Does Codependency Therapy Help or Hurt?

It seems to me that the adult children of narcissists who learn of NPD and then go through the natural process of dealing with this stunning revelation fare better than those who get involved in codependency therapy.

You are at first enormously relieved, because your instincts were right and the brainwashing was wrong: it wasn't your fault, and you weren't the defective one. But then come the memories and the pain and all the emotions they generate. You go through them. You gain much understanding.

Result? SELF-ESTEEM!

Yes, you do learn who loves ya and that you must look out for yourself first in life. But you just lost your naivete, that's all. You (correctly) view your abuse as the narcissist exploiting your love and goodwill, which are virtues - not as him or her exploiting what the preachers of codependency regard as a FLAW in you - your vulnerability. (Which is exactly the view the narcissist takes. Hmm.)

If that parent is still alive and plaguing your life, you stop enabling by making changes to distance yourself as much as possible.

Then, six months, a year, or two later, you're beyond it. Because those emotions are spent, and you have put that parent too far away from you to hurt you anymore.

The people who handle it naturally like this have no problem talking about it, either. They will give you frank, straight answers about that parent.

But just listen and compare their voices to the adult children of narcissists in support groups that preach codependency therapy. The latter still seem enslaved to the idea that there is something wrong with them, that they need much improvement and have been struggling at it, some for many years.

They go against nature on everything, as though what a person is naturally inclined to do is always dangerous or something.

So, for example, instead of feeling their feelings, they repress them. Because in that religion, being made to feel bad or angry is a sin: you're supposed to have one emotion = happy, happy, happy. No matter what is done to you - happy, like good people are. (Which is again the view the narcissist takes.)

Years later they are still fighting to conquer those repressed feelings, which they consider a character flaw in themselves. Any little thing that happens calls those painful feelings to consciousness, so that they must be stifled and repressed again.

Again, for example, instead of contemplating their memories in the light of what they now know, and having a good cry, they eschew thinking or talking about it. They think it's a sin to think or talk about what happened to them, so they repress memory too, because just talking about the childhood abuse or that parent is "failing to take responsibility" for your life in that religion.

You must take responsibility for the hurt done to you. Narcissistic abuse hurt you only because you are weak and let it hurt you. You must pump up your self-esteem (which is telling the victim to do exactly what a narcissist does) and just "blow off" abuse and all other unhappy things so that you stop being guilty of ever feeling any negative emotion about anything.

In other words, you must act like it didn't happen. Which is exactly what the narcissist tries to make you do.

Consequently, the adult children of narcissists under codepency therapy act like war veterans who come home and never talk about the harrowing experience. But, unlike war veterans, they won't even talk about it with other war veterans.

And these people constantly have to puff up their self-esteem because every little thing still deflates it. Which is no wonder, because they believe they are flawed for having their feelings.

How is this "casting off victimhood"? It looks to me more like re-vicimization. Is this codependecy therapy not picking up right where the narcissistic parent left off?

Add it up. It sounds like therapists took this therapy for the VICTIM right from mouths of the NARCISSISTS on their couch! For, this is exactly the line the narcissist hands a therapist about his or her victims...to blame them.

And notice the wholly negative nature of this "positive" therapy: Rule 1: Don't feel what you feel. Rule 2: Don't remember your past. Bossy, bossy, bossy.

Where is the proof that this therapy is effective? Nowhere. Why? If it really works, why don't the practitioners show us the proof? They offer nothing but the kind of unreliable testimonials you can find posted on a website that sells tablecloths or some other merchandise.

Since codependency therapy is so involved with 12-step programs, here is a well-kept secret about 12-step programs: A scientific review of comparative studies of various 12-step programs show that they are no more effective than any other kind of treatment for alcoholism.

But here's the kicker: no studies have been done to establish whether most of these other treatments are effective at all. That's indefensible. Why are there no such studies? Are the AA and APA afraid of what the results would be?

The existing SCIENTIFIC research allows us to say nothing more than Dr. Edward V. Nunes, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia notes - that certain elements of A.A. are known to be effective:

Some of the wisdom embodied in A.A., such as the notion of persons, places and things that trigger drinking, are very much a part of cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a scientifically driven, empirically validated treatment.

