Book Review: Co-Dependence: Healing the Human Condition

4.0 out of 5 starsExhaustive for It's Time... with Major Pointers for the Future, January 22, 2012

Exhaustive for It's Time... with Major Pointers for the Future

Rodger Garrett "SighKoBlahGrr" (Loma Linda, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

Co-Dependence - Healing the Human Condition (Paperback), by Charles Whitfield, Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1991.

Frankly, I'm surprised there are so few reviews of what is still the single most theory-grounded, comprehensive and predictive of all the many books on the topic during the '80s and '90s. Whitfield had done his homework, and it shows. He's pretty solidly grounded in psychodynamic object relations (though, oddly, Harry Stack Sullivan is missing; go figure), as well as state-of-the-art addiction theory c. 1990. His reference list makes that clear, and serves present day readers as a pretty complete rundown of the major published material in the rubric's first heyday.

Which is useful, as it looks like Co-Dependence as a means of understanding why our interpersonal relationships aren't working is making a comeback, as well as beginning to be the "next thing you do" if you're a female in AA or Alanon.

Whitfield ties it all together for adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families as co-dependents far better than either of CoDA's or ACA's 12 Step "big books" (as good as both of them are).

That said, Co-Dependence... is a product of it's times, which almost means "ancient history" in the current era of the evidence-based and brain-scan-informed neuropsychological therapies like CBT, DBT, ACT, MBCT and SIQR. Whitfield was definitely headed in the right direction in suggesting a "spiritual solution," but in his mind, that was something closer to A Course in Miracles than to the research-grounded, Buddhist-based "experiential" therapies that are so popular with most HMOs these days. (Because they teach skills one can use by themselves and produce results in a hurry.)

(ACIM came and went in the '80s and '90s, even with Marianne Williamson's considerable help in the later stage of its popularity. Essentially Judeo-Christian in flavor, a) it ran into the wall of resistance typical of those who suffered from cult-ist or fundamentalist religious crazy-making, and b) it's a very long, arduous and demanding system.)

Even in the new age (but not "New Age") of the mindfulness-based cognitive therapies, however, Co-Dependence... joins Pia Mellody's simpler and more easily-grasped, but no less effective, Facing Codependence as one of the two very best "grist mills" for modern therapy. Most readers seem to get the picture sufficiently that they acquire enough realization, identification and sense of history, as well sense of current dysfunctional behavior, to move them through Prochaska & DiClemente's first three stages of recovery into "commitment" and "action."

Whitfield's book does not supply the "actions" in anything close to sufficient operational detail, but authors like New Harbinger's Steven Hayes, Matthew McKay, Victoria Follette, Thomas Marra, John Forsyth, and others do. And with the guidance of a DBT, ACT, MBCT or SIQR therapist, what the reader learns in either Co-Dependence..., Facing Codependence, CoDA's Co-Dependence Anonymous or ACA's Adult Children of Alcoholics / Dysfunctional Families will serve him well.

(c) 2012 by Rodger Garrett; all rights reserved. Links are okay. Please comment or inquire to not_moses@fastmail.fm. Thank you.