Love is the drug: Co‐dependency ‐ the bind that blinds

Abstract

There is a burgeoning interest in ‘process’ or ‘activity’ addictions and compulsions, as opposed to ingestive addictions (such as drink, drugs and food). Co-dependency, sometimes called ‘relationship addiction’, is just one of these. How much of the phenomena reflects a self-preoccupied and psychologised culture is open to question and there is now considerable popular interest in codependency (books by Melody Beattie such as Co-dependent No More and John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You have achieved record sales). Co-dependency (CODA) groups have spread across America and the UK since the mid 1980s.While advocates of the codependency concept strongly argue that it represents a real syndrome, and should be included in official psychiatric classifications (for example Cermac, 1986), others dispute whether the term is meaningful at all and that it lacks any real evidence. In this first article of the Addictions without substance series I steer a ‘middle course’, arguing that co-dependency concepts can be clinically helpful, while reserving a degree of scepticism about how much they can be brought together as a discrete medical syndrome. Like Rice (1996), I navigate a course between the advocates of co-dependency and its critics.