Therefore, the other treatment methods and the rest of the 12-step program may be ineffective for all we know. We do know that at least 1 in 5 alcoholics achieves long-term sobriety on their own, with no treatment at all. Do any of these treatments beat that benchmark?

The NYT tries to downplay the facts by suggesting credibility in the whining that this reveiw refused to accept the pseudoscience usually put forth as "proof" of the 12-step program's validity. In other words, they whine that no junk science "data" was allowed in this scientific review. Specifically, they complained that this scientific reveiew cited only randomized, carefully controlled studies = real science.

Get it? Very funny. Can't the NYT tell a joke when they quote it?

The people who let that stinker have NO CREDIBILITY whatsoever, and the NYT shouldn't lend them the semblance of any. You do nothing but misinform by "balancing" the known truth with a known lie. The NYT is irresponsible for even quoting that crap. The defenders of the 12-step program should have been warned that if they couldn't come up with something credible and legitimate to say, they wouldn't be quoted at all.

Otherwise, from now on the NYT must quote a flat-earther every time to "balance" any source quoted as implying that the earth is a sphere.

And I'm not being facetious. I'd be surprised if there were no legitimate criticism one could make of this scientific review. So, its opponents don't have to try to legitimize the illegitimate...unless that's exactly what their goal is.

They're just trying to discredit real science and pass off their pseudoscience as superior - with nothing but fast-talk to people who don't know enough about science to see how absurd they're being.

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"Responsibility" Wrap: Narcissist Hurts You to Make YOU Guilty of the Sin of Feeling the Pain

Remember when you were a child and you used to say that "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"?

Even little children instinctively know enough to hide their pain when someone has hurt their feelings. This instinct is good, even when the enemy isn't really an enemy - just a friendly opponent in a tennis match. Don't let the emotional effect on you of bad things show. It encourages the adversary.

But keeping them to yourself doesn't get rid of those feelings, does it?

Children, however, live in very different minds than normal adults do. Like Alice and Peter Pan, they don't distinguish between fantasy and realty, preferring fantasy, where they learn the (delusory) power of magical thinking. In some cases this pretending goes so far as to imagine into existence an imaginary friend, expecting Mom to set a place for her at the dinner table.

So, children have no problem getting rid of unwanted feelings. They just pretend them away. They just pretend their feelings aren't hurt.

They aren't really altering those feelings though. They're just repressing awareness of them to the subconscious and pretending to have other, good, feelings instead.

You can tell, because their behavior is such as proceeds from bad feelings, the repressed ones, not the feelings they pretend to have. In other words, those repressed feelings are still there and having their normal motivational effect on the thinking that controls conduct.

Unfortunately, however, the child is unaware of those buried feelings and therefore unaware of why she's doing what she's doing.

When feelings are repressed, it takes a good deal of of introspection to get in touch with those feelings again, so that you know why you're doing whatever you're doing.

I'll never forget this little exchange between Sister Mary Peter and a budding sixth-grade narcissist who had done something vicious that was totally inexplicable and whose mother was there and totally snookered by the conning brat. Seeing that the mother was willfully obtuse, Sister Peter got blunt...

Sister Mary Peter: Why did you do it?

Narc: I don't know.

Sister Mary Peter: Do you know what we do with people who don't know why they do things?

Yes, people who don't know why they do things are seriously mentally ill. And when you bury your natural feelings, that is what you are doing to yourself. You will soon NOT know why you are doing things.

But narcissists aren't the only people who refuse to grow up and quit clinging to the cherished myth that they can make unhappy feelings go away and make them into happy ones instead. Many people cling to this belief that "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" because I am strong and I have high self-esteem, when really all I have is a habit of lying to myself.

One thing I remember about the Bible is how virtually anything can be "uncircumcised." Like your heart. Your eyes. Your ears.

In fact, according to the Bible, things that are circumcised can suddenly get uncircumcised. Kinda calloused-over with some crusty shield.

So, I had a hard time figuring out exactly what this figure of speech means. But, like a dog with a bone, I kept at it till I got it.

Nothing uncircumcises a head faster than stating the simple, self-evident truth that we cannot control our feelings, that feelings are not conduct and therefore cannot be right or wrong.

