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Just For Today

Up Or Down

'This is our road to spiritual growth. We change every day.... This growth is not the result of wishing but of action and prayer.'

Basic Text, p. 35-36

Our spiritual condition is never static; if it's not growing, it's decaying. If we stand still, our spiritual progress will lose its upward momentum. Gradually, our growth will slow, then halt, then reverse itself. Our tolerance will wear thin; our willingness to serve others will wane; our minds will narrow and close. Before long, we'll be right back where we started: in conflict with everyone and everything around us, unable to bear even ourselves.

Our only option is to actively participate in our program of spiritual growth. We pray, seeking knowledge greater than our own from a Power greater than ourselves. We open our minds and keep them open, becoming teachable and taking advantage of what others have to share with us. We demonstrate our willingness to try new ideas and new ways of doing things, experiencing life in a whole new way. Our spiritual progress picks up speed and momentum, driven by the Higher Power we are coming to understand better each day.

Up or down - it's one or the other, with very little in between, where spiritual growth is concerned. Recovery is not fueled by wishing and dreaming, we've discovered, but by prayer and action.

Just for today: The only constant in my spiritual condition is change. I cannot rely on yesterday's program. Today, I seek new spiritual growth through prayer and action.

pg. 238

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Codependency

Codependency

First I have to share with the reader that this is going to be a blast for me. I have had this information for years but few people are courageous enough to think for themselves, so they missed it. I would have missed it too, had it not been for an attitude I took on studying the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. This attitude was to think for myself, using, but not taking as gospel, all that I had "learned" in the past, mostly through gossip. It was in this manner that I came to see the real, and obvious, meaning of "Insanity" as Bill Wilson used it in the big book. Keep this in mind. If I didn't have to defend this new information on co-dependency, would I accept it as being the simple, unabashed truth? If you want to be popular, stop now. If you want to be accurately informed, read on.

Many diseases are named after the people who had them (Lou Gehrig's Disease), the person who first isolated them as a disease or found a vaccine for them (Salk Vaccine) Other disease names tend to indicate what the disease is. Pneumonia. Sinus. Water on the brain, and many more. No need to spend our time enlarging on this list. You get the point. So now let us do our review of alcoholism, for we will soon see that this is the disease that co-dependency is related to.

In 1935 Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA, said alcoholism was a disease. In 1955 the American Medical Association (AMA) said alcoholism was a disease.

Not long after this we began to talk of alcoholism as a family disease. Actually, our forefathers (mothers) had known this since shortly after 1935. It seems the ladies came to the meetings and brought cookies and coffee for the guys and sat in the other room waiting for them to get through with their meeting so they could eat and have a social hour.

While waiting for the men to finish their meetings the women began to talk about their resentments. As they continued to talk they came to believe that the same spiritual program that was saving their husbands could save them also.

They named their little groups Al-anon. The first to name their groups Al-Anon were in Canada but out of deference to Bill Wilson and his wife Lois they afterward said that Lois founded Al-anon. It is not true, but then who cares? The main thing was that they had a formal organization up and running.

While AA and Al-anon were getting started in Canada, Akron, Cleveland and New York the medical community began to see a way to make money by "treating" alcoholism. This flourished in Minnesota and the Minnesota model, as they called it, became the standard of all treatment centers who believed that alcoholism was a physical disease. (biogenic disease for biological as opposed to psychogenic for those who thought the disease of alcoholism was a subset of another psychological disease.)

By the early seventies the gold rush was on treating alcoholism. Since the mates of the alcoholics had advertised themselves as being sicker than the alcoholic the treatment community began to search for a way to make money from treating Al-anonism. Al-anonism sounds stupid so they could not call it that. The name they finally came up with was co-alcoholic.

This seemed perfect. Not only did it describe the husband and wife's alcoholic relationship but it left the door open for another word to describe the children of alcoholics who were demonstrating many of the same symptoms---but also some different symptoms--- that the co-alcoholic mother showed. The perfectly descriptive name they used for these "children of alcoholics" (COA), in addition to COA, was para-alcoholic. Now every name fit under the alcoholic umbrella. Since alcoholism was a disease and the insurance companies and hospitals were accepting it as such, it was easy as pumpkin pie to slide the para-alcoholic right in to the alcoholic and co-alcoholic payment umbrella.

Then all hell broke loose. Before the co-alcoholic and para-alcoholic nomenclature had spread to the gulf and pacific coast women were yelling at the top of their lungs: "I am not a damn co-alcoholic." I am not a "co" anything. If it hadn't been for that drunken SOB I would be just fine. Of course this flies in the face of the idea that they were coming to Al-anon for their own resentments but never mind, they were not going to have their good name mingled with the "alcoholic" name.

So the words that symbolized the emotional pain one comes to bear after caring emotionally for an alcoholic for a number of years was discarded. And with it went the poor para-alcoholic who had never done anyone any harm to begin with. These poor "children of alcoholics" really didn't ask to be born to two sick people.

How then was the professional community going to treat this disease which had been seen as a "big buck disease" coming around the corner. The answer was not long in coming.

The disease was alive and well in another corner of the addictive world. The people who had been treating only alcoholism now were treating "addicts" in large numbers. They were first treated as narcotic addicts, (hence NA) but it came to be chemically dependent as fast as a doctor can charge you a buck.

