Taking Care of Herself

By Elizabeth Taylor

The rustic lodge on Gull Lake in pristine northern Minnesota hums with singsong, flat-voweled excitement. The 500 sensibly dressed welfare workers in the convention crowd usually dish out encouragement for a living. But today they will be on the receiving end from a former recipient who managed to get herself off welfare and onto the best-seller list. Here she is, flashing her big white smile: Melody Beattie, queen of codependency.

The petite, elegantly dressed woman warms up with jokes about sticky food stamps and useless powdered milk and reminds her listeners of the familiar line that "a woman is one man away from welfare." As harsh stage lighting reflects in her large gold earrings and red fingernails, her soft voice intensifies with an emotional turn. Beattie urges her audience to "have clear boundaries," "let go of the victim belief" and, most of all, "take care of yourselves."

These exhortations might prompt outsiders to ask, like the Meryl Streep character in Postcards from the Edge, "Do you always talk in bumper stickers?" But expressions like "one day at a time" and "higher power" are the not-so-secret passwords of our times.

This audience recognizes them and, more, believes them, cheering, beckoning Beattie back to the stage until clapping and tears subside. Women rush to her, clutching her best-selling Codependent No More, thrusting worn copies toward the author for an inscription. "I'm codependent. Your book saved my life." "My mom gave me the book when I started treatment. It's my bible."

Melody Beattie is an American phenomenon. With her codependency concept, she connects with age-old quests for self-improvement and rebirth. These values, and the slogans that convey them, have reached the souls of millions of Americans who seem to communicate with one another through a national emotional chain letter. Off-putting or silly to the uninitiate, her messages inspire true believers. She has tapped into a preoccupation with addiction and alcohol, added a whiff of New Age mysticism and come up with a message that reaches Americans adrift in an atomistic society and often disillusioned with traditional psychotherapy.

Beattie, who gives people a name for their pain -- codependency -- says they are not victims and suggests simple, specific activities for those on the rocky road to spiritual rebirth. The bible for her movement, Codependent No More, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 115 weeks and has sold more than 4 million copies since its 1987 publication. Her subsequent book, Beyond Codependency: And Getting Better All the Time, focuses on relationships and what she calls "taking recovery on the road." Her 1990 book, The Language of Letting Go: Meditations on Codependency, offers daily doses of wisdom on topics like "Gratitude" and "Coping with Stress." But just what is codependency? The queen decrees, "A codependent person is one who has let another person's behavior affect him or her and who is obsessed with controlling that person's behavior." She figures that more than 80 million Americans are emotionally involved with an addict or are addicted themselves -- not just to alcohol or drugs, but also to sex, food, work or shopping. A recovering drug addict, alcoholic and codependent herself, Beattie urges readers in the subtitle of her most popular book to "stop controlling others and start caring for yourself." She lives by example: "This book is dedicated to me."

Thousands of these book buyers are flocking, with new converts' passion, to the myriad "Anonymous" groups; 500,000 self-help meetings are held weekly across the country. Codependents Anonymous is among the most rapidly growing of these free, confessional meetings. Addiction is a big industry these days, with expensive treatment programs, seminars, books, magazines and, yes, even "sobriety vacations." Flinty Americans may find this new commercialism discomfiting, but many anguished souls have found their salvation in 12-step programs, which owe a debt to Alcoholics Anonymous, the novel effort by two heavy drinkers who, in 1935, learned to stay sober -- one day at a time -- and pioneered a new philosophy.

The oracle herself resides in a modest subdivision of Stillwater, Minn., & replete with neat lawns and American flags. Beattie (that's Beet-y) sits in the sun in a cafe along the St. Croix River with tall pines casting a shadow on the water and her 42-ft. houseboat, Nightsong, floating placidly down the way. In her calm, girlish voice, she orders decaffeinated coffee before a light lunch ("I let go of caffeine this year"). Beattie leads a pure, "land-o'-lakes" life and has a sense of, well, serenity. This wasn't always so. The sleeves of her soft blouse meet the bean-size indentations on her arms: the dots connect to her years on life's underside, and she matter- of-factly recites the details. Beattie, 42, of French extraction, was raised by her mother, who worked as a switchboard operator. She tells of being sexually molested by a stranger at age four and drinking whiskey and blacking out by 12. By graduation, the onetime editor of the school newspaper was working as a legal secretary and using drugs, and was briefly a stripper. After an attempted burglary of a pharmacy, she landed before a judge, who decreed jail or a treatment program.

So Beattie arrived hyper and antisocial at a state hospital where, eventually, a "spiritual experience" on the hospital lawn transformed her. "I lay back and the whole sky seemed to turn purple, and I became fully aware that there was a God. My consciousness was raised at that moment." This rebirth, as Beattie tells it, kept her alive. "She's a girl who put her whole heart into getting away from the drug life, and she would not be alive today if she had continued it," agrees Ruth Anderson, one of Beattie's counselors.

