On April 21, 2022, I woke up and went to my basement office to begin work. My ex-wife (Analie, a pseudonym) was smoking outside with her mother, who lived with us. I came upstairs to make a cup of coffee. Analie apparently left a cabinet wide open in the kitchen. I slammed it shut. Analie had purposely left it open. The ex-wife was looking to spark an incident, knowing I disliked that kind of sloppy disorganization. She was looking for permission from her mom to leave me since she’d met another guy out at the bar with her girlfriend recently. She had been claiming to be in recovery herself, in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and not drinking, a lie.
Analie came down into the basement later that day, probably after consulting her new boyfriend. She announced she didn’t want to be married anymore. This was my ‘rock bottom’ moment. The moment I realized that the way I was living my life was improper, and I was finally ready to do something different. I learned later this is very much like the rock bottom moments for an alcoholic or addict. What I didn’t understand yet was that I was a codependent.
My Aunt Diane, a therapist, suggested Al-Anon to me. I knew little about the organization except that there had been TV commercials about it when I was a kid. Sometime in early May, I attended my first meeting. I was struggling to hold my marriage together somehow, not realizing it was already over. My recovery journey was about to begin.
Arriving In Al-Anon
At first, the kind people at Al-Anon listened to my complaints about my soon to be ex-wife. She was an opioid addict. Also, she was an alcoholic. I didn’t even know how to put words to these problems, as I had not thought of her as any of these things before. Sure, we had problems, but those words were scary. My grandfather had been an alcoholic, and I thought of such people as old men pounding fifths of scotch every day in some smelly corner bar in low light. But as they patiently explained, alcoholism affects young people and women also.
Their preferred word turned out to be ‘addict’, and covered both the alcoholic and the drug addict, as well as those with gambling addictions, love addictions, virtually any addictive behavior. I learned that the addict is prone to shift addictions based on life circumstances. I discovered after probing deeper into my life, that my grandfather had shifted from alcoholism to a gambling addiction and a heavy smoking habit. His diabetes denied him the drinking after his leg was amputated. He spent the rest of his life living out the other addictions.
Codependency
Not too long into my Al-Anon experience, the question was posed: what about me? What they really meant was about my own codependency, which they could all see. I didn’t even know what codependency really meant at that point. Kind persons explained codependency slowly to me. I took literally months to understand what they meant.
Codependency comprises a few behaviors. The codependent feels that they are responsible for another person. Feeling responsible for another person’s choices and how they live their life is essentially unhealthy. Codependents have an unhealthy concern over their charges. We often can’t walk away when we should. Codependents use control to get the results they are looking for. The control does not work. Addicts resent attempts to control them into better behavior. Codependents also manifest people pleasing behaviors, including enabling addictions. Enabling someone else’s addiction is always unhealthy.
My Sins
Turns out that my codependency had many impacts. For years I had been supplying Analie with alcohol. Every few days for a long time, she had wanted a 1.75L bottle of Bacardi, and I kept her stocked. Later, she would drink bottles and bottles of Chardonnay and other wines, and I would keep those supplied also. This is classic enabling behavior. The pathetic reason I did it was because getting her drunk or high was the only way to make her responsive in bed and desiring sex.
I would drive her around to keep her from getting a DUI. The fact that this was a good idea was proved in November of 2022 when she got a DUI after I was no longer in the picture. Only took about 6 months. But the behavior was highly codependent – controlling the addict in an attempt to “save” them.
In addition, I would try to keep her away from bars and in the end refused to accompany her. This is probably the reason why she ultimately found herself a boyfriend. He was an addict himself with three DUIs and semi-permanently banned from driving.
I would tolerate all kinds of behaviors that I shouldn’t have tolerated. She overdosed on opioids and booze during the summer of 2021 and I tolerated that. She stole opioid pills from my daughter Normina during 2013. Analie broke her leg to get drugs in 2021. She sexually assaulted my daughter during 2022. Each of these should have been enough to end things, but my codependence kept me going, believing that if I did just a little more it would all be okay.
Damaging My Daughters
The codependence also impacted my relationships with my daughters. I encouraged Normina to become a codependent like me, caring for her sister who is diagnosed with BPD without consideration for the abuse she herself suffered as a result. I encouraged her to tolerate her mother Mary’s bipolar condition and abuse. In both cases this did harm to her. If she chose to separate herself from that situation and not be exposed to it, that was her right. But I was thinking like the codependent that I am, without knowledge of any recovery.
In Shartbox’s case, the codependence led me to harm her and harm myself. By tolerating Analie’s abuse of Shartbox over many years, I did direct harm to Shartbox. I should have dumped Analie from the start. Instead I let Analie torture her about her body shape verbally and mentally and then ultimately assault her.
Damaging Myself
As for myself, I learned that I had been actually selecting people like Analie my whole life. In retrospect, Analie wasn’t special at all, except inasmuch as I spent more time with her than others. If you take a look at the Translation Table, you’ll find that a lot of personality disorders are on there, as well as alcoholics. I didn’t select these women by accident; I was looking for them, and they were looking for me as a codependent to enable their addictions and/or personality disorders.
My plan was to take women who were entirely broken and convert them into acceptable partners. I’d eliminate their addictions, personality disorders and bad behavior and leave behind the woman I really wanted. This presumed my ability to change someone else via codependent control, which is resented and not possible anyway.
