I told my boss, “and I’m new here.”

“Neither do we," he said. "And that’s why you get the job.”

Nobody else wanted it. The revolution hadn’t begun yet.

Although Lois Wilson, Bill Wilson’s wife, began Al-Anon meetings in the 1950s, codependency recovery began so quietly then that most of us didn’t see
it. Bill Wilson wrote the Twelve Steps and cofounded Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Even in the 1970s, people (I was one) thought Al-Anon was a social event for wives of alcoholics. More treatment centers opened. We knew that people other than old men could be drunks and learned more about addicts. But when it came to the needs of the family, we didn’t know what to do, and most people didn’t care.

Numerous alcohol and drug treatment centers opened in the 1980s. People working in the field realized treatment and recovery are experimental. Different therapies and techniques could be tried to see what worked.

Diversion became popular, with judges sentencing people convicted of nonviolent alcohol or drug crimes to treatment instead of prison. The government and the people felt that alcoholics and addicts deserved another chance. Clearly, addicts and alcoholics can be instrumental in helping each other get sober when clergy, doctors, professors, psychologists, and psychiatrists aren’t of much value. Alcoholics and addicts listen to other recovering people, preferring shared experience, strength, hope, role models, and being genuinely understood over college degrees.
If you can do it, I can too
became a powerful transformational belief.

It would take time before these ideas finally evolved into codependency recovery. Sometimes believing creates seeing. In other situations, seeing creates a new belief. Blind faith may not be enough. We have to see somebody like us recover to believe we can.

Significant others continued to know and stay in their place, standing quietly in the backdrop. Treatment centers went through the motions of offering family groups, often because of government regulations. But the results of this therapy weren’t impressive. When I attended college to get my degree as a chemical dependency counselor, I received the following training to prepare me for dealing with the family members: "Just listen, nod your head, and agree. Say um-hum," the professor said. "Show empathy.”

I did as he instructed, but it didn’t work. The training that counselors received was sorely inadequate, but nothing else existed. Like the man carrying the heavy wooden beams up the steep stairway to help rebuild the temple, people will crawl over broken glass—gladly suffer—if they know it’s for a good purpose. Later, we learned codependents will sacrifice with or without a purpose. They’re happily miserable.

Treatment centers didn’t see a purpose to search for the Holy Grail for significant others. What difference would it make? What they needed, at least in Minnesota, was two offensive linemen and a tackle from the Vikings to block the plays made by the significant others when their addicted boyfriend or husband began to get better. Significant others have a finely tuned psychic radar when it comes to what’s happening with others, although they’re naturally unaware of themselves. When a woman senses changes in her loved one, she’ll often try to convince him to leave treatment, even though it might mean he’ll end up in jail. She fears that if he gets well, he won’t need her. Most people with codependency issues feel genuinely unlovable. They attach themselves to people by caretaking, hoping to become indispensable instead.

“I’d give anything to know what it feels like to be loved,” one anonymous recovering woman said. She’d been working on herself for more than twenty years.

As the 1980s rushed in, “name that pain” became the rage. Dysfunctions popped into sight as fast as we could name them. How could we not have seen these problems before—issues such as physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; eating disorders; and compulsive sexual behaviors? Of all the pains named, identifying
codependency
and what needs to be done to heal from it continues to make the greatest positive contribution to the largest number of people’s lives.

When I wrote
Codependent No More
in 1986, I thought it might speak to a few people. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people identified themselves as codependents. When awareness and identification of codependency popped into the culture’s consciousness, it initially brought excitement and relief. Identifying codependency kicked off a recovery revolution the way nothing else had since AA, Alanon, and NA. We welcomed the explosion.

People enmeshed with addicts, alcoholics, or any kind of dysfunctional family system finally found what they’d been looking for, even if they didn’t know they were looking for it. They found validation. They weren’t crazy, they were codependent. Given the same set of circumstances, anyone would behave similarly.

Counselors had often felt frustrated with or angry at the family members. The rhetorical buzz questions and phrases among them concerning codependents had become, “They’re crazier than the addict or alcoholic,” and “Who wouldn’t drink with a spouse like that?”

