Codependency: a view from women married to alcoholics

Abstract

Intensive interviews with women married to alcoholics reveal a taken-for-granted use of the term "codependent" to describe the spouses of alcoholics, despite considerable definitional ambiguity as to what codependency is. Although most of the wives agreed that codependency involves caretaking behavior and exists by virtue of their association with an alcoholic, they disagreed widely as to its impact on the self, its locus as personal or social, its disease status, its longevity, and whether or not it is distinctive to alcohol-complicated marriages. Self-labeling and identification occur through retrospective reinterpretation of their lives with their alcoholic husbands, guided and legitimated by rehabilitation personnel. These reconstructions then serve as self-evidence of codependency. In challenging the notion of codependency as an objective condition, we emphasize the social construction and application of this condition, and, in doing so, suggest that there has been a two-fold process of deviantizing the women's identities and medicalizing this new-found deviance. While this situation perpetuates a traditional view of women as more passive than active, a more serious possibility is its affinity to a historical view of wives of alcoholics as pathological.