This coming week-end I will be facilitating our 15th Codependence Camp along with my colleague, Margaret Cress, LMFT. We offer this Camp twice each year. The curriculum for the Camp began with my Disentangle work and has evolved as the participants have evolved and also as our knowledge about codependency has evolved.
A year ago as Camp was ending, it was clear that we were ready to go yet deeper into understanding the origins of our codependent behaviors. So for Camp this past spring our focus was “Deeper Roots: Empowering Our Self Further through Understanding.” In my over eager, over functioning codependent way, I prepared way more for our 2 days than could possibly be covered, absorbed, and applied. Camp this coming week-end will be continuing our “Deeper Roots” work.
What we studied in the spring were the influences of our childhood and family-of-origin experiences. Yes, we certainly had studied this before, but at that Camp we looked at several important areas of influence we had not so examined before. Here is the first of those three areas very briefly offered as ideas for you to examine as well.
The work of Alice Miller offers much to help us understand our focusing on others to the detriment of focusing on self. Working to connect with our true self vs. our false self, Alice Miller’s material informs us how in early childhood, some part(s) of us were split-off from our true self. Our feelings and needs were not attuned to and responded to by our primary caretaker. We were not mirrored or echoed. Instead, we learned to attune to the feelings and needs of our primary caretaker who was likely not doing this to us intentionally. Their needs for our mirroring of them were at an unconscious level.
As a result of these experiences, we developed a strong capacity to attune to the feelings and needs of others and to respond to those feelings and needs.
Sound familiar? What a great description of one of the core dynamics of codependency.
My plan for future blogs is to share three more areas of childhood and family-of-origin influences with you and then to offer a list of helpful ideas for recovery which come naturally from our understanding of our “Deeper Roots.”
September 21, 2012

Several years ago I was presenting my Disentangle material at a conference on addiction and recovery. My session was full with around 30 participants. As we started the session, I asked the participants to give me some comments about why they had chosen to attend my session. Several hands went up right away. The first man I called on said, “I am here, because the primary reason for relapse is codependence.” A number of people nodded and agreed.


This man worked in a treatment center for substance addictions. And though much of the treatment offered to patients in such a setting is directed at education about and treatment for specific substances, this counselor knew that the treatment of this process addiction of losing our self in someone else is essential to sobriety from those substances.

Then within the past month, I ran into an article also saying this same thing. In a blog appearing in Sober Living Outpatient David Kolker, therapist at Sober Living Outpatient, states, “The number one cause of relapse is codependency.”

These statements are emphasizing the importance of understanding and treating codependency for solid recovery. As you know, I speak of codependence as loss of self in someone else. If I am not able to listen to, to attend to, and to cultivate my self, I am very likely to fill those needs through things outside of my self. This external meeting of my needs can range from tangled relationships to return to substance addictions.

It is completely normal for me to have my needs for love, connection, attention, safety, security, and encouragement – to name just a few of these human needs. It is just important for me to be learning how to offer these things to my self as a cornerstone of my own health and recovery. My potential to be in a healthy relationship and substance free is greatly increased by this loving work on my own behalf first.
Here is my third blog in this series supporting the work laid out by Dan Griffin and Rick Dauer in their article Rethinking Men and Codependency in the Addiction Professional. In that article, they name nine relational skills they believe are essential to healthy codependency recovery for men including conflict resolution, emotional expression, healthy boundaries, and self-care. As in my past blogs, my comments which follow are offered for both men and women.
I agree with all of their nine identified relational skills. And I believe there are many skills within those skills that have to be learned. In my book, Disentangle: When You’ve Lost Your Self in Someone Else I present more than 50 of those skills divided into four areas of work for our Self: Facing Illusions, Detaching, Setting Healthy Boundaries, and Developing Spirituality.
For example, learning how to detach and gain some emotional distance involves learning that I am a separate individual from the other person and to differentiate what is theirs and what is mine, learning to observe my self and the other so as to act not react, and paying attention to my motivations as I interact.
Learning to set healthy boundaries involves learning how to quiet our self, how to listen to our self, how to know what is true for our self in a given situation, being able to assert our boundary, being able to stick with our boundary, and learning how to manage our self as we feel the various feelings that come from stating and standing firm with our boundary.
The skills are numerous and important. Why don’t we already know these things? Well, it is likely that the roles we have taken on over our lifetime and the related socialization influences discussed previously have limited the skills we needed. We have operated in our prescriptive ways over and over. The good news is that you are reading this and are interested in change. New relational skills will definitely help with those changes.
This is the second in three blogs responding to the article in Addiction Professional on Rethinking Men and Codependency. In my previous blog, I cited three points with which I resonate. The second point here is the role of socialization in the origins of codependent behaviors.
In their article, Griffin and Dauer focus on codependency in men as an expression of their socialization based on gender. They look specifically at relational cultural theory emphasizing how men are raised to be separate, independent individuals who are taught the use of power and control on their way to manhood. In these ways, they do not learn ways to interact and form emotionally honest, healthily connected relationships. In their article they list important ways in which these effects of socialization are expressed in male codependent behaviors.
I, too, believe that our socializations are very important to understand as we look to make changes away from codependent behaviors. As I have written and presented on this topic of codependency over the past ten years, I have come to think of the influences contributing to codependency in the form of three concentric circles:
In the center circle is the individual, our core self who we are always attending to and cultivating. This self includes at least four areas: physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual
The second layer around the center circle is the family system which includes our family-of-origin as well as whatever constitutes our current family. This layer is emphasizing the influences of our family systems on the roles and rules we have developed over our lifetime.
The third layer around the center circle includes the social/cultural/political worlds in which the individual and their family systems live.
As I say in My Life as a Border Collie: Freedom from Codependency, “Each of these outer layers has profound effects on the individual it surrounds. To understand codependence in the individual without seeing these layers of influence on them is incomplete” (p. 28).
August 22, 2012

