Rethinking Codependency
This is a work in progress, a bit of an outline of the content I will include in the final piece. I will probably shorten up some of the excerpts and allow readers to expand sections to read more. I may re-arrange the authors, or intersperse comments not grouped by author. Not totally sure yet. But I’m putting a bunch of stuff down to draw from.
Maia Szalavitz does a brilliant job in her book Unbroken Brain laying out a case for how the concept of codependency grew in an environment of toxic regard for connection, which is like a manifestation of the very cancer that is our disconnection in this modern world. Of course a society so deprived of, and so afraid of, real connection will produce concepts like codependency. I don’t need to write anything about this because she already did. I will include the most relevant bits of a story arc she tells over 6 pages of her book.
After that, I will share some excerpts from Matthew Lieberman and Francis Weller. And then I will elaborate on this concept I have that when (per Matthew Lieberman) our core need, beneath all other needs, is belonging, the concept of codependency can’t coexist with the mindset that best meets these core needs, since belonging is a collaborative creation, not something one person does.
I will also include excerpts from Sue Johnson (books (1) Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love and (2) Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy with Trauma Survivors: Strengthening Attachment Bonds) & Amir Levine (book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love), about attachment in adult relationships.
I may want to include some quotes from Marc Lewis (Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs); Bruce Perry/Maia Szalavitz (books (1) The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook—What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing and (2) Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered); and Beth Berry (article and book Motherwhelmed: Challenging Norms, Untangling Truths, and Restoring Our Worth to the World).
Marc Lewis continues the thread I will lay down from Francis Weller about belonging.
From Bruce Perry’s books I might mention (1) Mama P and how her comforting, snuggly presence, which at first may appear to be infantilizing, was in fact what led him to develop the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics, where you have to go back in time and meet the unmet needs from childhood before the person can move on, especially as related to our needs for community (tie-in to Francis Weller’s work?), and (2) the ratio of adult caregivers to children before the modern era being 4:1, so at odds with the experiment of the nuclear family being conducted in so many Western cultures right now (and other bits from that book that talk about the need for community and closeness and how isolated we really are compared to what we evolved to expect).
Beth Berry gives some concrete examples about how it feels to parent without the support of “the village” and how that affects our abilities to parent in ways our children really need, and at the end of the day, it’s only in a society like this, where our families of origin modeled for us this absence, that we can so arrogantly pretend that individualism has any place in optimum human health.
The childhood / parenting piece (the deficits inherent in a culture that doesn’t automatically laugh away the concept of “codependence” is one that still buys into this individualism thing) plays into it as well because it is due to our attachment trauma (or even just the seemingly unremarkable unavailability of support dealing with “ordinary” childhood challenges) that we end up as addicts, or struggling to be in healthy relationships, and it’s an illness not belonging to individuals, so much as to a society that is rife with holes in the fabric that is meant to support us. Those who are called “codependent” are trying to lean into those very real needs and what they expect in their very bones to be available to them: unconditional, unfailing, love and support. When we pathologize this reaching, we are saying this failed social experiment is right and their instincts are wrong.
Rather than breaking down the problem from a systems perspective (maybe bring in Uri Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems approach), we are looking at each individual instead of a system that is failing all of us.
I might also want to bring in the important point of divergence in Western psychology where Watson & Skinner convinced us to take as a baseline truth this cold and false idea about how humans work, and though Harlow came along and skewered their ideas, as a field, we never really divorced from their findings. We have continued to accept as default truth this idea of human motivation as being simplistic and driven by reinforcement or aversion, a glorified binary code system of ones and zeroes, like computers. And we ask the burden of proof to fall on those who want to say, there are some drives that are built into the being that aren’t bound by this simplistic system, that are inherited and innate and part of our evolutionary legacy. What a different place we’d have been in if, instead of Watson & Skinner setting the tone and everyone who came after needing to prove anything that disagreed with their findings—what if we’d taken the premise that love and connection are the most base human needs, and anyone who wanted to propose it wasn’t like that, THEY had to prove their ideas to the contrary? We continue to pretend that we’re being objective scientists because we just want everything to be evidence-based, but we forget that we don’t come to these questions with neutrality. How much of modern psychology has behaviorism baked into it? This may be too much to bring in here, but I may need to mention some of this stuff and link to another article (or series of articles) where I skewer behaviorism and its harmful impacts and how it is at root a deeply conservative ideology that robs humans of our most beautiful nature. (Mona Delahooke, Ross Greene, Alfie Kohn)
There is a video from Gabor Mate included in the Compassionate Inquiry training program where he talks about the concepts of “hitting rock bottom” and “enabling” which also seem relevant to the topic, which I will include, though I’m not sure where they’ll fit in, so for now I’ll put them at the end and later figure out where they go.
