Adult children: the secrets of dysfunctional families

PART IV 
BENEATH THE ICEBERG
Whatever is hidden away will be brought out into the open, and whatever
is covered up will be uncovered.
Mark 4:22

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16 
A General Model of Adult Children and Co-
dependency
We have used the term "co-dependency" a few times thus far. It is
likely that many of you who read this book are familiar with the
term. Many of you perhaps use the word several times a day.
Despite the fact that we are probably best known for our research
and clinical work in the area of co-dependency, we felt that it was
important to hold off on any discussion of it until this point in the
book because there is a lot of confusion surrounding the term. We
believe that the term "co-dependency" has been, and still is, in a
state of evolution.
Co-dependency originally meant the spouse, lover or significant
other of someone who was chemically dependent. At that
beginning point in its evolution, it was simple to understand.
Whether you had any symptoms yourself or not, if you were
involved somehow with a chemically dependent person, then you
were a co-dependent.
But since those simpler early days, "co-dependency" has taken on a
life and an identity of its own. Many professionals now feel that
co-

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dependency is a specific diagnostic term which refers to a specific
set of emotional and behavioral symptoms.
Robert Subby and John Friel defined it as a dysfunctional pattern
of living which was learned by a set of rules within the family
system (Subby & Friel, 1985). Subby used a similar definition in
his recent book entitled Lost in the Shuffle: The Co-Dependent
Reality (Subby, 1987).
Noted psychiatrist and Chairman of the National Association of
Children of Alcoholics, Dr. Timmen Cermak, makes an excellent
case for defining co-dependency as a clear-cut psychiatric disorder
in his book Diagnosing and Treating Co-Dependence (Cermak,
1986).
Co-dependency Symptoms
In listing the symptoms of co-dependency, we and others most
often look at issues such as "caretaking", "over-responsibility" to
others and an inability to care for self appropriately, difficulty in
identifying and expressing feelings, swinging from "too nice" to
angry and abusive, over-focusing on others while under-focusing
on self, identity development problems, and getting into abusive
and/or confusing relationships.
In co-dependency we do not believe that we have choices, which
produces a painful feeling of "stuck-ness". Along with this
symptom is a lot of compulsiveness, too. In our seminars we often
say, "In our co-dependency we don't know how to start and we
don't know how to stop."
Our own work in this area began in 1982 when we likened co-

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dependency to a "paradoxical dependency" (Friel, 1982) in which
we appear strong, competent and emotionally healthy on the
outside but feel confused, lost, lonely and dependent on the inside.
This type of co-dependency, of course, is now seen as just one of
many forms that the disorder can take, depending upon one's role
in their family of origin and upon the stage of co-dependency that
one is currently in. The strong, responsible, hold-everything-
together type of co-dependency can give way to an abusive,
rageful, unpredictable, irresponsible form under certain conditions.
Confusion also develops over the concept because one of the
common symptoms of untreated co-dependency is simply chemical
dependency. In fact, it has been our clinical experience and that of
many other professionals with whom we communicate, that most

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chemically dependent and other addicted people are also co-
dependent beneath their addiction.
In 1984, we began presenting a model of co-dependency which has
served us very well in our clinical work, and which has been
extremely well-received by the professional community and client
populations alike. Clients like our definition and "iceberg model"
because they make both "intuitive sense" and are easily
understandable. The professionals in the fields of mental health,
chemical dependency, medicine and law who we have trained with
the model, state that it is also easily understood, as well as
clarifying the complex and confusing relationship between
chemical addictions, relationship addictions, other addictions and
co-dependency. We offer here our definition and conceptual model: