Excess Baggage : People-Pleasers Carry a Suitcase Full of Woes, but That’s About All Co-Dependency’s Leaders Can Agree On

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. â€”  You will help someone in need. --Fortune cookie prediction received by participant at the First National Conference on Co-Dependency.

They came to debate and define co-dependency, the controversial disorder of the late ‘80s that’s also called “the doormat syndrome.” There’s been so much published on the subject lately with so little agreement that even the recognized authorities on co-dependency have yet to concur on whether it’s a disease, a stress disorder, a behavioral condition or just a plain old problem.

Everyone accepts, however, that co-dependency is a big-deal phenomenon and one of the hottest buzzwords around.

The term first appeared in the 1970s when co-dependents were described as those whose lives were affected by close relationships with alcoholics or drug addicts. More recent thinking holds that co-dependent behavior is learned in dysfunctional family systems of any kind.

The People Pleasers

Chief among the afflicted are the incessant people pleasers of the world. According to experts recently gathered here for the first National Conference on Co-Dependency, famous sufferers include such role models as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Snow White and the entire Ozzie Nelson family.

Though the specialists were unable to agree on how to classify co-dependency, they were able to define it. According to a group of 22 nationally recognized authorities who met before the conference began, co-dependency is “a pattern of painful dependence on compulsive behaviors and on approval from others in an attempt to find safety, self-worth and identity. Recovery is possible.”

Advanced-stage co-dependents, say many of the therapists who treat them, often become so obsessed with getting others to approve of them that in their frustration they often become workaholics, alcoholics, shopaholics, sexaholics, drug addicts, food abusers or compulsive gamblers in the process.

Pathologically Nice

Co-dependents are said to be unconsciously pathological in their relentless niceness. And so estranged from their own needs and values that they often suffer from physical exhaustion, depression and hopelessness. They frequently become suicidal, abuse or neglect their children, ignore other responsibilities and commonly become addicted to toxic substances or behaviors. Some physicians who treat serious co-dependents have even found they’re likely to develop specific diseases along with the malady of co-dependency: migraines, gastritis, ulcers and more.

Variety in Treatment

Treatment has ranged from the self-help possibilities (reading books and attending support group meetings) to psychotherapy to specialized programs at in-patient treatment centers. It’s estimated there are now about two dozen such centers in the United States, mainly in Arizona, California and South Dakota.

Much of the treatment for co-dependency has been developed by recovered alcoholics and drug addicts who became counselors in their fields and then realized that staying clean and sober didn’t address the underlying issues of their co-dependency.

At the conference, for example, virtually every speaker identified him or herself as a recovering co-dependent--if not also a recovering alcoholic, drug abuser or sex addict. Many of the experts shared their personal, pain-filled histories and frequently moved the audience of 1,800 co-dependents to tears.

‘Charismatic’ Movement

The co-dependency movement is “a very charismatic, exciting movement--that’s where the skepticism and controversy comes in,” explained conference organizer Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse, a recovering co-dependent and family therapist who’s written five books on co-dependency and family issues. “There are now well over 1,500 groups of Co-dependents Anonymous (CODA) (a 12-step recovery program based on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous) throughout the country. They’re registering 25 groups a day.” (In Los Angeles’ 213 telephone area code alone, there are now 69 different CODA groups meeting each week. According to a spokesperson, there were 17 groups a year ago.)

“And that doesn’t count all the

other groups,” added Wegscheider-Cruse, the founding board chairperson of the National Assn. for Children of Alcoholics. “CODA is just one, small part of the whole picture.”

One reason why co-dependency is so rampant, most experts claim, is that it’s unwittingly encouraged by society. In its earliest stages, co-dependency can be easily mistaken for basic kindness, a virtue, and co-dependents may be unconscious of their self-destructive behavior until it becomes extremely painful.

As recovering co-dependent Melody Beattie put it, she wrote her bestseller, “Codependent No More,” for beginning co-dependents, those who are still proud of compulsive care-taking and attempts to control others.

“My new book, ‘Beyond Codependency’ is for advanced co-dependents--those of us who know we shouldn’t be controlling and care-taking and find ourselves doing it anyway,” she said.

Co-Dependent Speakers

Like most of the conference speakers, Beattie told the gathering that she is substantially recovered from her co-dependency but still addresses it daily. In fact, she revealed that the only fight she had with her editor on “Codependent No More” was over the title. She thought it should have been “Co-dependent Not as Much.”

Like Beattie, other conference speakers--including John Bradshaw, host of the acclaimed PBS television series, “Bradshaw On: The Family” and Anne Wilson Schaef, author of “The Addictive Organization” and “Co-Dependence: Mistreated, Misunderstood”--categorized the problem as epidemic.

Said Rokelle Lerner, a therapist, author and co-founder of the Minnesota-based Children Are People organization, “You don’t have to be the son or daughter of an alcoholic to be a co-dependent. Any critical parent will do.”

Endured Unfaithfulness

Co-dependency, it seems, knows no socioeconomic boundaries. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, claimed Ralph Earle, president of the American Assn. for Marriage and Family Therapy, revealed her co-dependency by quietly enduring her first husband’s unfaithfulness and by once telling the press that it’s best for a man to do what he loves--”the wife’s satisfaction will follow.”

Snow White, observed Lerner, was raised by “a wicked, narcissistic stepmother.” She then left home and surrounded herself with “seven, little, asexual men.” Snow White then lapsed into unconsciousness and waited to be rescued by “this necrophile in the woods--a man who loves to kiss dead women.”

Who are the healthy role models? Some speakers suggested there may be none. Even “the best American families are still shaming kids,” said Bradshaw, the co-dependency movement’s evangelistic stand-up comedian. Asking the audience, “How many kids get to have their anger?” he asserted that “100%” of people today are co-dependent: “Who is this healthy American family? . . . I’ll show you families in recovery who are functional. (But) Ozzie and Harriet? Ozzie didn’t even have a job!”

Critics outside the movement have jumped on such broad declarations and criticized them as simplistic. Others have argued that co-dependency is nothing but a pop-psych name for an old problem--and perhaps not a very serious one at that. Many object to the fact that the condition is frequently described so universally as to include everybody.

Such criticisms and other considerations prompted Wegscheider-Cruse to start organizing the conference a year and a half ago, gathering together the country’s top authorities.

Looking at the Illness

“Co-dependency is a term that’s been around since the 1970s in very select parts of the country,” she recalled. “With the formation of the National Adult Children of Alcoholics in 1983, you ended up with thousands of adult children of alcoholics who started to look at their illness.

“From 1983 until now, many different experts and authorities have formulated their views on what the phenomenon is and how to treat it. It’s actually a mainstream word, even though many people don’t know what it means.”

Nonetheless, as Bradshaw told the gathering, “This massive, grass-roots movement is going on all across the country because people can relate to it.”

Consider:

* Beattie’s “Codependent No More” has been on the national paperback best-seller list for 70 weeks, selling more than 1.2 million copies. Its successor, “Beyond Codependency,” has simultaneously been on the national paperback list for 15 weeks.

* Bradshaw’s series has been running on PBS since 1986 with about 50 stations nationwide now carrying it (the largest number to date). According to the host, it has generated more than 140,000 letters from viewers and helped his books (“Bradshaw On: The Family” and “Healing the Shame That Binds You”) to currently sell a combined total of about 40,000 copies per month.

* There are co-dependency jokes (“Two people are out in a canoe. One person falls overboard and as he’s dying, sees the other guy’s life flash before his eyes”), songs, T-shirts (emblazoned with the words “How Am I?” and the name of treatment center), theatrical presentations (including “Family Baggage,” a two-act series of “tragicomedy vignettes” featured at the conference), spoken-word tapes, musical tapes, and at least one humor-oriented book on the subject, “The Doormat Syndrome” by Lynne Namke.

