Why Do We Need Secular Codependency Meetings?

Like a lot of people, I first learned about codependency from a therapist who recognized the signs. After years of desperate attempts to please my abusive spouse I was distraught, lost, and hopeless. At the end of my rope, I knew that I needed help and found it in an intensive outpatient therapy program, 5 nights a week for a month. Each day they introduced a new subject to provide us with the skills and knowledge we needed to recover along with discussion and long group therapy sessions. One day, they handed us a survey with 20 questions and gave us time to fill it out. To my surprise, I answered affirmatively to 18 out of the 20 questions. I got a great score and learned one of the most important lessons of my life: codependency is a core problem for me. Just about everything I’d heard up to that point described aspects of problems I’d had, being sensitive, regular depressive episodes, social anxiety, panic attacks and the like, but when I read about codependency for the first time, it was like being seen for the first time. And so my journey had begun. I found a local CoDA group and dove in, reading everything Melody Beattie ever wrote, becoming an active member of my local meeting, and beginning to work the program. I read the CoDA Blue Book and showed up every week, eventually leading the meeting for several half year stints. I learned a lot about boundaries, about improving relationships, and about the patterns, but there was a problem.

Throughout it all, I was biting my tongue; the religious aspects of CoDA, the regular mention of God and God’s Will and the concept of a Higher Power, were difficult for me to swallow. I tried for years, having many, many heartfelt conversations with friends and fellow codependents, but I never made it past step 2 and couldn’t fathom ever doing step 3. I was raised as a Christian but had decided it wasn’t my answer to the questions of the universe when I became an adult. I am an atheist, not in the sense that I don’t believe there is a God, but in the sense that I reject traditional concepts of God. In my view, I’ll never know if there is a God or not. It’s not an important question to me. God and his/her will are not how I explain the events in my life. I’m an engineer, a scientist, and a humanist. To me, a higher power is equivalent to an imaginary friend, a placebo. Imaginary things can be useful; concepts can be powerful and placebos can have a measurable effect on how people feel. Obviously, the mind is capable of wonderous things, but for me it’s not real and therefore can’t be something I rely on. It’s just not how my mind works.

For a long time, I was doing what a lot of people in my position do. We take what we need and leave the rest. I listened intently to shares. I shared myself and I kept my concerns about the religious aspects private or shared them only with close friends. Locally, this was a workable solution for me, but then the pandemic came and suddenly everything changed. My meetings weren’t local anymore. They had people from all over the country and the world. I felt that the meetings had become more religious in tone and in the character of the shares. The God stuff became more and more of an issue for me and I found that I no longer felt safe sharing my feelings in meetings. I was struggling more and more with the religious aspects, finding that it was taking up more of my mind than my work on codependency itself! I was getting upset and found myself debating whether I needed to quit CoDA, which was my only real source of support in this world. It was a wrenching situation.

So, I naturally did what you do when you don’t know the answer; I googled.  I searched for other codependents like me. But what I found shocked me; no matter the search term I entered, I found nothing. Nothing! There were almost no search results at all and certainly zero meaningful resources. Stunned, I went looking for secular AA groups and was very happy to find not only active groups but bountiful literature and many alternate versions of the traditional 12 steps. And then one day, I found a book that changed my perspective on what was possible, Jeffrey Munn’s book “Staying Sober without God”. Many people have made versions of the steps. Often they trim around the edges, changing a word here or there to soften the language, but Munn went all the way, full blown rewriting. There are times in life when it feels as if we are waiting for someone to give us permission to do something, like we aren’t allowed. We need to learn that we ourselves contain a power that others possess by seeing them do something and seeing that we are the same. This was my moment. I said, “Aha! I can do it too!” There wasn’t a secular CoDA, just like there hadn’t been a book like his before. He had to make it and so did I.

I wanted a safe space where it would be acceptable to speak our honest truth, whether we believed in a higher power or not. For years, I had been told by well-intentioned friends and fellow codependents that I needed to define a Higher Power of my own understanding and I seriously did try, but I knew all along it was never going to work. Every time I heard the 12 promises read, I dreamt that one day they’d come true for me, but I feared the day would never come because I could never work the CoDA steps. I did think that I could work Munn’s steps but also knew that they would never fly in a CoDA meeting. I decided to see if I could find people to form a study meeting to read Munn’s steps and work them together. I brought it up in a meeting and it went over like a lead balloon which was horrifying but I did meet people and through them I found the courage to start.

But why does there need to be secular CoDA? Many people object. They say that we are welcome at CoDA meetings to believe in a “God or Higher Power of our own understanding”. I feel this is a false choice; I still have to choose a God or a Higher Power. None is not an option. The choice is presented as if I could choose anything I like, but there are restrictions. A Higher Power is not an inert thing. It is a being with intent, power, and an interest in my personal life. These characteristics are not optional; they’re foundational. If I don’t believe that a higher power exists that is looking out for my best interest, the program loses all it’s power. Even dutiful members of CoDA or any 12 step group for that matter will regularly say “The program isn’t for everybody”. I can accept that. It’s not for me. To me, that means there must be somewhere else to go. When I was at the end of my CoDA journey, I was fraught, distressed at having to let go of a program that had been so helpful, but that had turned toxic. It was like losing a relationship, like going through codependent withdrawal. I felt I had nowhere to go, but my experience had taught me that I wasn’t alone. I needed to build the place to go and dedicated myself to the work of making sure there would always be a place for someone like me to go when they find themselves at the end of their rope.

There needs to be secular codependency support because there are secular codependents. There are those who have been traumatized by religion itself who could not accept more religion as the answer to their problems. There are humanists, people who believe that humans can solve human problems. There are scientists who see the world through the lens of science, like me. We can learn so much when we open our minds to all that we have learned since the inception of CoDA, about the sources and causes of our common suffering. Together, in the time since secular codependency support began, we have outlined a new program. We don’t require labels. We don’t shame ourselves. We understand that self-love and self-compassion are the keys to a better life as a codependent. We have learned that codependency is not a disease, not a set of character defects to be eliminated. We learned that when we feel free to express ourselves as we truly feel amongst peers who have similarly open minds, we flourish. In secular codependency, we take personal responsibility for our recovery. We follow a conscious process of letting go of that which we don’t control while we focus our energy on the things we do control. I personally learned that I’m not alone. There are loads of us and for this lesson I am eternally grateful. Nothing I’ve learned has been quite so powerful.