Stop That Whining! : Are You an ‘Adult Child’? A ‘Co-Dependent’? Critics Say Recovery Groups May Offer an Excuse for Bad Behavior

Nancy was 10 minutes into her weekly co-dependency group before she realized she was at the wrong meeting. Instead of a group for people with eating disorders, the 42-year-old writer for public television in New York was surrounded by adults who were habitually messy.

“I got there late, and evidently they had changed rooms,” she said. “What was upsetting was that there were several other people from my eating group, but they hadn’t noticed either, because the vocabulary was the same.”

Before long, Nancy, who did not want her real name used, decided she had had enough of “sharing her experiences” with other adults “in recovery.” In the process, she found herself part of an emerging backlash to the recovery, co-dependency and adult-child movements that swept this country in the 1980s.

The notion that scars etched deep in childhood resurface as negative behavior in adults is under attack from a number of directions. Critics blast “recovery” and “co-dependency” as code for self-absorption. They say the recovery movement has failed to make a distinction between understanding inappropriate behavior, and excusing it. They say that labeling problems as diseases reduces the importance of personal responsibility.

But critics save their strongest ammunition for “dysfunctional family,” a term they say is overused to the point of parody. Or as Wellesley, Mass., family therapist Michael Elkin put it: “When politicians use it, you know the phrase has become truly bankrupt.”

More significantly, opponents say, no family could measure up to the abstract ideal of perfection expected by the recovery and co-dependency movements.

“People have been wearing co-dependency like merit badges in Boy Scouts,” said Washington, D.C., psychiatrist Edward Beal. “The truth is, everyone is co-dependent in some way.”

Charles Sykes, author of “A Nation of Victims,” said the chorus of powerlessness over one’s problems has become so shrill that “if Walt Whitman were to come back to America in the 20th Century, he wouldn’t hear America singing. He would hear America whining.”

But the criticism goes beyond bashing. At the recent meetings of the American Assn. of Marriage and Family Therapists in Miami Beach, Fla., Michele Weiner-Davis offered what she called “solution-oriented brief family therapy,” which concentrates on present solutions instead of past traumas.

At the same conference, the Washington, D.C., psychiatrist and psychologist team of Steven J. and Sybil Wolin introduced the concept of “resiliency therapy”--focusing on how survivors of troubled families overcome their pain by building on their strengths.

“Our model is an attempt to provide balance,” Steven Wolin explained. “To say, yes, there has been damage, but that you can develop strengths you might not have had, had you not gone through the caldron.”

Although they are forceful in arguing against what they call the “damage model” of the recovery movement, the Wolins are nevertheless diplomatic in their assessment.

“I think the adult-child movement needs to move toward a vocabulary of strengths,” said Steven Wolin. “I think you preserve the ‘victim’s trap’ by preserving the sense of the adult child.”

Atlanta psychiatrist Frank Pittman is more blunt. Writing in the American Family Therapy Networker, a professional journal, Pittman asserted that “the adult child movement, by declaring practically everyone to be a victim of imperfect parenting and therefore eligible for lifelong, self-absorbed irresponsibility, has trivialized real suffering and made psychic invalids of those who once had a bad day.”

To illustrate the excesses of the recovery movement, journalist Charles Sykes begins “A Nation of Victims” with a story about “a guy who lost his job because he could never get to work on time.” The man sued, arguing that he was “handicapped by chronic lateness syndrome”--and won.

“It’s as if we, as a nation, have developed an allergy to dealing with rather old-fashioned notions like personal responsibility,” Sykes said. “But you bring this up, and people look at you like you’ve been beamed in from the 19th Century.”

The evolution--or, arguably, mutation--of the recovery/adult-child movement has given pause to one of its pioneers, Jane Middelton-Moz. The lecturer and best-selling author, who is based in Montpelier, Vt., observed that one recent book about adult children “identifies 254 symptoms of co-dependency”--one of which, she dryly noted, “is that you think before you speak.”