* When the first National Conference on Co-Dependency was planned, it was estimated it would attract perhaps 800 participants. Not only was the event sold out at 1,800 registrants--mostly professionals in the field from all over the world--many people were turned away for lack of space. To accommodate the hordes gathered on its premises for the daily 8:30 a.m. through 10:30 p.m. sessions, the Wyndham Paradise Valley Resort had to set up impromptu food booths all over the hotel--in the lobby, in hallways, on patios. Between sessions, hallways resembled sardine cans.

* Publishers have been rushing to jump on the recovery book bandwagon. The largest in the field, Deerfield, Fla.-based Health Communications Inc. (whose sister firm U.S. Journal Inc. sponsored the conference), now offers 102 titles on co-dependency and related subjects. According to co-founder Peter Vegso, the company has grown from sales of half a million dollars in 1983 to $14 million in 1988.

Harper & Row, which publishes Beattie’s books, will have published about 80 different titles on co-dependency and related subjects by the end of 1989. Bantam Books recently introduced what’s known in the trade as a “recovery line.” And, said Pat Rose, a spokesperson for Harper & Row, “Other major publishers are starting to hook up with the educational divisions of treatment centers” to distribute recovery books that the centers have published and sold through direct mail.

Some bookstores even have set up co-dependency sections. At B. Dalton, for example, co-dependency titles are stocked together near books on health--not psychology.

* Organizational consultant Wilson Schaef, who has long worked with Fortune 500 companies, reported that she was recently approached by a major branch of the U.S. government about working with one of its divisions regarding problems of co-dependency. And she said she was recently asked by two medical doctors (whose licenses were either threatened or revoked) to testify that co-dependency was a factor in their malpractice. She refused, explaining, “They were trying to get their licenses back without recovering. I turned them down. And I told one that if I testified, it would hurt him.”

* The first National Institute for Physicians Specializing in Co-dependency is being scheduled for the fall of 1990 by ONSITE Training & Consulting Inc., the Rapid City, S. D., firm run by Wegscheider-Cruse and her husband, Dr. Joseph Cruse, the founding medical director of the Betty Ford Center. She estimates several hundred physicians throughout the country are actively treating co-dependency and expects the specialty will soon be recognized by the medical establishment.

Despite such signs of acceptance, criticism of the co-dependency movement also persists. For instance, Edith S. Lisansky Gomberg, a professor of psychology and social work at the University of Michigan, has written a 19-page treatise, funded in part by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, on problems of the co-dependency movement.

Source of Stress

In it, she points out that “the impact of a deviant member of a family, whether that member is alcoholic, depressed . . . or deviant in any way, has long been recognized as a major source of stress and distress within the family.” Gomberg also argues that there are “no data at all” that justify diagnosing immediate relatives of a deviant family member “as manifesting personality disorder solely on the basis of their family membership.”

And she notes that the term co-dependency has been expanded “without any consideration of its meaningfulness or its contribution to theory and practice, so that it encompasses virtually the entire population of the United States.”

Some within the co-dependency movement agree with much of such criticism.

“We have no theories of co-dependence now,” acknowledged Dr. Timmen Cermak, chairperson of the National Assn. for Children of Alcoholics. “One of the problems in the co-dependence movement is there is such a demand for sophisticated and good quality services and there’s such a lag in the people trained to provide such services.”

Wilson Schaef, who described herself as a recovering former psychotherapist, thinks a lot of the problems are simply the result of co-dependency being popularized by nonprofessionals.

“I think part of the upset about the field is that the majority of the people who’ve been diagnosed as co-dependent have diagnosed themselves,” she reasoned. “I think it’s very threatening to professionals and the media when people say, ‘I fit.’ Because I think we’re accustomed to having experts telling us what’s wrong with us and believe it’s only valid if an expert says it.

“We have massive numbers of people who started seeking help before the professionals knew about it. The professionals have been trying hard to jump on the bandwagon.”

Meantime, Wilson Schaef and others in the movement claim not to be bothered by the lack of research studies, criticisms inside and outside the movement and the resulting confusion.

“People can tolerate confusion,” she emphasized. “I think it’s important that we agree where we can and not make nice for the sake of the field when we disagree. Conflict isn’t necessarily bad. It’s stimulating.”