first up:
Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction
by Maia Szalavitz
everything below this line is quoted from Unbroken Brain p.148-153:
==================
During my addiction and recovery, this was made even more difficult by the codependency movement of the 1980s. This movement, which grew along with Al-Anon, was based on flawed psychology and wound up promoting harmful ideas that persist in addiction treatment and policy to this day. It recognized the link between love and addiction---but in a peculiar and ultimately damaging way.
The idea of codependency itself---that some people are overly dependent on their partners and try to escape their own issues by trying to solve other people's problems---is relatively uncontroversial.
But the codependency movement stretched this idea to dangerous extremes. Because addiction was defined as a disease, codependency became one as well. No one, however, was ever able to come up with a diagnostic tool that reliably distinguished between "codependents" and those without the disorder. Moreover, the problem of codependency was soon combined with the idea of "tough love", which diagnosed nearly any caring behavior toward people with addiction as "enabling" their drug use to continue.
As a result, codependency counselors and Al-Anon members recommended withholding love and material support. Add this to an individualistic culture where any type of dependence on others is seen as a weakness and you have a recipe for pathologizing normal human needs while increasing the pain and stigma associated with addiction.
....
It's not surprising, in this context, that Peele and Brodsky's Love and Addiction, with its strong claim that love was a form of addiction, became a bestseller in 1975. The authors' aim was to destigmatize addiction by comparing it to the most natural, healthy emotion of all: love. But given the cultural era in which it appeared, instead of making addiction seem less pathological, it wound up making love seem more so.
The book was eagerly seized upon by the founders of the codependence movement, who saw it as endorsing their ideas about the sickness of people who had relationships with addicts or were raised by them. By 1991, Robin Norwood, author of Women Who Love Too Much (1985), had called it "required reading" for every such woman. Melody Beattie, who wrote Codependent No More (1986), was another key figure in the movement, which grew as the drug panic of the '80s and '90s raised fear about everyone touched by addiction. Being obsessed with your lover soon became a sign that you had the addictive disease of codependence; wanting to spend all your time with your partner was abnormal, not healthy. Any addiction-like behavior during love was a flashing danger sign; you were supposed to end relationships with any obsessive qualities to nip codependence in the bud.
Because it was rooted in 12-step programs, the codependency movement was also deeply committed to the idea that addiction is a disease. And if addiction was an illness, then sick codependent love had to be a medical disorder, too. The role of learning and culture and how they interact with biology and psychology was ignored. "It is a sad irony for us that our work contributed to the labeling of yet more 'diseases' over which people are 'powerless'", Peele and Brodsky wrote in a 1991 preface to an edition of Love and Addiction, printed when codependency was all the rage. While they had wanted to show that normal love could go awry in a compulsive and life-contracting way---just as drug use can---instead, their work was interpreted to mean that all relationships were mere addictions and most love was delusional and self-centered.
....
While a romantic relationship isn't necessary for health, having at least some close relationships is. Research finds that loneliness can be as dangerous to health as smoking and more harmful than obesity, in fact. The more and higher-quality relationships a person has, the more mentally and physically healthy they tend to be---and that's not just because people want to be friends with those who are healthy. Improving relational health improves health in general, for both children and adults.
When I was addicted in the late '80s, however, human interdependence was not understood as well or as emphasized in psychology. Passionate love was decried as addiction and any need for others was suspect, especially in someone who was already an addict. Back then, any relationships an addicted person had were presumptively labeled "codependent"---even if the person was in recovery. The idea that a person with an addiction could be genuinely loved for herself was mocked.