Sobriety improved, but didn't solve, Beattie's travails, in her view because she was still codependent -- although she didn't yet know the term. She counseled spouses of alcoholics and tried to cope with her husband's drinking until she finally realized that she couldn't stop him; the two eventually divorced. "When I really let him go, I began to see that I could not control the life path of another human being." With this recognition, Beattie hunted for clues to her unhappiness and found codependency, an idea that had existed in relative obscurity in addiction circles since the 1970s.

The idea is that codependents, either from troubled families or in relationships with compulsive people, develop emotional response patterns like those of spouses and offspring of alcoholics, and that these learned but unconscious behaviors shape their future relationships and lives. This insight is not foreign to traditional psychotherapy. But unlike traditionalists, believers in codependence -- and the Anonymous philosophy -- enlist a democratic and emotional revivalism to uncover an individual's secrets. This populist alternative rejects the relationship between the weak patient and the superior, distant doctor or therapist. "We're talking about a group of people like myself who bottomed out so badly that we didn't have the time to waste on things like penis envy, Oedipus complexes -- however you pronounce it," laughs Beattie. "We were ready for some real basic stuff, and the self-help movement gave us that."

Beattie is influenced by popular ideas born in the 1960s and 1970s. She adores Richard Bach's "metaphysical classic" The Bridge Across Forever: A Lovestory. She "really connected" with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and mentions her debt to transactional analysis. Beattie also strongly endorses 12-step programs tailored to the needs of codependents, which entail detaching from the addict, admitting powerlessness over the addiction and turning one's life over to God or a "higher power." Her latest book is Codependents' Guide to the 12 Steps. She says, "Go until the magic works on you. And if you go long enough, the magic will work."

There was a little magic and a lot of dedication in the way Beattie popularized the codependency theory. With a $500 advance from Hazelden Educational Materials, the publishing arm of the renowned Minnesota substance- abuse center, she went on welfare with her children Nichole, now 14, and Shane, now 11, for four months while she wrote Codependent No More. (Last year Beattie returned about $5,000 to the welfare department.) She recalls, "I kept thinking of Sylvester Stallone, penniless and writing Rocky because he believed in it." Beattie's "I'm-in-the-emotional-trenches-wi th-you" style has a powerful appeal for her readers. Treatment counselor Scott Egleston says, "Melody doesn't write to impress. I don't see a lot of 50 cents words."

Earlier best sellers like Robin Norwood's Women Who Love Too Much and Janet Woititz's Adult Children of Alcoholics primed readers for Beattie's message, which has a special resonance for women who often feel like powerless victims, nurturing everyone but themselves. Beattie offers a list of more than 200 codependent tendencies. The sufferers "feel anxiety, pity and guilt when other people have a problem" and "overcommit themselves." In the book portion titled "The Basics of Self-Care," Beattie suggests that her readers should "feel your own feelings" and "have a love affair with yourself."

Beattie's home state is a cultural cradle of the recovery movement, and some joke that in the land of the Vikings, there is nothing better to do in the cold winter than think up new addiction groups. Beattie, however, muses over a different theory. "I've heard kind of a strange philosophy on that," she says. "According to some Eastern religion, there is a belt that goes across the world, and I've heard that Minnesota is right in the heart of this spiritual-creative belt of energy. I don't know ((if there is)) any fact to that, but it would make a lot of sense."

Although it is impossible to assess the troop strength of this grass-roots movement, it is significant enough to spark a backlash. Recently Oprah Winfrey, no slouch of a trend barometer, featured "self-help addicts" on her TV show. Some reconsideration is coming from movement leaders, like Anne Wilson Schaef, author of When Society Becomes an Addict and Co-Dependence: Misunderstood, Mistreated. She now calls the term outdated and argues that it should be modernized with a new concept of relationship -- sex, love or romance -- addiction. Social psychologist and therapist Stanton Peele, author of Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control, rejects the idea of addiction as a disease and questions the A.A. 12-step model's effectiveness. He charges, "We no longer have a moral basis on which to disapprove of, or respond to, misbehavior. We have given self-declared addicts their defense: they were blinded by their disease." He also criticizes the underlying theory shared by Beattie and others. "It's ironic and humorous that the main way people define their problems is that they help others too much. With homelessness and all our other problems, I don't get the feeling that self-sacrifice is a massive culture-wide problem."

Another problem with the movement flows from its strength: its effort to deal with each individual's very personal and unique woes. While Beattie and the movement's theorists have found a way to express common problems, believers can feel pressure to fit their unique life experiences into the accepted dependency theory. This creates a risk that they simply substitute the movement for the person or problems upon which they are codependent. "To call zealousness toward recovery a dependency trivializes the healing process," responds Beattie. "Some of us need to go overboard to counter years of destructive ways of thinking, feeling and behaving before finding the balance."

Beattie understands being overboard, which helps her throw best-selling lifelines to those still adrift.