Book reflection: From Bondage to Bonding

Nancy Groom's book From Bondage to Bonding is summarized succinctly by its subtitle: Escaping Codependency, Embracing Biblical Love. (I've got the 1991 edition. It's from NavPress.)

Readability: Small margins and print, intensely sad anecdotes, and a lack of dialog mark this book as the product of the previous century (or should I say "millennium"?), and put it in contrast to How We Love. This book takes some serious contemplation. Every chapter does come with a summary and a diagram at the end, but you won't find easy-to-read bullet points in this book.

Ease of absorption: The hardest part of reading this book is thinking through how/whether the material applies to your own life. The tone of How We Love is very sympathetic, non-judgmental. Bondage, in contrast, does not hesitate to mark a behavior or attitude as sinful. Groom does discuss how codependency develops (Part 2), with a compassionate perspective as a recovering codependent and the child of an alcoholic herself, but she is very clear about placing the responsibility to change on the shoulders of the codependent (through the power and love of God, Part 3). Codependence is a disorder or addiction, not a "normal" or healthy condition, and so the decision to accept or reject the label of codependent is a much weightier one than identifying which insecure "love style" is yours, as in How We Love.

Key concept: Groom offers a (frightening and intense) definition of codependency on p. 21: "Codependency is a self-focused way of life in which

• a person blind to his or her true self 
• continually reacts to others 
• being controlled by and seeking to control their behavior, attitudes, and/or opinions, 
• resulting in spiritual sterility, loss of authenticity, and absence of intimacy."

(Bullet points mine, inserted to compensate for the minimal punctuation in the original.)

Groom does mention that "you can be just a little bit codependent," and our counselor D. prefers to think of codependency not as a bin but as a smooth continuum. "Everyone's a little bit codependent," D. says. I think this is a misleading way to put it, because codependent is a real and weighty label. What I'd say instead is that everyone has imperfect relationships and imperfect self-knowledge, and everyone uses certain strategies to protect themselves in the midst of their broken relationships. Those strategies, taken to an unusual extreme, render a person codependent--and so everyone follows the strategies of the codependent "a little."

Organization & Overview:
The first chapter explains how the definition of "codependent" evolved. "Codependent" originally described the spouse of an alcoholic, or the co-alcoholic, whose patterns enabled and reinforced the alcoholic's dependence on alcohol. Later, codependence was recognized as an addiction in its own right--an addiction to approval.

The other chapters of Part 1 unfold the various characteristics or manifestations of codependence:

• self-forfeiture,
• self-contempt,
• self-aggrandizement,
• self-sufficiency, and 
• self-deception. 

Each is illustrated with a character in the Bible who sinned in that way, and each concludes with an explanation of why Jesus' behavior as recounted in the gospels differs from the codependent pattern.

Part 2 consists of some chapters exploring how a person becomes codependent: A child's natural Fervent Longings for relationship are not met by parents, so the child suffers Painful Losses and goes on to develop Self-Protective Pretenses. In attempting to reverse the bondage of addiction to the approval of others, a codependent may turn to Autonomy, which Groom summarizes as a "refusal to trust or need," but autonomy does not actually offer freedom from bondage but only deepens the codependent's disconnection from true relationship.

In Part 3, Groom outlines the path a codependent must take to move "from bondage to bonding." These include grieving, accepting grace, and surrendering to God. She then goes on to describe what real bonding looks like, in Part 4. I haven't read Part 4 yet; I'm still in the last chapter of Part 3 ("The Freedom of Surrender").

My relationship with the book thus far, briefly: I'm a bit embarrassed not to have finished reading this book yet, since I started it over a month ago, and it's a slim volume (200 pp). I stalled after coming back from Turkey and found myself surrounded again by more pleasant books! Then we had a murky discussion about codependency with the counselor, in which I found myself totally overwhelmed and left with a number of misunderstandings of what she'd been trying to say. So I gave myself some time off to process subconsciously, and I'm only picking up the conscious processing again now... I'll write more in another post, but for now I'll say that the chapter that resonated with me the most was "Self-Deception: Committed to Denial." This one was an eye-opener, putting a name to some patterns of thought that I'd never even registered as artificial before.

More personal thoughts to follow, and eventually a summary of Part 4, on real love, real relationship, real Bonding.

Social Life

From David Dobb's feature story in the Oct. 2011 National Geographic, "Beautiful Brains":

"This supremely human characteristic makes peer relations not a sideshow but the main show. Some brain-scan studies, in fact, suggest that our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply. At a neural level, in other words, we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence. Knowing this might make it easier to abide the hysteria of a 13-year-old deceived by a friend or the gloom of a 15-year-old not invited to a party. These people! we lament. They react to social ups and downs as if their fates depended upon them! They're right. They do."

