Codependency: A View from Women Married to Alcoholics

Abstract

Intensive interviews with women married to alcoholics reveal a taken-for-granted use of the term "codependent" to describe the spouses of alcoholics, despite considerable definitional ambiguity as to what codependency is. Although most of the wives agreed that codependency involves caretaking behavior and exists by virtue of their association with an alcoholic, they disagreed widely as to its impact on the self, its locus as personal or social, its disease status, its longevity, and whether or not it is distinctive to alcohol-complicated marriages. Self-labeling and identification occur through retrospective reinterpretation of their lives with their alcoholic husbands, guided and legitimated by rehabilitation personnel. These reconstructions then serve as self-evidence of codependency. In challenging the notion of codependency as an objective condition, we emphasize the social construction and application of this condition, and, in doing so, suggest that there has been a two-fold process of deviantizing the women's identities and medicalizing this new-found deviance. While this situation perpetuates a traditional view of women as more passive than active, a more serious possibility is its affinity to a historical view of wives of alcoholics as pathological.

Enabling behavior in a clinical sample of alcohol-dependent clients and their partners

“…Clinical and research notions about family members initially pathologized their reactions to disordered drinking (e.g., disturbed personality theories) or attributed blame for the drinking to spouses of alcoholics. However, the popular notion that (female) spouses of alcohol-dependent clients possess personality traits that cause them to exhibit irrational enabling behaviors has been abandoned by some clinicians and researchers, and replaced with the view that enabling behaviors, if they do occur, are normal reactions to the stress that is present in the alcohol-involved family (Asher & Brissett, 1988;Haaken, 1990;Hands & Dear, 1994;Miller, 1994). Significant others may engage in different and often changing means of coping with substance abusers, and report experiencing significant mental and physical strain as a result (e.g., Velleman et al, 1993).…”

Codependency in families of alcohol and other drug users: is it in fact a disease?

“…Também critica o fato de que cuidar da parceria é de algum modo responsável pela manutenção do "comportamento adicto" do outro 18 . Outros críticos argumentam que o modo como este fenômeno vem sendo conceituado e, sobretudo, utilizado pelos conselheiros em dependência química e grupos de mútua ajuda tende a colocar um holofote sobre a questão, de forma a patologizar um comportamento interpessoal ou de "medicalizar" um comportamento dito "desviante", principalmente de mulheres (esposas de dependentes de álcool), diminuindo a identidade feminina e reforçando uma cultura sexista e de vitimização, o que, em geral, tende a aumentar a estigmatização da condição, sobretudo das mulheres esposas de usuários de álcool e outras drogas 19,20 . Por outro lado, o modelo de codependência praticado e amplamente difundido pelos grupos de mútua ajuda destinados a acolher familiares de dependentes químicos, como, por exemplo, o Al-Anon, Nar-Anon e o Alateen, tem se mostrado uma ferramenta importante [21][22][23][24] , que promove segurança, estabilidade e esperança às famílias cujos membros são portadores da síndrome de dependência ao álcool.…”

Partner Enabling of Substance Use Disorders: Critical Review and Future Directions

“…Enabling is thought to comprise a wide gamut of actions that potentially reinforce continued use of alcohol or other drugs. More ambiguity surrounds the definition of codependency (some writers even spell it differently, as co-dependency), but themes of caretaking, pleasing others, and association with a person who has alcohol or drug problems were found in one narrative study to be common conceptions of the term held by women married to alcoholics (Asher & Brissett, 1988). These linguistic constructs are built upon the notion that family members of alcoholics and addicts are a part of a dysfunctional family system, and that they, usually unwittingly, contribute to the perpetuation of the alcoholic's or addict's destructive behavior.…”

“…Moreover, having a problem is not the same as being the problem, an implication of extending the disease model to codependent family members of chemically dependent individuals. In essence, it has been argued from various perspectives that these behaviors have been pathologized and those exhibiting them have been unfairly labeled as "sick" (Asher & Brissett, 1988;Haaken, 1990;Miller, 1994;Tavris, 1990). For example, Tavris (1990, p. 43) asserts that by focusing on themselves as the problem, women continue to "look inward to their own faults and failings," which only contributes to low self-esteem.…”