Co Dendency

Relationships and the Modern Disease of Co-dependency
By Tom Russell

Despite marketing claims and shameless promises to the contrary, your life puzzle can never be provided to you ready made. Your puzzle comes together only through research and experimentation. Consider the depth of these two words!
What fits for you may not fit for someone else. Dogmatist scoff at this but inner life scientists know it to be so. Cosmic energy never creates a duplicate.
Certainly relationships can be classified as a big piece of the puzzle. Here we find fertile ground for enrichment and enjoyment. However, what lies at the core of most relationships in our modern world? Not enrichment and enjoyment, but co-dependency.
Consider the massive control mechanisms existing in dysfunctional family structures, education, news programming, government propaganda, churches and spiritual groups, entertainment and music, etc, etc, etc.. While originally thought to apply only to “enablers” in the orbit of an alcohol or drug addict, extensive modern research reveals co-dependency to be perhaps THE disease at the root of our madhouse society. What structures in the environment support the confused, unhappy, unfulfilled, bored and shaky self?
Co-dependency researcher Anne Wilson Schaef defines the pervasive disease this way: “Co-dependency is an emotional, psychological, and behavioral condition that develops as a result of an individual’s prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules – rules which prevent the open expression of feeling as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems.”
Ms. Schaef shares many challenging and fascinating insights including:
* “We live in a society whose institutions are built upon and exacerbate some of the chief characteristics of the addictive process . . . Many of our love songs are about addictive love and are based on its assumptions – suffering, possessiveness, cling-clung relationships, and externalizing our identity (that is, needing someone outside ourselves to establish our identity). Our culture teaches our teenagers to aspire to such relationships! They are taught to want someone who cannot live without them and through whom they can find their identity; they are taught to see suffering as noble and accepted.”
* “Co-dependents will usually get back into the disease when they find themselves talking about others in a way that they would not be willing to talk about them in person, and when they do this to build up allies and justify themselves.”
* “For me, one of the most challenging aspects of the disease of co-dependence is that it is so common and so ordinary. Of course, this is also one of the aspects that makes it so insidious. We know how to operate in it better than we know how not to. Ordinary as it is, co-dependence is unhealthy, however, and it will kill us, so we had better learn to recognize it and heal ourselves from it.”
I have found co-dependency to explain much in our modern day swamp. It is a major part of relationships, and relationships are indeed a major part of the life puzzle. SuperWisdom resources to take your inquiry further, if you choose:

• SuperWisdom podcast on Ms. Shaef’s book The Addictive Organization
  * SuperWisdom podcast on Memes and Why We Cant Stop Thinking