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Addictive agents are those persons, places, or things (choices) on which we form an excessive dependency, consequently causing our lives to become unmanageable. A “moment of truth” from a Divine Power greater than ourselves leads to rigorous honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness to
CHANGE ! !
The catalog of addictive agents includes:
- Alcohol or drugs
- Work, achievement, and success
- Money addictions, such as overspending, gambling, hoarding
- Control addictions, especially if they surface in personal, sexual, family and business relations
- Food addictions
- Sexual addictions
- Approval dependency (the need to please people)
- Rescuing patterns toward other persons
- Dependency on toxic relationships (relationships that are damaging and hurtful)
- Physical illness (hypochondria)
- Exercise and physical conditioning
- Cosmetics, clothes, cosmetics surgery, trying to look good on the outside
- Academic pursuits and excessive intellectualizing
- Religiosity or religious legalism (preoccupation with the form and the rules and regulations of religions, rather than benefiting from the real spiritual message)
- General perfectionism
- Cleaning and avoiding contamination and other obsessive-compulsive symptoms
- Organizing, structuring (the need always to have everything in its place)
- Materialism
Fowler, Dr. Robert and Dr. Richard Hemfelt. Eds. Serenity: A Companion for 12 Step Recovery. Nashville; Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1990. Pages 13-14.
Codependency is a type of dysfunctional behavior prevalent in society as a whole, as well as in Christian families. There are four basic dysfunctional situations, which may cause a person to exhibit codependent behavior:
- Persons who are currently in a close relationship with an addict or alcoholic.
- Persons with an addictive parent or grandparent. This includes addictive disorders such as chemical dependency, workaholism, compulsive overspending, sexaholism, and child abuse.
- Persons suffering significant childhood loss due to reasons other than addictions, death, divorce, physical or mental deprivation.
- Persons from an emotionally out of touch or extremely repressive family background.
Codependency, like chemical dependency, is a disease that is chronic, progressive and fatal.
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