Just state that plain truth to many people and you can almost see it happening: that person's forehead suddenly gets thick as a brick. Reason bounces off it like missiles bounce off an Abrams tank


Uncircumcised Head
They act like they didn't even hear what you said. They just come back with, "But" and a reply that assumes you can control your feelings and that certain ones are sins.

How's that for being blockheaded? They can't even give you an answer - just nothing but this complete dodge all the time.

Which is absurd. Feelings are sensations, emotional sensations. You cannot alter sensations (except with hallucinatory drugs and hypnosis). If you get burnt, you should feel burned. If you don't, something is wrong with you. If the narcissist punches you in the face, he is responsible for your pain, not you. If he forces you to your knees and shoves your face into garbage he threw all over the floor, he is the one responsible for your anger, not you.

To think otherwise is incredibly stupid. The cause of a sensation is the stimulus that produces it, not the mind of the person who experiences it.

The worst thing about repressing unwanted feelings is that burying them locks them inside. They never go away then! Just as normal physical pain motivates action and then passes, normal feelings motivate action and then pass whether action has been taken or not.

But denied pain paralyzes and then just festers in the subconscious, motivating negative behavior (usually passive-aggressive behavior) like an unseen puppet master. And not just against the abuser - but rather against any available target, people who had nothing to do with the person who abused you. Hence we see many people subconsciously getting even with a parent by mistreating their spouse decades later.

That's crazy.

So, the very premise that codependency therapy rests on is invalid. Manifestly invalid. Of course people swear by it, though. But that doesn't mean that codependence "therapy" works. It just means that they think they have made their bad feelings go away. But they have merely brainwashed themselves and were conned into doing so. Sooner or later the price for doing that will have to be paid.

The pain of narcissistic abuse is sheer torture. I have no doubt that it drives many mentally healthy people all the way to suicide. And often without the narcissist even laying a hand on the victim. It's THAT bad when you're bludgeoned with it day after day after day.

But in my own experience, I found relief when I stopped trying to fight those feelings off. When I asked myself why I was angry, sad, outraged about this or that. When I accepted my feelings as having a valid cause and owning them. I could see that my feelings were a natural human reaction to what had been done to me. I no longer felt like a pressure cooker about to explode. I could bear it. And it got better - just a little better - every single day.

Feelings are nothing to fear. Felt feelings motivate behavior, but they don't rule it. And felt feelings never killed anyone.

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2nd Banality of Sounding Smart Award

This deserves another Banality of Sounding Smart Award.

First, the facts:

The Guardian, Wednesday March 21 2007: A "sadistic" foster mother was found guilty yesterday of subjecting three children in her care to a horrifying catalogue of physical and mental abuse over 20 years.

Eunice Spry, 62, beat the children with sticks and metal bars, scrubbed their skin with sandpaper and forced them to eat lard, bleach, vomit and even their own faeces.

Now, I don't know about you, but I find that conduct evil and that woman evil (unless she is insane rather than psychopathic). Hold the applause, please. It takes no rocket scientist to see that ;-)

But if you want to sound smart, like an intellectual, you must pull this stunt (See the 9:09 anonymous comment). Like David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Central England in Birmingham and author of Serial Killers: Hunting Britons and Their Victims, 1960-2006:

The Guardian, March 21, 2007: We are all child-haters

Sadistic foster mother Eunice Spry is no different to the rest of us - she reflects a culture that despises young people. ...Children in this country are routinely battered, raped, abused and all-too-regularly murdered. ...Yet, in the same way that Spry's case seems to be being reported to exonerate the rest of us, so too these simple, awful criminological realities get hidden in notions of "stranger danger" (surely the worst ever aphorism in our public policy), and predatory paedophiles stalking playgrounds waiting to abduct our children. And whilst this does - very occasionally - happen, we consistently choose to ignore the all-too-banal source of the overwhelming reality of child battery, abuse and murder - parents.

Hear that echo? It's the old "banality of evil" buzzword being used to make both evil and the evildoer not evil...just banal = trivial and commonplace, like us the unwashed masses.

This banal intellectual closes thus:

Eunice Spry is no different to the rest of us - she merely reflects a culture which has increasingly become, at best, intolerant of young people and at worst child-hating.

