pretty well.”
Before I could respond, he walked over to the whiteboard and picked up a marker. He drew a rudimentary tree, and at the tips of its various branches he wrote Alcohol, Drugs, Food, Sex, Love. At the tree’s roots, designated by hyperextended squiggly lines, he wrote in big block letters: CODEPENDENCY.
“Can anyone tell me what that word means?” he asked.
I raised my hand but didn’t wait for him to call on me. “It’s an inability to be in a healthy relationship with the self.”
“Right,” he said. “How’d you know that?”
In her book, Pia Mellody had made a significant effort to distinguish codependency from love addiction: While love addicts turn to a person as a drug of choice for soothing the pain of their difficult relationships with themselves, the absence of healthy self-love is itself codependency.
“I read it somewhere.” I shrugged. “I remember things.”
“That’s one definition of it,” he conceded. “Here we like to think of it as the pain from childhood that manifests in adulthood.”
“So unless you grew up in a 1950s sitcom,” I said, “you’re codependent?”
Richard forced a laugh. “It’s true that most people have unresolved pain from childhood. But not everyone ends up self-medicating with one of these.” He ran the capped marker back over the words at the ends of the branches. “The goal is figuring out how we got from the root of the tree to the branches. From codependency to addiction.”
We began by telling our life stories. “There’s no time limit on how long you have, just however long you need to take,” Richard said as I clenched the edges of my chair. Having known these people for less than twenty-four hours, I wasn’t too enthused about hearing their entire personal histories. I assumed everyone else must’ve felt the same way, but to my surprise, they seemed engaged, leaning forward attentively to listen to one another. Though I mostly scribbled in my notebook and did equations, calculating the cost per hour of being there, I picked up bits and pieces.
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