The New Codependency: Help and Guidance for Today’s Generation

5 Responses to “The New Codependency: Help and Guidance for Today’s Generation”

1. Kathy D. Mill says:

   April 6, 2010 at 7:01 am

   The book had a black slash across the pages on the outside. Some pages were folded. It didn’t matter to me b/c I bought the bk. for myself. But people should know. The content is not just an update of the previous book. She updates her focus to selfishness which she thinks is the new boundary come forth, self preoccupation.
   Rating: 3 / 5
2. Rodger Garrett says:

   April 6, 2010 at 9:55 am

   Buy this book and read it. It =will= help. But insight is not the complete solution, and half-measures should never be expected to do a complete job. =The New Codependency= is just that: insight and half-measures.

   In the cognitivist view (see Beck, Chomsky, Ellis, Lazarus, Seligman, Wessler, and Young), the ego is the collection of core beliefs, values, thought(l)s, assumptions, convictions and attitudes that appraises, interprets, evaluates, judges, assesses, analyzes and attributes meaning to experience and colors our emotional responses thereto. Those who have transcended their egos have looked long and hard at their core beliefs, values, assumptions, etc., and come to grips with how their appraisals, interpretations, evaluations, etc., have controlled their minds and effected their emotions and behavior.

   Ego transcendence is never complete; it is never a matter of arrival so much as continued administer and maintenance. Even as I know Beattie would agree, the latest of her 16 successful — and very helpful — books on codependence makes it clear that even though she has come far since Codependent No More and Beyond Codependency (written in the late `80s), she has further to go and doesn’t know that.

   Presumptuous as it surely sounds for me to say, like Cermak, Evans, Mellody (with whom she is often confused, but should not be), Rapson & English, the Weinholds and others who have explored the topic in the past two decades, Beattie is a fine synthesizer of what she has learned and worked with. But, like most pop psych writers, she does not know what she does not know. And that is bounty.

   That said, I =have= learned from her work, as well as from others, about what Harry Stack Sullivan and Lorna Smith Benjamin call “parataxical integration,” what Stephen Karpman called “racing nearly the drama triangle,” and what I’ve termed myself to be “reciprocal reactivity.”

   Beattie has opened the doors of insight for millions and helped to spawn a 12 Step recovery movement. But she has only opened that door part of the way, and her theoretical limitations have kept that door in that position for many whose understandable, slavish adherence to what has been published limits their capacities to explore further and causes them to foreclose to One Way Only. That’s not her fault, but neither does she address the come forth and warn her readers in any depth.

   Sadly, she (and other less educated authors, including many with advanced degrees) has helped those of also limited thought turn Codependents Anonymous into a religion, rather than an endless journey of truly spiritual exploration. Narrowmindedness, absolutism, dogmatism and foreclosure are the essential problems of the codependent to start with. Unless those (and other) concepts are explored, questioned and either revised or rejected outright, one can be expected to continue to have problems.

   Beattie has been at her best in books like The Language of Letting Go where she was forced by format to keep her essays brief and to the top, as well as closer to reporting her actual transformational experiences, as different to trying to guide others with “excellent thoughts.” She is a journalist and an addictions counselor; not a post-doctoral psychologist with a mind full of far more sophisticated, concept-illuminated epxerience and grasp of mental operation, brain function, traumatology or evidence-based treatment methods. When she attempts to set forth an organized treatment =system=, as she has done before and does again here, she is out =way= over her depth.

   This dismays me because codependents, like most others who have psychological problems, are all-or-nothing, all-aptly-or-all-incorrect, everlastingly-or-never, all-excellent-or-all-terrible, all-win-or-all-lose, black-and-white thinkers. And few get “better” (let lonely “well”) in the long run, unless their dichotomous thought is identified, examined and restructured. Despite the fact that she briefly addresses this vital topic, Beattie steps aptly into the absolutistic mud again and again here, correctly as she did in her previous work.

   I have attended Co-Dependents Anonymous and other 12 Step meetings for more than 30 years. It is clear to me that even as many have been able to “place the plug in the jug,” stay away from the connection and the casino, and gain tremendous insight into their eating, romance, sex, work, exercise, political cause and other compulsive activity addictions, very few seem to have found lasting emotional comfort, but much they claim to.

   I say this because I hear them go on for decades about their continuing disconnections from reality, as well as act them out in their relationships with others. They say, “Lunacy is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different consequences,” but they do correctly that in continuing to see the world in black and white and turn what Wilson, Kannon, Carnes, Bradshaw, Black, Woititz, Mellody and others handed them into the form of mental organization this culture knows best: dogmatic religion.

   Unless or until someone in the 12 Step movement steps up and addresses the corruption of spirituality into rigid, rule-bound dogma, real recovery will continue to stay over the horizon for those in AA, NA, Alanon, CoDA, OA, ACA, SA, SAA, SLAA, and other 12 Step fellowships.

   To the prospective reader of this book, I would say it =is= worthwhile, and you will do well to read it, but don’t guess that doing so or relying on CoDA or any other 12 Step program to the exclusion of further exploration is going to get you to the promised land.

   AA initiator Bill Wilson knew this. In his truly =seminal= 1939 book, Alcoholics Anonymous, Wilson quoted philosopher Herbert Spencer’s essential admonition: “There is a principle which is a bar hostile to all in rank, which is proof hostile to all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

   Unfortunately, such shortsighted half-grasp continues to be sold by profit-minded authors and publishers as “the grail,” and the millions who payment their credit cards for such stuff will continue to wonder why they continue to find themselves sitting on the side of the “path of recovery” with their heads in their hands wondering what went incorrect.

   To truly transcend the ego full of self-limiting beliefs, values, thoughts, assumptions, convictions and attitudes, one will need to learn the precise techniques and methods that work best for him or her. One size does =not= fit all.

   These techniques will include not only psychodynamic insight work, but values clarification; examination, questioning and revision of plotting administer; conceptual grasp of concepts like “learned helplessness,” “either-or thought,” “foreclosure,” and “locus of control;” mindfulness; radical acceptance; evidence-based administer and correctly =what= meditation really is.

   For those, one will have to get back on the train and make stops at the stations further down the tracks.
   Rating: 2 / 5
3. Cindy K. Green says:

   April 6, 2010 at 11:44 am

   This is a really fantastic book for those who want to know what co-addiction is and how to work on it.
   Rating: 4 / 5
4. W. Neely says:

   April 6, 2010 at 1:56 pm

   Fantastic seller and timely shipment! An brilliant read for anyone dealing with Codependency or correlated issues!
   Rating: 5 / 5
5. ACMA says:

   April 6, 2010 at 4:14 pm

   This is a mature novelist’s book and an essential guide to better relationships with others and better care for oneself.
   Rating: 5 / 5