Via Normblog in No different from hot air in which he responds to Wilson's "fatuous" statement:

I assume that the academic discipline David Wilson professes in contains intellectual resources which would have enabled him to make his point about parental violence against children without the absurd overstatement and the slur on all those who love and cherish their children.

This nonsense is part of the poisoned fruit of the condependency tree. The monstrous theory has been stretched into the widespread belief among the "experts" that child abuse is banal because nearly all parents abuse their children, making virtually everyone codependent, which is the cause of any negative emotions we experience in adulthood.

Otherwise, we'd blithlely never feel a slight or offense, you see. Nothing would make us feel sad or angry. So, whatver some jerk just said to you isn't what makes you angry today: it's your mother several times having been too busy to read you a story when you were four.

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Update on Codependence

A additional note on the previous post.

Do check out the links at the end. One thing they show is that codependence theory started out sensibly as the realization among the family members of alcoholics that their behavior "enabled" the alcoholic.

We all likewise see how our behavior enabled our abusers until we caught on.

The problem with this idea came with pseudoscience. You get a bunch of theorizers sitting in their ivory towers, speculating (hypothesizing) to come up with something new and different to say on the subject. Why? For attention, of course. Publication. Getting "known" as an "authority" on the subject.

Which places a premium on saying something attention-grabbing.

But they do no research. This so-called "scientific literature" is highly theoretical and speculative = basically just essays on the subject. Essays - not experiments and valid statistical data.

At best they refer to "clinical studies." (See what's wrong with that here. And the drug companies love clinical studies! You can get virtually any drug approved with them.) But mostly their idea of "scientific research" is to quote the mere speculative essays of others doing the same thing!

Where, pray tell, is the "scientific research" in that? Quoting the mere theorizing of others is supplying no valid EVIDENCE. That ain't scientific research, because it ain't scientific data. Unfortunately, most people don't realize this. They wrongly consider these sources reliable JUST BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN FOOTNOTES, even when those footnotes refer to no valid "evidence." Smoke and mirrors.

This burlesque plus the eternal desire to blame the victim have bastardized an originally sound idea and made a monster of it, as every new voice that comes along tries to stretch illogic to an even greater extreme than his or her predecessors did. Pop psychology at its greedy worst.

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Nonsense Check on Codependence

The preachers of codependence say that you are to blame for how the narcissist's abuse makes you feel. They say that no one can make you feel anything. That if you feel bad about abuse, it's your fault. Specifically, you lack self-esteem. Shame on you. That makes you a victim. And it's bad to be a victim.

If that isn't blaming the victim, I don't know what is.

I ran across this example on the web: It starts off in the title saying that no one can make you feel anything, though the writer admits it's hard to achieve this mental armor.

Lets say someone comes up to you and says you are a liar. Inside you know you always tell the truth, you are confident in that and don't feel threatened by the accusations of this other person because you know youself, you know how you treat people and you don't care what others believe about you, you let your actions speak for you. The idea is if your self esteem is HIGH enough, and you are not dependant on the opinions of others, then you would be able to blow this off and feel secure in the knowledge that you are not a liar. The power then, that this other person seems to have over you is lost because you know the truth and you have faith in yourself/ your higher power.

It's hard to know where to begin disentangling this mess.

Presumably, the third sentence contradicts the second because the writer got the cart ahead of the horse and meant to say that 'only if your self-esteem is high will you be able to know that you are not a liar, etc.' Which is absurd. Your self-esteem can be in the pits, and you'll still know that you're not a liar.

This literary spaghetti confuses mere insecurity with being brain-dead, so brain-dead that if someone tells you that you are 3 feet tall, you believe them.

And what follows doesn't follow: "You know you always tell the truth, so you are confident and don't feel threatened by the accusation, and you don't care what others believe about you." There are two – count 'em, two – absurdities in that sentence.

First, being honest makes you feel unthreatened by the accusation that you are a liar? That's absurd. Being honest does not make you immune to damage by being called a liar. If you are a liar, THEN you suffer no real damage by being called a liar, because then you are just getting the reputation you deserve. That's justice. No foul. But when you're honest, that false accusation can make your whole past life go up in smoke. That's damage. The threat is real, and if you don't feel it, you are off ga-ga land.

