"Codependency means," said one woman, "that I'm a caretaker."
"Being codependent means I'm married to an alcoholic," responded one woman. "It also means I need to go to Al-Anon."
"Codependency," replied another, "means I'm up to my elbows in alcoholics."
"It means I'm always looking for someone to glob onto."
"Codependency? It means I know any man I'm attracted to, fall in love with, or marry will be chemically dependent or
have some other equally serious problem."
"Codependency," explained one person, "is knowing all your relationships will either go on and on the same way
(painfully), or end the same way (disastrously). Or both."
page_Page 33There are almost as many definitions of codependency as there are experiences that represent it. In desperation (or
perhaps enlightenment), some therapists have proclaimed: "Codependency is anything, and everyone is codependent." So,
who's got the inside story? Which definition is accurate? A brief history of codependency will help answer this question.
A Brief History
The word codependency appeared on the treatment scene in the late seventies. I don't know who discovered it. Although
several people may claim to have done so, the word emerged simultaneously in several different treatment centers in
Minnesota, according to information from the office of Sondra Smalley, C.C.D.P., a licensed psychologist and a leader in
the codependency field. Maybe Minnesota, the heartland of chemical dependency treatment and Twelve Step programs
for compulsive disorders, discovered it.
Robert Subby and John Friel, in an article from the book Co-Dependency, An Emerging Issue, wrote: "Originally, it was
used to describe the person or persons whose lives were affected as a result of their being involved with someone who
was chemically dependent. The codependent spouse or child or lover of someone who was chemically dependent was
seen as having developed a pattern of coping with life that was not healthy, as a reaction to someone else's drug or
alcohol abuse." 3
It was a new name for an old game. Professionals had long suspected something peculiar happened to people who were
closely involved with chemically dependent people. Some research had been done on the subject, indicating a physical,
mental, emotional, and spiritual condition similar to alcoholism seemed to appear in many nonalcoholic or non-
chemically dependent people who were close to an alcoholic. Words (more jargon which would later become
synonymous for codependent) surfaced to describe this phenomenon: co-alcoholic, nonalcoholic, para-alcoholic.
Codependents certainly felt the effects of codependency long before the word was coined. In the 1940s, after the birth of
Alcoholics Anony-
page_Page 34mous, a group of peopleprimarily wives of alcoholicsformed self-help, support groups to deal with the ways their
spouses' alcoholism affected them. 4 They didn't know they would later be called codependents. They did know they had
been directly affected by their mates' alcoholism. And, they were envious that alcoholics had a Twelve Step program to
recover through. The wives also wanted a program. So they used the A.A. Twelve Step program, revised the A.A.
Twelve Traditions, changed its name to Al-Anon, and it worked! Millions of people have since benefited from Al-
Anon. 5
The basic thought then, and in 1979 when the word codependency emerged, was codependents (co-alcoholics or para-
alcoholics) were people whose lives had become unmanageable as a result of living in a committed relationship with an
alcoholic. 6