Although research rapidly showed that there is actually no way to scientifically distinguish between people with "codependence" and everyone else, the idea continued to spread and is still taken seriously by a distressingly large percentage of professionals in the addictions field today. In fact, Codependent No More remains a bestseller among books about addiction. While it's certainly true that some people behave addictively in their relationships, it's hard to say more than that about it with any data firmer than anecdote. There is no "codependent" personality, no "brain disease" of codependence, no predictable course of any such "disorder". A "diagnosis" of codependence is about as scientific as a horoscope---and far less entertaining.
For me, at least, it did great harm. Once I started recovery, I was told that basically anyone who was involved with me was merely playing out codependence. That meant there was no way of distinguishing between good relationships and bad ones. I failed to realize that the same thing that distinguishes addiction from passionate interest also divides unhealthy love from that which is the highest experience of humanity. That is, love is real when it expands and enhances your life---and troubling and problematic when it contracts or impairs it. Whether you love a person, a drug, or an intellectual interest, if it is spurring creativity, connection, and kindness, it's not an addiction---but if it's making you isolated, dull, and mean, it is.
Contrast this with the "codependence" account, where obsessive, passionate love can't be "real" love---and Romeo and Juliet had a disease. More sensible, I think, is to see it like this: obsessions can get out of hand, but love is inherently obsessive and needs to be that way to keep us bound to each other. When you are in love, in fact, the levels of serotonin in your brain fall and are comparable to those seen in people with OCD. Having low levels of this transmitter isn't always bad, though. It is healthy and normal to be obsessed when you meet a potential life partner. If this love isn't reciprocated or the person is abusive, that's another story---but obsession itself doesn't make love an addiction.
If all-encompassing passion is itself pathological, true love is a disease. To me, this seems not only demeaning and dehumanizing but silly. Dismissing one of the greatest human sources of meaning and joy---and yes, pain and loss, too---as illness is no way to help people. And what it says to those of us with addictions is that we are the unlovable monsters we feared we were. Not helpful.
On top of all the other problems, labelling caring as codependence particularly pathologizes behavior that is typically associated with women. It makes us the problem for "loving too much" rather than recognizing human interdependence and normal relational needs.
Further, saying that a woman who tries to help her alcoholic husband by hiding his drinking from his boss has a "disease" because what would really be better is for him to face the consequences is not only inaccurate but incoherent. Trying to help someone you love, even ineffectually, is admirable, not sick. In fact, as we shall see, the idea that being kind and "enabling" addicts does more harm than good is, itself, damaging. Healthy relationships are essential to recovery: while love isn't always all you need, without it, few people get better. Love can't always cure addiction---but lack of it or inability to perceive it often helps cause addiction. Compassion is part of the cure, not the disease. Our societal belief that toughness is what works instead is a huge part of why our drug policy is so disastrously inept and harmful.
next up:
Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
by Matthew Lieberman
(several excerpts will go here, and I will comment on most of them)
and then:
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
by Francis Weller
Francis Weller speaks beautifully about the need to grieve and celebrate in community (ellipses omitted for readability):
———————————————
When we are born, and we pass through childhood, adolescence, and the stages of adulthood, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, and reflection. In short, we expect what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely, the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred.
The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can't give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog. This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it difficult to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.
At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of a personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect.
What I felt in the people of Dano was a deep sense that they knew their worth and their welcome. These two things are extensions of one another: worth and welcome. There wasn't any anxiety of whether someone was good enough to be let inside the circle; this was a given.
I wrote earlier about shame and how this toxic emotion situates itself in us as a consequence of an inadequate sense of belonging. Without a village to reflect back to us that we are valued, ruptures are interpreted in silence, in a vacuum, and the conclusion we often come to is, "I must have deserved this treatment" or "I was somehow responsible for this."
Another facet of loss at this gate concerns the expectation of purpose in our lives. Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer the community. Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need. To feel valued for the gifts with which we are born affirms our worth and dignity. In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment---simply being who we are confirms our place in the village. That is one of the fundamental understandings about gifts: we can only offer them by being ourselves fully. Gifts are a consequence of authenticity; when we are being true to our natures, the gifts can emerge.