Second, because you know you're honest, you don't care what others believe about you? That's a non sequitur. And anyone who says they don't care what others think about them is either deluded or lying.

Now for the self-esteem thing. First, self-esteem itself is but a feeling. It's your emotional response to how you treat yourself. People who force you to knuckle under to abuse beat it down, because they have made you stoop.

So, this guy is saying that if you pump up one feeling enough (your self-esteem) you won't ever be made to feel other (bad) feelings? That's another non sequitur.

That's two gigantic leaps of illogic.

Your self-esteem, among other things, will figure into your emotional response to this false accusation or any other kind of abuse. But the main factors will be whether the accusation is true and who the accuser is.

For example, have you ever incurred the wrath of a tempestuous little child? She stamps her foot at what you're saying and yells, "You're a liar!" You are not going to be bothered by that, are you? In fact, you'll be amused and have to try to hide your amusement so as not to rub it in. Why? Because you don't feel threatened by the accusation of a child.

But if your boss calls you a liar, that's a whole different thing. You are threatened by that, just by virtue of who he or she is. And you can't make his power over you go away by just pumping up your self-esteem.

So, the circumstances and the accuser have much more to do with your feelings than your self-esteem does. If you need fear that this accusation is going to be spread all over town, you are off in ga-ga land if it doesn't evoke a very strong negative emotion in you.

And any sensible, thinking person knows all this, so where is this half-baked doctrine coming from?

What's more, if it is a FALSE accusation, you will be all the more angry. Correction, you will be outraged, because your sense of shame and your sense of justice are being outraged. Yes, your sense of shame, because (contrary to this sloppy thinking) shame isn't guilt: shame is something others put on you. It wounds the innocent far more deeply than the guilty. Indeed, the most damaged are the most innocent.

Note that this preacher of codependcy even says that you don't counter the false accusation. You just let your actions do the talking. In other words, you act like the offense didn't happen.

If that isn't aspiring to victimhood, I don't know what is.

I'm a firm believer in the victim rising from the dust as soon as possible and thundering with both fists in the air.

What's so horrible about admitting that other people's treatment of you can make you experience negative feelings as well as positive ones? Is that too scary, or what? Isn't it narcissistic to be in denial of that fact? Why do people need to feel in control of their feelings? And notice how it all comes down to power in the end. Why do people feel the need to be more powerful than their abuser? That too is exactly how the scared-of-his-own-shadow narcissist thinks.

He NEEDS to control others because he is terrified of a world in which he isn't more powerful. He NEEDS to feel in control of his feelings because he is a big baby who can't take them. He too regards feelings as weakness, so he represses them. Deludes himself about them. He too pumps up his self-esteem. Or, he thinks he does. He just pretends he has high self-esteem and represses awareness of his low self-esteem.

I don't think the cure for narcissistic abuse is to become like the narcissist who abused you.

Some feelings are pleasant, and some are unpleasant. Some, like anger and sorrow are emotional pain. Of course we don't like feeling them. At least if we are normal we don't. But does that mean they are intolerable? That they should be feared?

I know that fear is the first thing to go when you "descend into Hell and rise again."

Owned and acknowledged, feelings are not harmful, just painful. And they pass if you don't keep them buried in your subsconscious. In fact, those unpleasant emotions are good for you in a way. They MOTIVATE you to do something about the theft or abuse. Without those feelings we'd all be pathetic wimps.

Numb ones betraying ourselves by going around and acting as though it didn't happen.

For how far codependence theory has run amok, see:
Codependence and Is It Wrong to Be a Victim?

UPDATE: Note that those who "believe in codependency" always talk as though a person's feelings automate his or her conduct. But this obviously isn't true. At a very early age, we learn to stop being impulsive. That's a character trait of childhood that normal people leave behind. We learn to keep the rational mind in control of our behavior, even when angry. So, what is wrong with these people? Have they failed to learn this? Are they still so childish that their own behavior is driven by their emotions? Listen to them. They talk as though they have no idea that a human being has any self-control. They equate feeling angry with losing your temper and acting out to do something bad.

Their unnatural solution is to numb their natural feelings instead of to just grow up and practice self-control of their words and deeds.

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