With the publication of her first book in 1986, “Codependent No More,” Melody Beattie brought the word codependent into our popular lexicon and, more importantly, brought an understanding of the codependent condition to people who were suffering from it and didn’t have a clue what exactly was wrong.

When I first read this book, more than 20 years ago, on a gut level I got what she was talking about and I knew that the glove of codependency fit me, but I didn’t really get it. There was nothing tangible to point to nor one particular incident in my life that would explain it. The whole idea of codependency – even the word itself – bothered me. It seemed to put other people in charge of the way I felt and left me a pawn in their world. How wrong I was.

25 years and 16 books later, Melody is still sharing her wisdom, which comes from her own experience – she was an alcoholic at age 13, a junkie at 18, and a codependent long before any of that – as well as her professional training. Her latest book, “Make Miracles in Forty Days – Turning What You Have into What You Want,” (Simon & Schuster) was published in December.

Nancy O’Hara: What is your opinion of what a true, intimate partnership looks like?

Melody Beattie: So many people have this idealized notion of what a relationship should be based on a combination of television, fantasies and their own unmet needs. As opposed to: “what do I want in my life, what works for me and if I wasn’t afraid and I knew I could take care of myself, what kind of relationship would I want? What do I want it to look like?” That’s completely an individual choice and that’s where I think many people don’t hit the mark.

NO’H: Are there certain elements that belong in an intimate relationship?

MB: There are some basic elements that are necessary if you’re going to have an intimate relationship and one is trust. If you don’t trust the other person, if you’re playing games with yourself and not listening to your own inner voice – do I trust this person? Are my guts going off every time they tell me something because I have a feeling they could be lying to me? – you’re not going to achieve true intimacy. You’re dealing with a relationship that is more than likely based on fear and denial.

NO’H: And trusting yourself has to come before trusting someone else?

MB: That’s right. And like I said in “The New Codependency,” the longer I look at codependency and especially having gone through 10 years of deep grief, the more I see that codependency is very closely connected to grief and the whole grief process. We enter a relationship, we have a fantasy about what we want the relationship to look like, it doesn’t pan out, something isn’t going right, but we don’t want to deal with it because we don’t want to lose our fantasy – so we go into denial, which is a stage of grief and loss. Then comes the anger, the negotiation, the bargaining – all the things that are stages of grief. But I would add two more stages to the grief process that aren’t classically listed: one is obsession and one is guilt. And those go hand-in-hand with codependency as well.

NO’H: If alcohol is but a symptom of the disease of alcoholism, what is a comparable symptom of codependency?

MB: Alcohol can also be a symptom of codependency. The older I get, the less I realize I know. But I do see in so many cases, including mine, that addictions were begun to deal with the pain of codependency underneath.

NO’H: Do you think codependency is underneath all addictions? The mother of them all?

MB: I haven’t done a controlled study, but I would say that more than 90% of people who have addiction problems have codependency underneath.

When it really hit home for me was when I went back to my high school and gave a talk. The principal had a surprise – he had dug up an old picture of me. I thought I had destroyed everything from my high school years and I hadn’t. And that picture, that memory, triggered a process that went on for months – all this grief and pain. It’s no wonder I became an alcoholic and addict as a child. It’s a miracle I didn’t kill myself if I felt this way. Because as an adult with all the tools I have now I can hardly deal with the feelings. And I’m thinking if I felt this way as a child it was simply too much. It was more than I could handle.

NO’H: Do you think loss of something or someone is the beginning of codependency?

MB: I would say in most cases it is. What family doesn’t have loss? I think a way that we see this is when we see it in celebrities’ lives. Because it’s so public, these people who seem to have it all, they get cancer, they lose children, they get divorced. They have all the loss that anyone else does. This is standard – loss is a great equalizer.

NO’H: What do you think the big losses are that we experience as children and which have such impact on us later in life?

MB: There can be so many – sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, divorce. There can be losses that we don’t know about because we’ve never experienced having it in the first place. If we’ve never experienced being loved, we don’t know that we’ve lost it. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going through the process of grief over it.

