But other issues in a couple's lives can foster codependence, too.

I know personally how it feels to live with the disease of codependence.

Yet people who have codependence often wind up in despair and actually die from its effects.

The next chapter describes how we are likely to pass codependence on to our own children.

And I believe that is how codependence is set up.

We now know that these adjustments lead to codependence in adulthood.

We must stop denying the fact of codependence and begin to take responsibility for facing it.

Not all mental health professionals agree about codependence or its standard methods of treatment.

Critical to recovery from codependence is knowing both what defense mechanisms are and how they work in our lives.

We all had the symptoms of what we now generally understand to be codependence.

And acknowledgement of abuse is vital for recovery from codependence.

But codependence is now seen by many of us to constitute a painful, almost ubiquitous problem for certain groups in our society.

As we7ve seen, the primary symptoms of codependence are experienced at opposite extremes.

It can take quite a while to do this, but this writing goes a long way to help us see our particular patterns of codependence.

Bates and his mother had lived together in a state of total codependence ever since his father's death.

And this is why codependence is called a shame-based disease.

This results in a sense of being crazy and a degree of codependence that is very difficult to treat.

Understanding the nature of this emotional damage is, for me, the key to understanding how codependence works in adults.

In this book we have tried to describe a connection between that childhood abuse and the adult symptoms of codependence.

Whatever codependence is, it cer- tainly acts like a disease.

I believe that people exhibiting survival traits at either extreme are suffering from codependence.

This led to the discovery that traditional psychological literature contains only a few references to the disease of codependence, at least by name.

This delusion that the abuse was normal and we were "wrong" locks us into the disease of codependence with no way out.

And how do the attributes get diverted away from mature adult characteristics to the symptoms of codependence?

But whatever tack you take, I urge you to make a beginning now in facing codependence.