Codependancy

Battered Women with Chemically-involved Partners

* Codependency and Effects of Victimization:
Similarities and Differences
* Implications of Codependency Treatment for Victims
* Recommendations for Substance Abuse Treatement Counselors
* Limitations of Codependency Model in General
* Relational Model (Self-in-relation Model)

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Codependency and Effects of Victimization:
Similarities and Differences
An abuser's involvement with substances can have a significant impact on victims of domestic violence. One of the ways in which victim safety is often inadvertently compromised is when victims participate in services designed to address the needs of family members of chemically- dependent persons.

One of the difficulties in talking about codependency treatment is that it often means different things to different people. In fact, several different definitions of codependency circulate within the field, each of which has different implications for intervention. For example, if codependency is understood as family members' situational responses to the presence of a chemically-dependent person in their midst, interventions are likely to be based on behavior modification approaches. If, on the other hand, codependency is understood as a pattern of behavior that is most often learned in the family of origin, then interventions are likely to include helping clients gain insight into family of origin roles to facilitate behavior change in the present.

Rather than trying to gain consensus about which definition of codependency is the "right" one, it may be more useful to focus on the behaviors or characteristics that the framework of codependency was intended to describe. Common behaviors and characteristics associated with codependency include:

* being preoccupied with partner, what he does, where he is, etc.
* being other-focused
* making others' needs more of a priority than one's own needs
* being unable to define one's own needs
* taking responsibility for others
* denial
* enabling behaviors, i.e., covering up for, making excuses for, supplying the drug
* having unclear boundaries; not setting limits with others' behavior
* defining mood based on other peoples' moods
* being reactive rather than proactive
* putting self down
* suffering somatic illnesses

For the most part, the behaviors and characteristics that describe codependency also describe the very behaviors that many victims of domestic violence adopt to survive.

posted by Robert Heard at 9:02 AM