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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."