TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121090/1210520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.3 KB | 242 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 106

Taking Care of Herself


Self-help is a philosophy, says MELODY BEATTIE, and her
best-selling books carry the word to a tidal wave of followers

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-with-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.