Interdependency over Codependency

With a new pen and some fresh words sent straight from the heart, I’m ready to spit fire. I really believe there are significant differences between interdependency and codependency. The most radical belief in their differences is that interdependency is real and codependency is not. I started a radical health mental zine dispelling codependency before getting locked up.

Codependency started, was established as a term to describe the conditions, the material reality in which battered and abused women suffered from at the hands of men with substance abuse issues. It went from a term of explaining a situation to becoming the reason, or more appropriately the scapegoat for those men and their personal culpability. Victim blaming 201. Because these women gave love, gave money, gave and stayed, they perpetuated the beatings; if they were to leave the men would stop beating. Men only beat enablers. The men aren’t guilty, just products of their surroundings. Now codependency is so openly vague that it pretty much covers any dependency. Counselors in the 90’s realized that people are so brainwashed to accept specialization and authority (or professionalism) that they will take advice that even seems so incredibly wrong as long as it comes from an authority. Clearly authority figures have been capitalizing on this fetishization of over specialization for centuries but for psychology it’s become really bad in the last 20 years.

Anyways, long story short, you can train a counselor over a weekend workshop (you decide which hotel conference room) to learn the language (no matter how deceptive and wrong) of codependency and then they can cure most of America (or the industrialized world) of its inflictions (caring, loving, longing for reciprocation, did I mention caring and loving).

My Mom drank and my brother used drugs and so now I only look for people with problems to “fix” them. I further perpetuate abuse by telling my Mom “I love you and I wish you’d quit drinking.” I should say, “I will be able to allow myself to love you once you quit drinking.” Control. Control. Control. Unconditional love becomes the disease not the substance abuse… Damn I forgot, long story short, codependency is beyond wack victim blaming, over simplification, problem solving.

Codependency is Ayn Rand’s wildest dystopic erotic fantasy on steroids. Individualism, selfishness, and conditional reward based affection are the altruistic goals of the codependency model.

Remember when the world, ecosystems, animals, the cycle of life and death was based on interdependency? Remember when humans and their ancestors were interdependent on not only one another but the rest of the natural world for millions of years? Remember when humans were social creatures and part of survival meant relying on social well being? Remember when I asked a bunch of rhetorical questions to get across what I was trying to say?

Case in point (I don’t even know what that phrase means); why interdependency over codependency, three words, Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.”

Written from the Nueces County Jail

(Transcribed by Charity)