Codependent No More

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The urge to monitor someone else’s drinking, track their moods, and clean up their messes feels like devotion. Melody Beattie’s blunt correction is that it isn’t love at all. It’s a compulsion, usually learned young in a chaotic home, and it keeps you so busy managing another person’s life that you never have to face your own. That’s codependency: your whole self organized as a reaction to somebody else’s dysfunction. As Beattie writes, codependents “overreact… underreact. But rarely do they act.” Recovery doesn’t start with fixing them. It starts with taking your own life back.

Melody Beattie on SummaryShelf

Codependent No More