We didn’t get the answers to the questions we’d been asking, but when we asked different questions, we got the answers. “Who wouldn’t act that crazy after living with an addict or alcoholic?” And, “The addicts and alcoholics medicate pain by drinking and using drugs while the codependents double over with pain, with no medication other than an occasional moment of relief brought on by good old-fashioned denial.”

We saw that rarely did a person have an addiction or another compulsive disorder without having codependency. People aren’t just chemically dependent. Most are Double Winners—chemically dependent and codependent too.

More and more people recovering from chemical dependency found themselves relapsing or suicidal after about seven years of sobriety, when the repressed pain from codependent behaviors broke through. They needed two Twelve Step recovery programs to create a life that works.

Each of us needs a break from the stark, raving pain of reality once in a while. Some codependents need it every day.

When looked at in the right light, codependency made perfect sense.

Doctors and experts used several terms to describe this condition:
para-alcoholic, nonalcoholic, co-alcoholic. Codependency
is the word that stuck. The word made it into reference books, medical journals, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. The behaviors that accompanied codependency got tagged as
survival behaviors—
behaviors people do to adapt to crazy people and difficult situations.

Survival behaviors are what people do when they don’t know what else to do. Survival behaviors aren’t preferable, because they begin causing harm to the person using them and to other people. Eventually they can become our downfall, resulting in secondary problems, addictions, or death.

Some people insist that God never gives people more than they can handle. However, the pain can be too great when an eight-year-old is sexually abused, a mother discovers her daughter smoking crack, or a husband learns his wife has been unfaithful since the day they married and the children he thought were theirs aren’t his.

Survival behaviors are what people do when they don’t have other options for dealing with overwhelming situations. Sometimes survival behaviors are the best we can do. The problem is, these behaviors become habitual. Then, when they turn on us and begin destroying our lives, we don’t know how to stop
doing them. Without help, we don’t have any options.

Changing codependent behaviors became a central part of a huge paradigm shift.

Whenever I heard people say that, I’d nod my head and agree, even though I didn’t know what a paradigm was or what happened when it moved. Later I learned it meant a new way of seeing ourselves and the world.

We felt like we discovered fire when codependency recovery began. That’s because we did. All those years of repressing emotions and living in denial had numbed and deadened our spirits. Now with recovery, we came alive. We aren’t trapped. We don’t have to stay stuck in relationships that make us miserable. We’re free to choose.

For so many years we thought other people held the key to our happiness. Then we found out we held the key to the prison where we’d been held captive. We might have started out as legitimate victims of others, but then we became victims of ourselves.

Some people became skeptical or cynical about the problems that became named in the 1980s, saying that
dysfunctional
and
family
meant the same thing (which is often true). They called codependency recovery, the art of taking care of ourselves, a symptom of the “Me” generation, but that’s not what codependency recovery is. Parents who barely survived the Great Depression or the Holocaust raised and trained the Baby Boomers, the first generation of recovering codependents. Surviving had become a way of life for these parents. That first generation of recovering codependents, like our sometimes severely persecuted parents, became well trained in feeling deprived and undeserving. Codependency recovery counteracts the deprived and undeserving belief systems, but we aren’t simply the “Me” generation. It took years of hard work to be able to say, “Me too.”

People’s attitudes about identifying themselves as codependents dramatically changed in the 1990s. Labeling themselves
codependent
didn’t excite or appeal to people anymore. The further away we got from our codependency, the less we wanted to admit that it had been our game. What once brought relief now carried more stigma than admitting to being an addict or alcoholic. I related to this stigma. Being needy, manipulative, or controlling became a source of embarrassment, especially as the public began associating codependency with psychotic,
rabbit-boiling stalkers like the borderline personality portrayed by actress Glenn Close in the movie
Fatal Attraction.

Some recovering people began to manipulate the concept of self-care, turning it into a one-way street to use their emotions to manipulate others while refusing to listen to anyone else’s feelings, or crying “abuse” when anyone confronted them. They used their growing knowledge of therapy to justify dysfunctional behaviors, substituting narcissism and self-indulgence for self-love.