While stressing that “thousands of people have been helped by the movement” that she has espoused, Middelton-Moz said co-dependency “has proliferated too far,” allowing its devotees to project responsibility away from themselves and to engage in unnecessary blaming.

“If you remain in a dynamic of defining yourself as damaged, you haven’t recovered,” she said.

But Middelton-Moz, conversely, said she objects to outright bashing of the movement. She cited Wendy Kaminer’s recent book “I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional”--whose very title expresses Kaminer’s contempt for the recovery movement--as an example of criticism that fails to offer solutions.

“What I’m saying is let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Middelton-Moz said.

At the barest minimum, she continued, the national obsession with the woes of childhood has brought public awareness to certain long-avoided topics.

“Now at least there are people talking about sexual abuse and alcoholism and addiction,” Middelton-Moz said.

At Health Communications Inc. in Deerfield Park, Fla., Peter Vegso--who has published Middelton-Moz and “a ton” of other authors in the self-help and recovery fields--praised the movement for lifting this veil of secrecy.

“It’s really amazing the way the whole vocabulary of recovery seems to have gotten into the mainstream,” Vegso said. “There are just a whole lot more people who are aware that if they are uncomfortable with their lives, there may be some reasons--and they can investigate those reasons.”

But for some people in the recovery movement, the investigation is only the beginning of their enlightenment. Robin, a nurse in Los Angeles who asked that her real name not be used, has attended the same adult-children-of-alcoholics group for almost eight years. Much of her social life is organized around the people in her weekly meetings, Robin said.

“There’s an intimacy there that I don’t find outside the group,” Robin said. “We share things that other people just don’t understand. I was 34 years old when I started going to those meetings. They’ve really helped me to discover myself.”

Mark, a stock analyst in New York who also asked that his real name not be used, said that since he became involved in a co-dependency group six years ago, he, too, has distanced himself from his biological family and from many of his former acquaintances.

“I find it easier to sympathize with people who have been through the same kinds of problems I’ve experienced,” explained Mark, who said several of his family members have been substance abusers.

But this exclusionary attitude is part of what concerns psychiatrist Beal. He mentioned one patient who had been dating a woman for some time, but said he couldn’t think about marrying her because she had never been part of a recovery program.

“It’s almost like a religious difference,” Beal said. “It can be that rigid.”

The widespread use of the term “adult children” makes Stanton Peele, a New Jersey psychologist and health care researcher who is the author of “The Diseasing of America,” breathe fire.

“They’re all at these meetings, complaining about how they were treated as children,” said Peele. “Meanwhile, their kids are at home. You wonder what groups they’re going to go to when they grow up.”

Until recently, the recovery/adult-child/co-dependency movement held such sway that many mental health professionals were loath to criticize it. Stan J. Katz said his book “The Co-Dependency Conspiracy” (written with Aimee E. Liu) “came under a tremendous amount of attack” when it was published in 1991.

“They didn’t want a book that said the emperor was wearing no clothes,” said Katz, a clinical psychologist in Beverly Hills. “They wanted a book that said, ‘I am not at fault, so I can blame someone else’ for whatever is wrong.”

For some of the better-known figures who have emerged from the recovery zone, that message has proven highly profitable. Barb Burg, the publicity director at Bantam Books in New York, said books on recovery, adult-children and co-dependency “just sell and sell.”

“Homecoming,” the most recent title from recovery guru John Bradshaw, sold more than 1 million copies and remained on national bestseller lists for a year, Burg said. She said Bantam has the same lofty expectations for Bradshaw’s “Creating Love,” published this month.

Bradshaw, vacationing at his Montana ranch, was unavailable for comment.

The Wolins, among others, are hoping that alternatives to the practice of identifying with disease and defect will take hold.

“People are going to realize that to get better, you just have to change,” Sybil Wolin said. “Even logically, it’s hard to understand how reciting your damages is going to help.”

Successful survivors, said Steven Wolin, “take pride in measuring their own strengths. They know there is no magical umbrella that enables them to walk through life’s raindrops without occasionally getting wet.”