NO’H: You’ve said that codependency is as deadly as chemical dependency…

MB: It can be worse. It’s pretty easy to point out the day that we stop drinking, or the day that we started drinking or using drugs; we can go back and we can point to that day and say, that’s when I started to lose control. It’s a lot more challenging to go back and say, that’s the day I started hating myself. Because we may have never loved ourselves. Or that’s the day I stopped taking care of myself, because we’ve never taken care of ourselves – we’ve always taken care of other people. It’s a much more conniving, subtle problem.

NO’H: I sometimes wonder if codependency was responsible for my mother-in-law’s death. She had exhausted herself to the point where she was driving and veered into oncoming traffic and had a head on collision. It looks like a traffic accident…

MB: It’s either exhaustion, or just that moment of not paying attention or in some cases when this happens it could be deliberate. Our subconscious is a powerful thing. When we finally reach that point and we say, I just can’t take it anymore. As a society we’re in denial. We want to believe that there’s a perfect answer to every problem. We want people to think that we are in control of things.

NO’H: It’s that black & white thinking…

MB: That’s an illusion. There are very few things we have any control over at all.

NO’H: And that’s hard to admit. Al-Anon says: “We can be happy whether the alcoholic is still drinking or not.” Do you think this is really true?

MB: Absolutely. I know it’s true, I’ve seen it in people’s lives. So many people think, well, she’s unhealthy because she’s still living with the alcoholic. I think happiness is better defined as peace. And peace comes when we take responsibility for our choices. That’s what the Miracles book is about. Getting in touch with what we’re really feeling, surrendering to that and being at peace with who we really are and what is, at any moment in time. Once we reach that place, we’re in touch with our true power. We’re in balance.

But I would say that in at least 80% of the relationships I see, the people are together based on fear. They don’t want to be alone.

NO’H: I notice that as well. I stayed alone for 17 years – and just turned 60 and got married.

MB: That’s fantastic. I’ve been alone for a lot of years. People say, aren’t you lonely? No, I’m not lonely. If I’m lonely, I can go be around people. I don’t have to have a body lying next to me at night to feel okay. In fact, it’s far more annoying to me to have someone around that I don’t really want around, or to be in a relationship that I don’t want to be in; at a level I don’t want to be at.

To be at peace with ourselves in our own life, to me that’s what true happiness is.

NO’H: Can someone be codependent without having grown up with addiction in their family?

MB: Absolutely, we don’t need addiction. It helps, but it’s not essential. There are a lot of other problems that mimic the dynamics of alcoholism, even growing up with somebody who has a serious illness. When the whole family is centered on the person with the illness, other people in the family don’t get their needs met. They may even feel guilty for wanting to get their needs met. And there you start having the symptoms of codependency.

NO’H: You talk about “clean giving.” How important is this to a happy life?

MB: I’ve seen so many people get to a place in recovery from codependency where they stop giving to people, but they never come full circle where they’re able to give from a clean place. Where they say, yes, I want to do this and I’m going to take responsibility for it, come hell or high water, regardless of the results, this is what I want to do… and to me that’s what clean giving is. As long as we’re taking responsibility for our choices, we cannot be victimized. So many people aren’t getting there. They get to the selfish part, and they like that, but they never get past that.

NO’H: I see that a lot. People who say I gave, I gave, I gave and I’m not going to give anymore. And then they completely shut down.

MB: And for some people it’s very important to go on hiatus from giving until they can get clear. You can have two people in recovery doing exactly the same thing and one person is codependent and the other person is healthy living. And that’s because it’s an inside job. It’s not what we do; it’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.

NO’H: You say that codependents are “the worst” to be codependent on, why?

MB: It really is a horrid thing. At least with the alcoholic you can clearly point to how that person is drinking and out of control. But codependents do such a good job of looking good and saying the right thing, that it’s hard to recognize when someone’s healthy and when they’re unhealthy.

