The concept of codependency was just psychology jargon when Melody Beattie, an addiction-recovery counselor, began writing the manuscript for her first book, Codependent No More. This was long before The Let Them Theory, or Set Boundaries, Find Peace, or the easy way so many millennials and Gen-Zers invoke the idea at the first whiff of a dysfunctional coupling today. At 36, Beattie’s whole life to that point had been steeped in unhealthy relationships: with her mother, with her first and second husbands, in her work within the drug and alcohol recovery community.
By the early 1980s, sitting in the windowless concrete basement of her home in Stillwater, Minnesota, she felt a maniacal calling to write a book about codependency in an effort to help others identify their own destructive relationship patterns — and maybe even resolve them.
