LifeRecovery

As many of you know I have been gifted with a number of years of recovery under my belt and overall feel much better.

Something has been nagging around the edges for a bit and I had no sense of what, but a podcast I listened to today made me realize that I am getting ready to work on some of the deeper and harder edges of my co-dependent behaviors (again). This recovery process really is lifelong, but oddly wonderful at the same time.

So for my question-
We often hear in 12 Step Programs and on here that from the moment of a substance abusers first drink that their emotional development will often arrest to that point in their lives, and that it is only after finding recovery that their development can continue.

I consider co-dependent behaviors one of my drugs of choice. Do you think that my emotional development would have started to arrest when I first started to use those behaviors to try to control my life situation and "numb" out?

It makes sense to me, but I had never really considered it before.

Any feedback appreciated.

FallenAngelina

Most of us begin our co-dependent "training" and resulting coping mechanisms as very young children, so we are greatly influenced but not completely arrested in our emotional development because of our codependent environment and thinking. Most of us who grew up in heavily codependent families have been handicapped in our emotional development, but certainly not stopped. I don't agree that alcoholics stop developing dead in their tracks when they begin drinking. If it were that simple and if they learned absolutely nothing from that point forward, the decision to be partnered with them would be a pretty easy NO.

Alcoholics and co-dependent thinkers do learn and do develop as we gather life experience, just not as readily as non-addicts. And, of course, we pick up a lot of wonky coping mechanisms along the way. I, too, have heard the oft-repeated trope that alcoholics stop developing at the age they begin drinking, but I just don't see evidence for that. Sure, at times, it seems so because the behavior and the thinking can be so childish, but if emotional development were completely stopped, the deficit would be painfully obvious. Emotional development is much more complicated than a Stop/Go theory. The effects of drinking and the effects of a codependent family are complicated and varied. If the effects were as simple as "all emotional development stops," then many of us would have no adult life to speak of. The problem with alcoholism and codependence is that we do keep developing emotionally, but in atypical and fractured ways.