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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 She now calls the term outdated and argues that it should be modernized with a new concept of relationship -- sex, love or romance -- addiction.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.