Past Is Prologue
Welcome Back, Codependency
The term went mainstream in the ’80s and ’90s, and it’s carried a stigma ever since
--
By the time I attended my first Al-Anon meetings as a teenager in the ’90s, I had heard the word “codependency” many times. Where? No one in my house talked about it, nor did friends, but it was ambient in the culture at the time. While researching the genesis of this term and its conceptual underpinnings for a memoir about my own disastrous relationship patterns, I realized I’d probably heard it on the daytime talk shows I sometimes mindlessly watched after school.
Codependency had a moment in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But, sadly, when the term went mainstream, it lost some of its power. These days, I’m seeing it again, mostly on self-care-focused Instagram pages, but it’s not always clear that the people using the word know what it means—or that it takes more than a bubble bath and green juice to deal with it.
Where did “codependency” come from?
The roots of codependency can be traced back to the work of German psychoanalyst Karen Horney, who advanced the idea that some people define themselves through the dependency or approval of others — especially women, who are rigorously socialized to do this. (Horney also challenged the phallocentrism of Sigmund Freud’s work, provocatively arguing that women do not suffer from “penis envy”; rather, it is men who experience “womb envy” and center their lives around achievement to redress this basic power imbalance.)
But the concept of codependency didn’t come into wider use until Alcoholics Anonymous gained traction in the 1940s and ’50s, and Al-Anon, its corollary 12-step program for friends and family of alcoholics, was founded in 1951. At that time, the “friends and family” were mostly the wives of alcoholic men. In history books about the early days of the program, I read that some meetings got started because wives, not trusting their husbands with the car keys, waited outside while the men were in AA meetings and got to talking about their common predicament.
Al-Anon membership grew throughout the 1950s and ’60s, and the program was featured on television programs and written about in…
