Codependent No More
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Codependent No More was the debut book of self-help author Melody Beattie. It was originally published in 1987 by the publishing division of the Hazelden Foundation. The book became a phenomenon of the self-help movement, going on to sell over eight million copies, six million copies of them in the United States.
Codependent No More introduced the word "codependent" to the wider world. The term "'codependent" originated as a term to describe people who use relationships with others as their sole source of value and identity. These people often end up in relationships with either drug addicted or alcohol addicted spouses or lovers. In the book, Beattie explains that a codependent is a person who believes their happiness is derived from other people or one person in particular, and eventually the codependent becomes obsessed with controlling the behavior of the people/person that they believe is making them happy.
Similar to Bill Wilson's Alcoholics Anonymous five decades earlier, Beattie's early work took the previously complex object relations and interpersonal theories of psychological theorists like Heinz Kohut, Wilfred Bion and Otto Kernberg and put them in language the average reader could easily grasp. The book also re-phrased many of the notions expressed in the Al-Anon Twelve-step program movement into more modern language, and made the notion of addiction to a person (who was addicted to a substance or a behavioral process) part of the western cultural lexicon.
Codependent No More was preceded by professional literature like Timmen Cermak's Diagnosing and Treating Co-Dependence, but Beattie's book was the first "big book", on the subject, and paved the way for a new Twelve-step take-off program, called Co-Dependents Anonymous. "CoDA" has a conference-approved, AA-like, "big book" of its own. Beattie's works continue to be staples in the CoDA meeting rooms.
Co-Dependents Anonymous has influenced over a million people, and is increasingly "prescribed" by members of the professional mental health community as a self-help adjunct treatment for marital, family of origin and other relationship difficulties well beyond involvement with practicing substance or process abusers.[citation needed]
