Codependency Books

“As I listened to the other addicts share their life experiences, I began to hear the story of my own life, told in a hundred different voices.

I heard from people who’d had some of the same painful childhood experiences as me, which had led them into the same unmanageable behaviors and compulsions.

I heard from people who, just like me, had blown up marriage after marriage—their own marriages and the marriages of others.

I heard from people who’d lost their jobs, their sanity, or all their money and belongings because of their obsession with some person or another. (“I took one look at that guy from across the bar and said, ‘I would follow that man straight to hell’—and then I did!” said one woman, while the rest of us nodded in quiet understanding.)

I heard from people who had been living in desperate yearning for decades with partners who were emotionally unavailable, or who had lived their whole lives in degrading servitude to people who did not respect them or love them back, or who were pining in fantasy about relationships that had ended years earlier. I heard from people who had traded sex for love, or love for sex, or both for money.

I heard about insecure attachment style and avoidance and unconscious compliance.

I heard about emotional anorexia and cortisol addiction.

I heard terms I’d never heard before but that immediately made sense to me (because I’d been doing those things for years but didn’t know they had names): love bombing, trauma bombing, attention pulling, ecstatic recall, digital stalking, insta-macy.

I heard about assigning magical qualities to others and making them into your higher power.

I heard about mistaking pity, lust, or loneliness for love.

I heard about sexualizing our feelings of guilt, shame, fear, rage, and grief.

I heard about rape, abuse, pregnancies, venereal diseases, pornography, prostitution, suicide, violence . . .

I did not hear a single thing in those meetings that I could not identify with at some level. In fact, to this day, I have still never heard anything in any twelve-step meeting that shocks me. Whenever I hear people talking about their most self-destructive behaviors, I’m either like, “Yeah, I’ve done that” or “Yeah, I would probably do that” or “Yeah, I can see why someone would do that, given the chance.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River