In her first book in over ten years, internationally recognized expert on dependence and recovery Pia Mellody shows us how to break free from harmful relationships and to learn how to attain the intimacy we need and deserve. This invaluable resource helps diagnose the causes of faulty relationships--many of them rooted in childhood--and provides tools for self-healing so that we can move on to establish and maintain healthy relationships. Through Mellody's unique system of boundary practice, developed over her twenty years as a counselor and consultant, you can:
Learn effective ground rules to achieve and sustain true intimacy,
Attain self-esteem and emotional stability,
Understand your strengths and limitations, and
Acquire concrete tools for building healthy relationships.
A brilliant new guide to understanding the origins of codependence and the path to recovery by a nationally recognized authority on dependency and addiction. In this fresh new look at codependence, Pia Mellody traces the origins of this illness back to childhood, describing a whole range of emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical, and sexual abuses. Because of these earlier experiences, codependent adults often lack the skills necessary to lead mature lives and have satisfying relationships. Recovery from codependence comes from clearing up the toxic feelings left over from childhood and learning to reparent oneself by intervening on the adult symptoms of codependence.
Central to Mellody's concept is the idea of the "precious child" that needs healing within each adult. She creates a framework for identifying codependent behavior and describes an effective approach to recovery that includes both therapy and self-help processes. Designed to be used with her new workbook for codependents, Breaking Free, this is a powerful tool for understanding the nature of codependence.
In this, Pia's latest book, she describes in detail the dynamics of a co-addicted relationship,
the symptoms of each partner, and the stages of addiction - from attraction and fantasy to denial and obsession. She provides a practical recovery process of love addicts and their partners, based on Twelve-Step work, exercises and journaling. Pia's clear guidelines will comfort and motivate all those who seek to establish health love relationships.
In her pioneering Facing Codependence, Pia Mellody traced the origins of codependence back to childhood and a wide range of emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical, and sexual abuses. Now in this innovative new workbook, she presents a step-by-step journal-keeping method for moving toward recovery from codependence. Based on such concepts as the "precious child" and the five core symptoms of codependence, along with the Twelve-Step process of recovery used by Codependents Anonymous, Breaking Free provides strategies and insights for attacking the fundamental problem in codependence the lack of dependence on self. In a three-part approach to recovery, Mellody first shows recovering codependents how to move beyond
denial of their childhood history of abuse. She then offers techniques to identify concrete ways in which the symptoms of codependence operate in their lives. Finally, Mellody guides users through the process of identifying and recording specific instances of improvement in their lives as an aid to greater self-awareness and further recovery.