In our modern culture of hyperactivity and stress, we are seldom asked what we have carried into the world as a gift for the community. The frequent question is: "What do you do for a living?" Or worse: "How do you earn a living?" I find that question obscene. We have gone from being seen as valuable to the community, a carrier of gifts, to having to earn a living. No one asks, "What is the gift you carry in your soul? What have you brought with you into the heart of the village?" We long to feel cosmically significant, that it matters that we are here and that we make a difference. The absence of this remains as a persistent grief in our psyches. We have become spiritually unemployed.
———————————————————————
—————————- / / ‘
Then he elaborates on the topic of belonging (write a couple sentences here):
———————————————————————-
[type up stuff]
———————————————————————
—————————- / / ‘
Add some final comments about Francis Weller…
In order to succeed meeting our core need for belonging, we had to evolve with this constant impulse to connect (or evaluate existing connection, or plan for future connection). Since that’s the way we evolved, it’s senseless to pathologize us for being that way. There are certainly conversations to be had about how to be supportive and compassionate in ways that are respectful to all parties. But it’s misguided to imagine that the dimensions of connectedness or dependence are the forces that limit our ability to connect peacefully. The triggers we have in relationships don’t come from the relationships themselves, but from our past. There’s really going to be very few people without some sort of trauma &/or attachment trauma that plays out in their relationships causing troubles. And so many combinations of trauma in the pairs we form that are hard on the people in them. A concept like codependence singles out the dimension of dependence, which leaves out all the important dynamics, the ones that give us the details about what each party needs to be safe with one another. When we focus on the pathologizing of being overly connected, we can ignore the harder stuff we face. And this impulse is super understandable. But I don’t think we get very far on the issues we lump under the name of codependence (which represents a million different permutations of trauma playing out) this way. We make progress in relational harmony when we can see ourselves clearly and have enough self-regulation to deal with triggers so we can be who we want to be in relationships. In other words, when we heal trauma. Someone who hasn’t healed these things is not going to turn an unhappy relational state into their deepest wishes and needs by focusing on the ability to disconnect, by pathologizing our co-dependence on those closest to us.
Then can add that Marc Lewis quote, and some Beth Berry stuff. and maybe end with the excerpt about Mama P. Do I want to include data on caregivers to child ratios in hunter-gatherer days from Born For Love? It might be nice to emphasize how we used to be able to count on far more people to surround and support us. So of course we’re all hurting from the lack of what we are evolved to expect. That relational pain doesn’t indicate something wrong with us, it indicates something wrong with the society the person is living within. We need to detoxify the environment to make it safe for people, not ask them to settle for greatly diminished connection from what our nervous systems evolved to need.
and here are those wonderful Gabor Mate quotes:
on “hitting rock bottom”:
"So there's this idea—particularly in addiction circles, but in general as well for people who are behaving in self-destructive, or self-harming ways—that you have to let them hit rock bottom. Well, first of all, “you have to let them hit rock bottom”? Who the hell are you to let them hit anything?
They're going to hit rock bottom or not hit rock bottom. You don't have to let them. Some people will, they just will. It's not a question of letting anybody, it's that whatever will happen will happen. It's true enough, that you can't stop anybody from hitting rock bottom if that's what they’re going to do. Don’t even try. You can’t do it.
That doesn't mean you can't intervene and help, but it's not up to you to let anything happen. So drop that language, that you've got the authority to allow somebody to hit something or not allow it. That it’s your agency that does it.
Now, in general, I don't believe in it. I used to work in the downtown eastside [Vancouver, BC] with people in the streets with HIV and Hepatitis C, outside of the law, in complete poverty, with teeth that were black and missing, and limbs that were covered in scars. What the hell is rock bottom if that's not rock bottom? That by itself did not make anybody give up their addiction, so it's just a myth.
I may read you a quote sometime from a Catholic monk Thomas Merton who says for people to find themselves, they don't need defeat but they need victory. They have to like that victory, like that taste of victory, and like that better than defeat. So, I say, if you want to help people, give them no more defeat, give them victory. And victory is precisely your ability to stay with them and be compassionate. Give them that."
on “enabling”:
"In terms of enabling, you don't enable anybody by being compassionate towards them. You do enable them if they commit a crime, and you help them cover it up. That's enabling. You do enable them perhaps if they keep stealing your credit card and you still make it available to them, maybe that's enabling, but being compassionately present, that's never enabling. That's giving them victory, that helps them perhaps open their possibility towards healing, which otherwise without your presence may not occur."