I am often looking for articles on codependency whether on the internet, in conference programs, or new books and articles. Just last week I opened the on-line Addiction Professional magazine to find an article on Rethinking Men and Codependency. It is an interesting article with thought, theory, and treatment recommendations. I am pleased every time I see that others understand the importance of this topic to both recovery and to good mental health and good relationships.


There are several points made in the article which I resonate with: seeing codependent behaviors on a continuum, understanding the role of socialization in the origins of codependent behaviors, and teaching relational skills as a means of treatment. I appreciate that the article is addressing men and codependency specifically, and yet here in my comments, I will simply be responding to their offerings about codependency itself. In this blog I will be addressing the first of the three points I list above: seeing codependent behaviors on a continuum. I will respond to the other two points in future blogs.

This article caught my eye right on the first page when the authors state that codependency pathologizes intrinsically human behaviors and that codependency can be viewed on a continuum of relational behaviors: independent, interdependent, and codependent. I agree with these premises.

My use of the continuum in working with codependency involves this: I believe that it is important to look at codependence in terms of the behaviors associated with it and then to look at those behaviors on a continuum from OK to Going Too Far. Devotion, care-taking, hard work, serving, and pleasing others can all have a healthy place in our relationships. Our assignments are to be aware of these behaviors, to be aware of any tendencies we may have to lose our self in these behaviors, to learn to intervene on our behalf as we start moving too far down the continuum of a particular behavior, and to then apply our knowledge and skills to find that ever-changing balance point of care of self and others that offers the health we seek.

April 27, 2012

Please know that these blogs are but brief looks at material that is covered in numerous books and articles. My intent here is to just keep pointing us all in directions that will increase our self-understanding and potential for healthy changes in our lives. I will be sharing the names of resources as we go along for you to explore further just as I am doing.


I have known of the work of Alice Miller, particularly her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, for the past 20 years, and yet not until this past year did I stop and intentionally study her work. I knew that therapists working with the inner child model quoted her and had built some of their work from hers. As I continued to write about codependency, I knew it was important for me to keep reading and learning. Alice Miller is one of the resources I studied, and I was thrilled to learn what she says and how it applies to codependency.

Alice Miller never uses the word “codependent,” but the “gifted child”‑ the child who is sensitive, intelligent, alert, and attentive - shares many characteristics with the codependent. But first a bit more background:

Alice Miller was a psychoanalyst who developed her material from both her professional and personal understandings. The Drama of the Gifted Child was first published in German in 1979 under the title Prisoners of Childhood. It was published in English in 1981 as The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. This subtitle is so powerful and telling as far as I am concerned. Many of us now know that recovery from codependency is in fact the finding and developing of our True Self.

Miller maintains that in very early childhood some parts of our true self were split-off from us as a result of the way we were treated by our primary caretaker. Our feelings and needs were not attuned to and responded to by that caretaker. We were not mirrored and echoed by them. Instead, we learned to attune to the feelings and needs of our primary caretaker and to try to respond to what we believed they needed and wanted from us. Those needs of the primary caretaker for our mirroring of them were at an unconscious level within them and likely to have come from the parenting they received.

As a result of these experiences, we developed a strong capacity to attune to the feelings and needs of others and to respond to those feelings and needs as best we can. In doing this, we disconnected from our own feelings and needs. I see this as the very early seeds of focusing on the external and not our internal. And because we were not mirrored by our primary caretaker, we are unable to see and know our self. We thus developed a false sense of self vs. a true sense of who we are and how to respond to both our self and others in healthy ways.

Ways to help our selves with this false self vs. true self will follow in later blogs.
April 20, 2012

You have read my blogs and tweets from Codependence Camp. After our last Camp earlier in April, I decided to blog about some of the things we are learning at Camp, but first, a bit about Camp.


Codependence Camp occurs in a bed-and-breakfast setting in southwest Virginia. It is the home of my close colleague and friend, Margaret. Camp occurs twice a year, and we have had 14 Camps. We meet for 2 days and 1 night and use at least 9 hours of our time to study and learn about ourselves and codependency. We also have time for walks, expressive arts, mindfulness practices, rest, great meals, laughter, and a campfire, of course.

In our previous Camps we have studied everything from understandings of codependency to extensive skills to help us with healthy self-growth. Each Camp helps us to see where we are in our growth and what would be good to work on in future Camps. After our Camp last October, it was clear that we were ready and wanting to look further at the deeper roots of our codependency so as to increase our self-understanding and learn more ways to make these changes we desire for our self.

My plan in this blog series is to share with you some of the sources we studied including the work of Alice Miller, attachment theory, and family systems theory as well as the rules and roles that encourage our codependency. With this information in mind, I will then blog on what we are trying to accomplish in our recovery from codependency as well as specific things we can do to meet those recovery goals.