Chemically dependence was the answer. Now that the addict was chemically dependent they could call the alcoholic chemically dependent also and save on ink. So even without thinking about it they had opened up the Al-Anonism money machine once more.

You guessed it. If the person presenting for treatment was chemically dependent, the the wife was co-dependent. This time it was easy. Not even the hardest case of Al-Anonism could resist the dependent wording and they were co-dependents before they could loosen their girdles.

And the money flowed. Treatment centers flourished. Books were sold, mostly through Hazelden, by the millions. Videos were shipped at $300.00 and up. The lowly tape was sold in sets and carried the message far--but not as far as the money carried these so called self described "professionals."

Being creatures of ego they began to try to define co-dependency by taking a snapshot of it instead of studying its history as you have just done. Literally dozens of newcomers to the "co" field tried their hand at writing a definition of co-dependency. Most of them seemed to think a smart person could do it in one sentence. The result was more semi-colons, commas and conjunctions that you ever saw under one psychologist. Lord, I almost laughed myself to death.

I guess I should write a few sentences about co-dependency since we have come this far. The 6 and 7 of the thing is that the women loved the men. The men drank, became alcoholic, and began to not carry their weight---either making a living or around the house. The women picked up these duties, found out they could do them as well as their husband had ever done them, and liked the sense of worth and power it gave them. This is almost exactly the same dynamic as the alcoholic who got a euphoric feeling he loved when first he drank. First you love it, then you have to do it.

The women also saw that the man would have to be covered for or the neighbors would know he was not functioning well and that family secret had to kept at all cost. Many times the man told the women it was their fault they drank, and bless their little ole pea picking hearts, the women believed them.

As she did more and more that she did not want to do, she became angrier and angrier and the resentments mounted. The anxiety she experienced did not help her and the seemingly hopeless situation caused her to become depressed. She began to hate everyone, including herself. Carried to its natural extreme, this is co-dependency.

As time went along it became more and more "normal" for the co-d to pick up his bad checks, help him into the bed, call his boss and lie about when he can't get to work this morning. It really seemed to them that it was their responsibility to check the bars at 3:00 A.M., to drive by "her" house or to batter in his windshield with a ball bat. (true story).

Horribly worse, not only did they do these crazy things, and not only did it become normal to them, when their circumstances changed (he got sober or divorced) they felt a great loss for a familiar environment so they went looking for a place where these sick actions and attitudes worked. ( a new drunk, raise enough hell to get him to drink again, whatever). To them this was the only way they knew to live. It had taken on a life of its own that would go with them under all conditions for the rest of their lives---if not treated.

The simple fact is this: If your are going to be "co", you have to have something to be "co" to. It could be assisting the pilot of the airplane, but in this case it is assisting the alcoholic in his drinking. More correctly it is the condition that is created by this assistance and which now has a life, including a pathology, of it's own.

The good part about reading this simple review about where the word "co-dependency" came from is that we can now understand enough about the dynamics of the situation to form our own working definition of co-dependency.

Now that wasn't too hard was it? Is your adams apple still in.. If you really want to be sold on some silly, Johnny-come-lately name or definition, feel perfectly free to do so, but remember we said at the beginning that the disease often described where it came from, what part of the body it effected etc, so I think it only fair that you explain your definition with the same rules in play.

What does this mean to us? It means that we cannot look out at a wide variety of people who are dysfunctional and call them all "co-dependents." They may be dependent, they may be neurotic, they may be any number of things but if they have not been emotionally involved with someone who has demonstrated bizarre behavior because of addiction which they tried to fix, they are not, repeat not, co-dependent.

You may say: "of course we can call them co-dependents, if we want to." And that is right. But lets take an analogy of that. We can compare a tree and a briar patch but they are different things. If we point to the tree (person involved with alcoholic) and call it a tree, we are correct. But if we try to enlarge on that by calling the briar patch a tree, then both the identification of the briar patch and the tree are lost. This is precisely what happens when the money machine of psycho-babble tries to make co-dependency a general name for everything so they can charge for anything.

If you follow this fools reasoning with the accurate idea that we treat people according to how we diagnose them, they we are not only cheating for bucks, we are HARMING OUR PATIENTS.

One other thing. The alcoholic has often been called a co-dependent that drinks, or conversely a co-dependent that is not drinking. Such is not the case. Many, indeed all, alcoholics are dependency inclined but they have no emotional ties to someone with bizarre behavior to be "co" to that behavior. Their dependency traits are the result of their alcoholism where they became more and more dysfunctional in all areas of their lives---thus more dependent on others. After quitting drinking, recovering from or repairing these dependency traits is one of the alcoholics biggest issues in attaining emotional sobriety.

In short, one cannot be co-dependent on their own. They get it by being emotionally dependent on someone who is dependent on alcohol (or other drugs).

The Twelve Steps		The Twelve Traditions
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptlym admitted it. 11. Sought though prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.		1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity. 2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority - a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern. 3. The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking. 4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole. 5. Each group has but one primary purpose - to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers. 6. An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert us from our primary purpose. 7. Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions. 8. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ special workers. 9. A.A., as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve. 10. Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy. 11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films. 12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.