The New Codependency: Help and Guidance for Today’s Generation
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- ISBN13: 9781439102145
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In Codependent No More, Melody Beattie introduced the world to the term codependency. Now a modern classic, this book customary Beattie as a lead the way in self-help literature and endeared her to millions of readers who longed for in excellent health relationships. Twenty-five years later concepts such as self-care and setting boundaries have become entrenched in mainstream culture. Now Beattie has written a followup volume, The New Codependency, which clears up misconceptions about codependency, identifies how codependent behavior has changed, and provides a new generation with a road map to wellness.
The question remains: What is and what is not codependency? Beattie here reminds us that much of codependency is normal behavior. It’s about crossing lines. There are times we do too much, care too much, feel too small, or overly engage. Feeling resentment after giving is not the same as heartfelt generosity. Narcissism and self-like, enabling and nurturing, and controlling and setting boundaries are not interchangeable terms. In The New Codependency, Beattie explores these differences, effectively invoking her own inspiring tale and persons of others, to empower us to step out of the victim role forever. Codependency, she shows, is not an illness but rather a series of behaviors that once broken down and analyzed can be successfully combated.
Each section offers an overview of and a series of activities pertaining to a particular behavior — caretaking, controlling, manipulation, denial, repression, etc. — enabling us to personalize our own step-bystep guide to wellness. These sections, in conjunction with a series of tests allowing us to assess the level of our codependent behavior, demonstrate that while it may not seem possible now, we have the power to take care of ourselves, no matter what we are experiencing.
Punctuated with Beattie’s renowned candor and intuitive wisdom, The New Codependency is an owner’s manual to learning to be who we are and gives us the tools necessary to reclaim our lives by renouncing unhealthy practices.
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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 egocentricity which she thinks is the new boundary issue, self obsession.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Buy this book and read it. It =will= help. But insight is not the perfect solution, and half-measures should never be expected to do a perfect 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. Persons 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 perfect; it is never a matter of arrival so much as nonstop process and maintenance. While I know Beattie would agree, the latest of her 16 successful — and very useful — 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 regularly 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 plenty.
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 around 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 devotion 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 take up the issue and warn her readers in any depth.
Sadly, she (and additional less educated authors, including many with advanced degrees) has helped persons of similarly limited vision 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 persons (and additional) 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 point, as well as closer to reporting her actual transformational experiences, as opposed 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 into the world 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-right-or-all-incorrect, permanently-or-never, all-excellent-or-all-terrible, all-win-or-all-lose, black-and-white thinkers. And few get “better” (let alone “well”) in the long run, unless their dichotomous thinking is identified, examined and restructured. Despite the fact that she briefly addresses this vital topic, Beattie steps right into the absolutistic mud again and again here, precisely as she did in her previous work.
I have attended Co-Dependents Anonymous and additional 12 Step meetings for more than 30 years. It is clear to me that while many have been able to “place the plug in the jug,” stay away from the tie and the casino, and gain tremendous insight into their eating, romance, sex, work, exercise, political cause and additional compulsive activity addictions, very few seem to have establish lasting emotional comfort, but much they aver 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, “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results,” but they do precisely 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 a name 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 persons in AA, NA, Alanon, CoDA, OA, ACA, SA, SAA, SLAA, and additional 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 expect that doing so or relying on CoDA or any additional 12 Step program to the exclusion of further exploration is going to get you to the promised land.
AA founder 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 against all information, which is proof against all opinion and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”
Sorry to say, such shortsighted half-grasp continues to be sold by profit-minded authors and publishers as “the grail,” and the millions who charge their credit cards for such stuff will continue to marvel 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 thought process; conceptual grasp of concepts like “learned helplessness,” “either-or thinking,” “foreclosure,” and “locus of control;” mindfulness; radical acceptance; evidence-based process and precisely =what= meditation really is.
For persons, one will have to get back on the train and make stops at the stations further down the tracks.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This is a really fantastic book for persons who want to know what co-dependency is and how to work on it.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Fantastic seller and timely shipment! An brilliant read for anyone dealing with Codependency or related issues!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This is a mature writer’s book and an essential guide to better relationships with others and better care for oneself.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5