If we get codependent on a codependent we’re talking about being enmeshed with what we think another person is thinking. So many maybes and illusions; it’s really insane. And codependency in full bloom, unleashed, is nothing to contend with. Even when compared with the most out of control alcoholic. Again, you can point to things, you can call the police, you can do something. It’s very hard to call the police on someone who’s driving you nuts.

NO’H: Yeah, it makes me grateful that I was an alcoholic and not just a codependent.

MB: Right, it gives us something we can get our hands on.

NO’H: It seems to me that people who are just true, pure codependents have a much more difficult time surrendering.

MB: They do. And they’re the ones that maybe have the least chance of getting well. It’s like mercury. It slides all over the place.

NO’H: In some ways their life is so controlled they don’t notice the unmanageability of it.

MB: Right, and they can say all the right things. How can you prove someone is obsessing? They take their cell phone with them. They don’t have to stay home and stare at it anymore, waiting for him or her to call.

NO’H: I remember my first boyfriend in sobriety, before I even had a date with him I was imagining what my furniture was going to look like in his apartment.

MB: Or we have the marriage planned. And half the time we never take the time to even find out if we even like the person. Until about 10 years into the marriage. It’s like we’ve got this job application to fill.

NO’H: Has the definition of codependency changed over time?

MB: That’s another mercurial kind of thing. Essentially it’s not taking care of ourselves. But there are times when that’s appropriate. I just finished up three years of taking care of my mother when she was dying from Alzheimer’s. I made a lot of trips from California to Minnesota and a lot of the time I didn’t pay attention to my own needs. But I was choosing to do that. It was awareness, it was choice. I knew there were things I needed to be doing in my own life and I was choosing to put them on hold.

NO’H: Well, that was clean giving, yes?

MB: To me it was. I don’t feel victimized, I feel like it was a huge spiritual blessing for me.

NO’H: Sacrifice isn’t always bad.

MB: You hit the nail on the head. And so many people have got to the point where they think that anything sacrificial is bad. But it’s not the case. It can be a very spiritual act if it’s done consciously.

NO’H: Is it “clean” to ask for miracles for others? For instance, for someone to get sober? Or is this treading into the codependent zone?

MB: I think we’ve crossed the line. Although it’s not wrong to want someone we love to get sober. Because we don’t want to watch someone we love dying of a disease that there is – and cure is not the therapeutically correct word here – but we do have a cure for alcoholism.

NO’H: Do you think it’s arrogant on our part to ask for a miracle for someone else?

MB: To a degree, yes it is. Because the person may not want to change. They may be protecting themselves from something much worse. If they’re not ready to change, they’re using survival behaviors, and they’re doing that to stay alive. We don’t know what their history is, what their future is, what’s going on with them right now. Because it’s an inside job, we’ve got no business inside anyone else’s soul.

NO’H: So, anytime we look at someone else and want them to change, even if we think it’s for a righteous reason, we have to look closer to see what our motive is?

MB: One of the oldest tricks for dealing with resentments is to ask our higher power, or god as we understand god, to bless the other person. I don’t see anything wrong with that. God, please bless this person, bless and protect them.

NO’H: One of my students asked, what about the child abuser, how can we do that with a child abuser? And that’s a tough one to answer.

MB: It is, and yet… there is the divine in everything that’s alive. I realized this when I became a complete vegetarian, not of my own choice, it just happened. I don’t know if it was from the surgery I had, or if it was my trip to Tibet, and I’ll probably never know. God, or higher power as we understand it, isn’t something out there… it’s an energy that permeates everything that is.

NO’H: Would you call that love?

MB: I would. Eckhart Tolle probably comes up with the best definition of love there is. Love is to be totally aware of our self and the person that we’re with. Also, to me it’s to bow in respect to the divine in every person whether we understand that person or not. We don’t know if that person has been sexually abused 5,000 times themselves. We don’t know about the pain going on in that person’s soul. And yes it is hard to bow to that and nobody even wants to think of or consider that. It’s a very hard thing to get past – any kind of physical abuse. We don’t have to love the behavior; we can actually despise the behavior. But we can love the divine, the part of the divine that permeates all that is. To honor and respect all life.

By Nancy O’Hara