[Bernadette]

LaTeeDa re-posted that "Don't be surprised...I'm an addict" great letter from the "Classic Reading" in a post today. It got me thinking: I wonder what the codependent equivalent of Jon the addict's letter would sound like?

Hi my name is X and I am codependent. I will not stop telling you what you should do and how you should do it. I will spy on you, I will monitor exactly how much alcohol you imbibe, I will lie awake at night and listen to your drunken crashing and vomiting and I will seethe with disappointment and rage. And then you will hear about it for three days.

Until I decide that this time is different, I will tell you time and time again just what I see you are doing wrong, how much you are hurting me and the children, how you are destroying our family. I will allow my finances and my social life to be destroyed. I will use your behavior to justify my frustration, depression, paralysis, and anger.

I don't love you, I cannot love you, because I pity you and don't respect your right to be exactly who and what you are. I refuse to accept you the way you are because it would mean I will have to change. I am incapable of loving you because I feel superior to you, I would never say it out loud, but when I look at you and your problems I am assured of all the ways that I keep it together. My good qualities become exaggerated in my mind because I have your handy example to compare them to.

I refuse to step off of my constant attention to your problems because it means I will have to see that I myself have serious problems that I refuse to address and change. I need to convince myself on a daily basis that I know you so well and what's best for you because I don't know myself at all, and because of that I don't know what's good for me.


My behavior cannot and will not change until I make a decison to stop behaving and thinking this way, until I make a decision to focus on my own problems and the consequences of my own decisions in this life, and then follow it up with a plan of action.

And until I make that decsion, I will hurt you and myself again and again and again.

Stop being surprised.

I am codependent, And that's what codependents do.