Purposely Damaged Women
The reason I wanted this was that I believed all relationships are transitory. Due to physical abuse as a kid, as well as my parents’ divorce, I came to this opinion. Watching other transitory relationships helped. People screwing around on each other, etc. Bad examples abounded when I was a kid. Exposure to alcoholics was probably key to a lot of this. The family disease spreads its tendrils out to us all, even if we don’t drink, which I mostly don’t.
If I found a broken person, and I fixed them, I believed they would stay with me. So I would go in for the rescue, every time. I’d take them out of their place and make somewhere comfortable for them with greater financial resources and more attention than they’d ever had before. This never really made anyone happy, of course. Broken people can’t be fixed in such ways. Any change for them has to come from themselves.
Enabling Broken Women
Another problem with this strategy was that a broken person, once you enable them, doesn’t really need you anymore. At least for the short term. I’ve noted that the broken women usually get back in touch months and years later looking for my codependency to enable them again. Analie has tried on several occasions to turn on the supply again after the breakup and abusive discard, as did Darlene and Mary and a bunch of others, really, usually after inflicting lesser abuses against me than Analie did. Generally, the place they end up is worse than being with me. But one of the Al-Anon precepts is that we should not set ourselves on fire to keep someone else warm.
The whole strategy of finding broken people and enabling them is bankrupt, but it is a classic form of codependency. I created the strategy as a young kid, early teen years at latest. It has all the hallmarks of an immature and self-defeating strategy enabled by abuse in my childhood. It is something I am learning how to avoid in recovery, having spent most of a life doing it.
Anger Issues
I learned how to use anger as a methodology for resolving disputes in my favor from alcoholics. They are really good at this, being unreasonable, getting angry and then getting their way. I watched it perhaps hundreds of times over the years. Unlearning this is part of my recovery.
Step Work
The actual nuts and bolts of recovery is working your steps. I am not done with my step work at this writing. I am close to completing Step 4, where you do a “searching and fearless moral inventory”. It is a long step; I’ve been at it the better part of a year. But doing a good job on Step 4 means you don’t have to redo it after discovering more problems. Being honest about your flaws helps. The Blueprint for Progress workbook is great stuff for working through your inventory, along with your sponsor. I am at page 60 of Blueprint for Progress at this writing in June 2023. I hope to be done with the book long before the summer is over.
Step 5 is all about admitting to your Higher Power and yourself and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. You have to list them all first before you finish Step 5, of course.
Step Six is where you are ready to have your Higher Power remove these defects of character. Step Seven is where you humbly ask for these shortcomings to be removed. That is as far ahead as I look at this time in recovery.
Avoiding Codependency
Since I haven’t completed my recovery steps, I don’t have all the answers in terms of avoiding codependency in the future. I have learned a few things.
First and foremost, anyone who wants to start a very intimate relationship too quickly is love bombing you and is a narcissist of some kind. I have found that this type of person usually is an alcoholic (or addict, I suppose) and has some kind of personality disorder. I made a few mistakes at first selecting this kind of person, but got better and better at identifying them quickly.
It turns out that narcissistic traits are common in addicts and people with other personality disorders, and this does not imply NPD. But it is bad news for you as the other person in the relationship.
Another issue I have found is that people with other personality disorders are looking for a codependent as well. One notable case of this is someone with control issues; I ran into another person who wanted to control my views on politics and such. That ended quickly, but this is commonplace.
Lastly, I found a major issue was people who wanted to borrow money off me. A codependent always wants to ‘help’. This is easy to take advantage of for a manipulative person. Ruling these people out with the tools I discovered in recovery helped a lot.
Detachment
Developing the ability to detach from others’ problems is key here. We learn in recovery that we are not responsible for anyone else’s problems or keeping them out of trouble. We try to detach ‘with love’, meaning we still care about the person but can’t be their caretaker or take ownership of their problems. If the person is harmful and cannot be contained within boundaries, sometimes we have to just detach.
Developing Boundaries
A big problem for codependents is developing boundaries. In Analie’s case, letting her sit in bed for a week doing drugs and booze (several times) was a broken boundary, as was stealing from and abusing my daughters. In the case of Darlene, letting her screw around on me virtually and in person was another. We have to create and enforce these boundaries and not permit people to get past them.
The problem is that narcissists in particular thrive on breaking boundaries. So we must be vigilant. Learning how to enforce these has been the biggest lesson I have learned. In some cases, the narc has to be relegated to ‘no contact’. Boundaries are unenforcable with this person, and for your own health you have detach entirely and cut them completely out of your life. This is a last resort, of course. There are only a few I have completely cut out – Analie, Mary, Darlene, one or two others. Keep in mind that ‘no contact’ amounts to a wall, rather than a boundary. Walls are not preferred.
This can be _really_ hard to do with actual family members, but sometimes needs to be done. You have to realize that relationships are conditional on people treating you well. If they are selfish, grasping, and uninterested in your well-being, you have a right to terminate these relationships. Forever, if need be. Their mental disorders are completely irrelevant here, there is no excuse for bad treatment of others. Once again, we shouldn’t set ourselves on fire to keep others warm. Forgiveness could happen and a restoration of contact, but should be on your terms, not theirs.
Recovery Never Ends
Just as an alcoholic or addict is always an alcoholic or addict, I will always be a codependent. This will be a struggle for the rest of my life. At least now, I know what the struggle is. That is what recovery is about.
For more information, go to the Al-Anon World Service Organization (WSO).
