Member-only story
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…