(David Dobbs, National Geographic, Oct. 2011 issue. )

--But do they?

On the one hand, the statement that "we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence" resonates deep inside me. I didn't experience that level of wild oscillation as a teenager, but now that I am in the most vital human relationship of my life (this thing called "romance," which has become "marriage"), I know in a new way the feeling that something in me will die, is dying, when the relationship is damaged. I never depended like this before, I never hurt like this before (& I never rejoiced like this before).

Which brings me to the other hand: though humans are meant to live in society/community, and to be defined by relationship, I don't believe our existence (as the essence of ourselves) is meant to be threatened by social rejection, no matter how severe. I think we're meant to feel threatened by it, and that that sense of threat should shake us into realizing: this isn't my life. Or rather, it's my life, but it's not my Life.

--if that makes any sense. Let me be more explicit.

As a Christian, I am at the same time profoundly dependent and connected to the people around me ("one flesh" with my husband, "one body" with the rest of the Church), and radically independent from them because who I am is who Christ says I am, and Christ is life, light, truth, salvation, and hope for me. He is the Bread of Life. He is my Refuge. No one can snatch me out of his hand.

Brief Comment on Our Society

Some facts (or things I think are facts, anyway. I have not verified these rigorously.):

1. People in societies where starvation is a serious problem do not have bulimia or anorexia.
2. People in environments where there are a lot of deadly diseases don't have deadly allergies.
3. People in time periods where they had to struggle just to survive didn't get paralyzed by depression and commit suicide nearly as often as they do in ours.

In my mind, these problems all go together. The common theme is that when humans are not facing any real dangers, they create deadly dangers for themselves, somehow. When outwardly imposed starvation is not a threat, we impose starvation on ourselves through tortured psyches. When death from the outer world is not a threat, we kill ourselves. We need danger, hostility, opposition, struggle. When the world immediately around us doesn't force those things into our lives, we dig them up from our hearts or create them with our culture or bring them into being through our own technology and carelessness.

Obviously, a possible viewpoint is that in those other situations, the people who currently have these unnatural afflictions were weeded out early. Yet another is that those people were around and just not diagnosed. Either of those explanations still leaves the fact that modern Western society is plagued by these issues that do not plague less materially comfortable societies. When the real problems go away, new ones will show up.

Memory and Identity

All I want to do is watch Battlestar Galactica and read blogs about linguistics. But I have a Bible study to plan and poems to edit... Also, I really, really want to check Facebook, but I've got another 27 days of fasting (which, by the way, I think I am not doing very well. Insufficient praying, overabundant exertion of the will.) Anyway, here follows a blog entry recycled from a class assignment: thoughts in reaction to a psychology article about a study of childhood amnesia (which, it seems, is the official name for the phenomenon of people not remembering much, if anything, from before the age of 3).

Though this study* dealt specifically with childhood amnesia, it raises questions about the nature of memory itself and its relation to identity. The end of the article suggests that childhood amnesia results from of a lack of autonoetic awareness. This claim assumes that having a sense of self enables memory to function more effectively for personally experienced events. How?

Perhaps autonoetic awareness creates a priority framework that makes memory for personal events more important. (Obviously, a priority system for deciding which memories to retain and which to discard is vital, due to the sheer volume of information processed during every moment.) If the self does not exist as a consistent experiencer/narrator/character, there is no reason to remember events that are only relevant to 'character development' or 'personal history', since they do not contribute to understanding the world or the behavior of surrounding people. Autonoetic awareness can provide a motive for retaining otherwise useless memories.

A sense of self could also provides a framework to which memories can attach, and thus a mechanism for retaining personal memories. For something to be “remembered”, there must be mental connections to its neural representation. If a memory is completely free-floating, it will never be accessed because nothing will remind its owner of it—and an inaccessible memory is effectively no memory at all. So having a sense of identity gives a remember-er a mental construct to connect personal memories to, thus making them accessible, thus making them retainable. Without this sense of self, there is no vantage point from which to determine the significance or even relevance of an event.

Suppose childhood amnesia does mean that young children lack a sense of self. Then developmental neurology could provide clues as to the mechanism for autonoetic awareness. A growing autonoetic awareness could be also tied to theory of mind (conceive of others' selves by analogy to one's own sense of self), linking socialization with memory capability.

[and that is where I cut off the paper I turned in, since it had to be under a page long. But I have lots more thoughts about this. Maybe I'll append them someday when I have excessive amounts of free time, if such a day ever arrives.]

*The study referred to is "Children remember early childhood: long-term recall across the offset of childhood amnesia," by Emily Suttfield Cleveland and Elaine Reese, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.